The Binghamton Neighborhood Project uses the city of Binghamton, New York, as a “field site” for basic and applied research from an evolutionary perspective. Since evolution is fundamentally about the relationship between organisms and their environments, it is essential to study people from all walks of life as they go about their daily lives. This kind of research is also most relevant for improving the quality of life in a practical sense. Thus, the best basic scientific research is also the best applied research.

Since evolution is fundamentally about the relationship between organisms and their environments, it is essential to study people from all walks of life as they go about their lives.

The BNP is closely coordinated with EvoS and the EI. EvoS provides a network of faculty from over 15 departments at Binghamton University, who speak the common language of evolutionary theory in addition to their traditional disciplinary training. We work with partners representing all facets of the city, including the city government, public schools, health department, social services department, and the residents themselves in their neighborhoods. This places us in an excellent position to implement recommendations that emerge from EI workshops as a model that can be emulated elsewhere.

One goal of the BNP is to assemble an integrated database that provides a foundation for many specific projects. The various agencies that make up a city collect a tremendous amount of information that is vastly underutilized. We integrate this information and collect our own to examine problems as diverse as social capital, academic performance, crime, and obesity. GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technology enables us to study variation among neighborhoods at a very fine scale, as illustrated by the map shown above that measures variation in the quality of neighborhoods as assessed by public school students.

One of our major foci is prosociality, defined as any attitude or behavior oriented toward others or society as a whole. Prosociality is a fundamental theme in all branches of the human behavioral sciences, but evolutionary theory sets an even broader stage by examining prosociality in all species and addressing the fundamental question of how prosociality can persist as a strategy in competition with more self-oriented strategies. It is important to emphasize that evolutionary theory does not exclude other perspectives in disciplines such as economics and sociology, but rather integrates them into a single consilient framework, as described in the attached article titled Prosociality from an Evolutionary Perspective: Variation and Correlations at a City-wide Scale (PDF).

There is growing awareness that prosociality results in multiple assets when it is present and multiple problems when it is absent.

There is growing awareness that prosociality results in multiple assets when it is present and multiple problems when it is absent. Problems such as substance abuse, crime, anxiety, depression, physical illness, marital discord, poor school performance in children and job performance in adults all go together like a toxic cocktail. Yet, most intervention programs focus on individual problems or small sets of problems. From the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to the behavioral sciences departments of our universities, to the federal and state agencies that have responsibilities or dealing with the problems, our entire public health system represents the very opposite of integration. Evolutionary theory provides a solution to this deeply rooted problem, for the public health system no less than the academic world. The EI is working with leaders in public health who have adopted an evolutionary perspective to implement a more integrated vision, such as increasing prosociality at the scale of whole neighborhoods in Binghamton and elsewhere.