scholarly journals Non-vertical cultural transmission, assortment and the evolution of cooperation

2021 ◽  
Vol 288 (1951) ◽  
pp. 20203162
Author(s):  
Dor Cohen ◽  
Ohad Lewin-Epstein ◽  
Marcus W. Feldman ◽  
Yoav Ram
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Horizontal Transmission ◽  
Structured Populations ◽  
Stochastic Simulations ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Population Mean ◽  
Mean Fitness ◽  
Lower Population

Cultural evolution of cooperation under vertical and non-vertical cultural transmission is studied, and conditions are found for fixation and coexistence of cooperation and defection. The evolution of cooperation is facilitated by its horizontal transmission and by an association between social interactions and horizontal transmission. The effect of oblique transmission depends on the horizontal transmission bias. Stable polymorphism of cooperation and defection can occur, and when it does, reduced association between social interactions and horizontal transmission evolves, which leads to a decreased frequency of cooperation and lower population mean fitness. The deterministic conditions are compared to outcomes of stochastic simulations of structured populations. Parallels are drawn with Hamilton’s rule incorporating relatedness and assortment.

scholarly journals Non-Vertical Cultural Transmission, Assortment, and the Evolution of Cooperation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dor Cohen ◽  
Ohad Lewin-Epstein ◽  
Marcus W. Feldman ◽  
Yoav Ram
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Horizontal Transmission ◽  
Structured Populations ◽  
Stochastic Simulations ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Population Mean ◽  
Mean Fitness ◽  
Lower Population

AbstractCultural evolution of cooperation under vertical and non-vertical cultural transmission is studied, and conditions are found for fixation and coexistence of cooperation and defection. The evolution of cooperation is facilitated by its horizontal transmission and by an association between social interactions and horizontal transmission. The effect of oblique transmission depends on the horizontal transmission bias. Stable polymorphism of cooperation and defection can occur, and when it does, reduced association between social interactions and horizontal transmission evolves, which leads to a decreased frequency of cooperation and lower population mean fitness. The deterministic conditions are compared to outcomes of stochastic simulations of structured populations. Parallels are drawn with Hamilton’s rule incorporating assortment and effective relatedness.

scholarly journals Evolution of cooperation in an epithelium

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (152) ◽  
pp. 20180918 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie Renton ◽  
Karen M. Page
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Voronoi Tessellation ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Cellular Level ◽  
Structured Populations ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Animal Kingdom ◽  
Population Structures ◽  
Fixation Probabilities ◽  
Evolutionary Graph Theory

Cooperation is prevalent in nature, not only in the context of social interactions within the animal kingdom but also on the cellular level. In cancer, for example, tumour cells can cooperate by producing growth factors. The evolution of cooperation has traditionally been studied for well-mixed populations under the framework of evolutionary game theory, and more recently for structured populations using evolutionary graph theory (EGT). The population structures arising due to cellular arrangement in tissues, however, are dynamic and thus cannot be accurately represented by either of these frameworks. In this work, we compare the conditions for cooperative success in an epithelium modelled using EGT, to those in a mechanical model of an epithelium—the Voronoi tessellation (VT) model. Crucially, in this latter model, cells are able to move, and birth and death are not spatially coupled. We calculate fixation probabilities in the VT model through simulation and an approximate analytic technique and show that this leads to stronger promotion of cooperation in comparison with the EGT model.

scholarly journals Cultural evolution of killer whale calls: background, mechanisms and consequences

Behaviour ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 152 (15) ◽  
pp. 2001-2038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga A. Filatova ◽  
Filipa I.P. Samarra ◽  
Volker B. Deecke ◽  
John K.B. Ford ◽  
Patrick J.O. Miller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Phylogenetic Signal ◽  
Horizontal Transmission ◽  
Call Structure ◽  
Error Accumulation ◽  
Behavioural Phenotypes ◽  
Call Repertoire ◽  
Powerful Process

Cultural evolution is a powerful process shaping behavioural phenotypes of many species including our own. Killer whales are one of the species with relatively well-studied vocal culture. Pods have distinct dialects comprising a mix of unique and shared call types; calves adopt the call repertoire of their matriline through social learning. We review different aspects of killer whale acoustic communication to provide insights into the cultural transmission and gene-culture co-evolution processes that produce the extreme diversity of group and population repertoires. We argue that the cultural evolution of killer whale calls is not a random process driven by steady error accumulation alone: temporal change occurs at different speeds in different components of killer whale repertoires, and constraints in call structure and horizontal transmission often degrade the phylogenetic signal. We discuss the implications from bird song and human linguistic studies, and propose several hypotheses of killer whale dialect evolution.

scholarly journals Evolution of vertical and oblique transmission under fluctuating selection

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (6) ◽  
pp. E1174-E1183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoav Ram ◽  
Uri Liberman ◽  
Marcus W. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Vertical Transmission ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Geometric Mean ◽  
Genetic Modifier ◽  
Fluctuating Selection ◽  
Selection Regime ◽  
Geometric Mean Fitness ◽  
Mean Fitness ◽  
Evolutionarily Stable

The evolution and maintenance of social learning, in competition with individual learning, under fluctuating selection have been well-studied in the theory of cultural evolution. Here, we study competition between vertical and oblique cultural transmission of a dichotomous phenotype under constant, periodically cycling, and randomly fluctuating selection. Conditions are derived for the existence of a stable polymorphism in a periodically cycling selection regime. Under such a selection regime, the fate of a genetic modifier of the rate of vertical transmission depends on the length of the cycle and the strength of selection. In general, the evolutionarily stable rate of vertical transmission differs markedly from the rate that maximizes the geometric mean fitness of the population. The evolution of rules of transmission has dramatically different dynamics from the more frequently studied modifiers of recombination, mutation, or migration.

