Rogers Diffusion of Innovation Model is one of the most used frameworks for research in evolutionary archaeology. It assesses how populations adopt innovations and how innovations spread between groups. The model emphasizes social and community communication networks as well as adoption phases that include testing and potentially adapting an innovation to better fit a population's needs.

However, I believe that this model assumes a level of personal and community agency and access that is simply not present in many populations in our post-industrial, globalized world. I use rural Appalachia as a case study for constrained or limited agency due to its rugged landscape, historical social separation, and the overwhelming presence of extractive industries such as coal and timber that build economically and socially predatory company towns. I theorize that in areas of constrained or limited agency Rogers model may not so neatly apply, and may need potential adaptations itself to better fit these populations.

As family farms face increasing uncertainty due to rural–urban or rural-international migration and expanding non-farm economic opportunities, understanding what drives younger generations to remain in agriculture is critical for the sustainability of rural livelihoods and local food systems. This study examines the factors shaping the next generation’s decision to take over and continue family farming in Northern Chin State, Myanmar – an upland, rural, and predominantly agrarian region. Drawing on qualitative data collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 27 smallholder farmers, I interrogate how social expectations, economic realities, and personal aspirations interact to influence farm succession decisions. This study focuses on an under-researched, conflict-affected context, offering insights into how war, displacement, and political instability intersect with traditional succession dynamics. Findings reveal that succession decisions emerge from both internal factors – including source of livelihood and the desire to preserve family legacy – and external forces, particularly the ongoing armed conflict that constrains alternative opportunities, threatens livelihoods, and shapes risk calculations. This study contributes to the literature on intergenerational farming, agrarian change, and rural resilience in Southeast Asia. Findings offer important implications for policymakers, development practitioners, and civil society organizations seeking to design initiatives that support youth engagement, sustainable land stewardship, and the long-term resilience of smallholder agriculture in Myanmar and similar rural contexts across the Global South.

Evolutionary change is often framed primarily in terms of mutation and selection, yet this perspective overlooks a prior, testable question: which genetic changes are permitted to persist within the genome at all. This project presents a methods-driven pilot analysis that examines whether epigenetic regulation of DNA repair context constrains the retention of rare genomic variants, leaving a falsifiable signature in population-level data. The study uses de-identified, consented high-coverage Y-chromosome sequencing data and public phylogenies (e.g., FamilyTreeDNA, YFull). An explicit, a priori variant-selection rule is applied to define a class of rare lineage-discordant SNP states arising within a specified downstream phylogenetic interval. Variants are subjected to quality-control filters including coverage thresholds, exclusion of known error-prone contexts, and evaluation of persistence across descendant configurations. These variants are mapped onto phylogenetic topology and compared against early-diverging sister branches with comparable sampling depth. Under null models of technical artifact, unbiased homoplasy, or sequence-context–driven recurrence, such variants are expected to distribute broadly and unsystematically across lineages. In contrast, the constraint-based framework predicts structured clustering within a single downstream lineage and systematic absence from sister branches. These predictions are evaluated through lineage-by-variant matrices and topology-aware comparative analysis, providing explicit falsification criteria. Rather than proposing new mutational mechanisms, the framework treats long-term environmental stress as a boundary condition that may transiently relax repair canalization, expanding the space of permissible outcomes before partial re-canalization. Chromosome 2 fusion is presented as a macro-scale motivating case illustrating constraint-mediated fixation, while the Y-chromosome analysis constitutes the primary testable component. For GradCon, these observed outcome distributions are presented as a methods-focused pilot analysis motivating future experimental testing, rather than as completed mechanistic results.