scholarly journals Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions

2022 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. e2113468118
Author(s):  
Qi Su ◽  
Benjamin Allen ◽  
Joshua B. Plotkin
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Population Structure ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Practical Problem ◽  
Structured Populations ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Network Growth ◽  
Indirect Reciprocity ◽  
Organizational Hierarchies

How cooperation emerges in human societies is both an evolutionary enigma and a practical problem with tangible implications for societal health. Population structure has long been recognized as a catalyst for cooperation because local interactions facilitate reciprocity. Analysis of population structure typically assumes bidirectional social interactions. But human social interactions are often unidirectional—where one individual has the opportunity to contribute altruistically to another, but not conversely—as the result of organizational hierarchies, social stratification, popularity effects, and endogenous mechanisms of network growth. Here we expand the theory of cooperation in structured populations to account for both uni- and bidirectional social interactions. Even though unidirectional interactions remove the opportunity for reciprocity, we find that cooperation can nonetheless be favored in directed social networks and that cooperation is provably maximized for networks with an intermediate proportion of unidirectional interactions, as observed in many empirical settings. We also identify two simple structural motifs that allow efficient modification of interaction directions to promote cooperation by orders of magnitude. We discuss how our results relate to the concepts of generalized and indirect reciprocity.

Cultural evolution and cultural psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Mesoudi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Cultural Psychology ◽  
Phylogenetic Analyses ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
Human Psychology

Cultural evolution is a branch of the evolutionary sciences which assumes that (i) human cognition and behaviour is shaped not only by genetic inheritance, but also cultural inheritance (also known as social learning), and (ii) this cultural inheritance constitutes a Darwinian evolutionary system that can be analysed and studied using tools borrowed from evolutionary biology. In this chapter I explore the numerous compatibilities between the fields of cultural evolution and cultural psychology, and the potential mutual benefits from their closer alignment. First, understanding the evolutionary context within which human psychology emerged gives added significance to the findings of cultural psychologists, which reinforce the conclusion reached by cultural evolution scholars that humans inhabit a ‘cultural niche’ within which the major means of adaptation to difference environments is cultural, rather than genetic. Hence, we should not be surprised that human psychology shows substantial cross-cultural variation. Second, a focus on cultural transmission pathways, drawing on cultural evolution models and empirical research, can help to explain to the maintenance of, and potential changes in, cultural variation in psychological processes. Evidence from migrants, in particular, points to a mix of vertical, oblique and horizontal cultural transmission that can explain the differential stability of different cultural dimensions. Third, cultural evolutionary methods offer powerful means of testing historical (“macro-evolutionary”) hypotheses put forward by cultural psychologists for the origin of psychological differences. Explanations in terms of means of subsistence, rates of environmental change or pathogen prevalence can be tested using quantitative models and phylogenetic analyses that can be used to reconstruct cultural lineages. Evolutionary considerations also point to potential problems with current cross-country comparisons conducted within cultural psychology, such as the non-independence of data points due to shared cultural history. Finally, I argue that cultural psychology can play a central role in a synthetic evolutionary science of culture, providing valuable links between individual-oriented disciplines such as experimental psychology and neuroscience on the one hand, and society-oriented disciplines such as anthropology, history and sociology on the other, all within an evolutionary framework that provides links to the biological sciences.

scholarly journals Digital culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Acerbi
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Future Directions

Cultural evolution can provide a useful framework to understand how information is produced, transmitted, and selected in contemporary online, digital, media. The diffusion of digital technologies triggered a radical departure from previous modalities of cultural transmission but, at the same time, general characteristics of human cultural evolution and cognition influence these developments. In this chapter, I will explore some areas where the links between cultural evolution research and digital media seem more promising. As cultural evolution-inspired research on internet phenomena is still in its infancy, these areas represent suggestions and links with works in other disciplines more than reviews of past research in cultural evolution. These include topics such as how to characterise the online effects of social influence and the spread of information; the possibility that digital, online, media could enhance cumulative culture; and the differences between online and offline cultural transmission. In the last section I will consider other possible future directions: the influences of different affordances in different media supporting cultural transmission; the role of producers of cultural traits; and, finally, some considerations on the effects on cultural dynamics of algorithms selecting information.

scholarly journals From storytelling to Facebook. Content biases when retelling or sharing a story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Acerbi
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Transmission Chain ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Content Information

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, where individuals need to understand, memorise, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing— only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (N=1080) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain set-up. The second experiment (N=1200), used the same material, but participants were asked whether they would share or not the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network, or with their friends, in their favourite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and, finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorisation and reproduction are involved in the transmission—like in oral transmission—than when they are not—like in online sharing.

scholarly journals Ordering structured populations in multiplayer cooperation games

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Peña ◽  
Bin Wu ◽  
Arne Traulsen
Keyword(s):  
Population Structure ◽  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Structured Populations ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Multiplayer Games ◽  
Spatial Games ◽  
Population Structures ◽  
Single Structure ◽  
Containment Order ◽  
Update Rules

AbstractSpatial structure greatly affects the evolution of cooperation. While in two-player games the condition for cooperation to evolve depends on a single structure coefficient, in multiplayer games the condition might depend on several structure coefficients, making it difficult to compare different population structures. We propose a solution to this issue by introducing two simple ways of ordering population structures: the containment order and the volume order. If population structure 𝒮1 is greater than population structure 𝒮2 in the containment or the volume order, then 𝒮1 can be considered a stronger promoter of cooperation. We provide conditions for establishing the containment order, give general results on the volume order, and illustrate our theory by comparing different models of spatial games and associated update rules. Our results hold for a large class of population structures and can be easily applied to specific cases once the structure coefficients have been calculated or estimated.

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