scholarly journals Population turnover facilitates cultural selection for efficiency

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Chimento ◽  
Gustavo Alarcon-Nieto ◽  
Lucy Aplin
Keyword(s):  
Parus Major ◽  
Diffusion Experiment ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Cultural Selection ◽  
Cultural Diffusion ◽  
Population Turnover ◽  
Learned Behaviors ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Abstract Selection for more efficient socially learned behaviors over alternatives is crucial for cumulative cultural evolution, yet our understanding of such cultural selection in animals is limited. We performed a cultural diffusion experiment using 18 populations of wild-caught great tits (Parus major) to ask whether more efficient innovations are subsequently selected for, and whether this process is affected by turnover. We show that gradual replacement of individuals greatly increases the probability that a more efficient behavior will invade a population's cultural repertoire, out-competing an established inefficient behavior. Turnover does not increase innovation rates, but instead increases adoption rates, as immigrants are more susceptible to novel, efficient behaviors. An agent based model further supported our results by demonstrating that this effect holds across populations of different types of learners. Altogether, these results provide strong evidence for cultural selection for efficiency in animals, and highlight the importance of population turnover for this process.

scholarly journals Population turnover facilitates cultural selection for efficiency

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Chimento ◽  
Gustavo Alarcon-Nieto ◽  
Lucy Aplin
Keyword(s):  
Parus Major ◽  
Diffusion Experiment ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Cultural Selection ◽  
Cultural Diffusion ◽  
Population Turnover ◽  
Learned Behaviors ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Abstract Selection for more efficient socially learned behaviors over alternatives is crucial for cumulative cultural evolution, yet our understanding of such cultural selection in animals is limited. We performed a cultural diffusion experiment using 18 populations of wild-caught great tits Parus major to ask whether more efficient foraging traditions are selected for, and whether this process is affected by turnover. We show that gradual replacement of individuals greatly increases the probability that a more efficient behavior will invade a population's cultural repertoire, out-competing an established inefficient behavior. Turnover does not increase innovation rates, but instead increases adoption rates, as immigrants are more susceptible to novel, efficient behaviors. An agent based model further supported our results by demonstrating that this effect holds across populations of different types of learners. Altogether, these results provide strong evidence for cultural selection for efficiency in animals, and highlight the importance of population turnover for this process.

scholarly journals Population turnover facilitates cultural selection for efficiency

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Chimento ◽  
Gustavo Alarcon-Nieto ◽  
Lucy Aplin
Keyword(s):  
Parus Major ◽  
Diffusion Experiment ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Cultural Selection ◽  
Cultural Diffusion ◽  
Population Turnover ◽  
Learned Behaviors ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Abstract Selection for more efficient socially learned behaviors over alternatives is crucial for cumulative cultural evolution, yet our understanding of such cultural selection in animals is limited. We performed a cultural diffusion experiment using 18 populations of wild-caught great tits Parus major to ask whether more efficient foraging traditions are selected for, and whether this process is affected by turnover. We show that gradual replacement of individuals greatly increases the probability that a more efficient behavior will invade a population's cultural repertoire, out-competing an established inefficient behavior. Turnover does not increase innovation rates, but instead increases adoption rates, as immigrants are more susceptible to novel, efficient behaviors. An agent based model further supported our results by demonstrating that this effect holds across populations of different types of learners. Altogether, these results provide strong evidence for cultural selection for efficiency in animals, and highlight the importance of population turnover for this process.

scholarly journals Population turnover facilitates cultural selection for efficiency in birds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Chimento ◽  
Gustavo Alarcon-Nieto ◽  
Lucy Aplin
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Parus Major ◽  
Darwinian Evolution ◽  
Diffusion Experiment ◽  
Cultural Selection ◽  
Population Turnover ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary

Abstract Culture, defined as socially transmitted information and behaviors that are shared in groups and persist over time, is increasingly accepted to occur across a wide range of taxa and behavioral domains. While persistent, cultural traits are not necessarily static, and their distribution can change in frequency and type in response to selective pressures, analogous to that of genetic alleles. This has lead to the treatment of culture as an evolutionary process, with cultural evolutionary theory arguing that culture exhibits the three fundamental components of Darwinian evolution: variation, competition, and inheritance. Selection for more efficient behaviors over alternatives is a crucial component of cumulative cultural evolution, yet our understanding of how and when such cultural selection occurs in non-human animals is limited. We performed a cultural diffusion experiment using 18 captive populations of wild-caught great tits (Parus major) to ask whether more efficient foraging traditions are selected for, and whether this process is affected by a fundamental demographic process—population turnover. Our results showed that gradual replacement of individuals with naive immigrants greatly increased the probability that a more efficient behavior invaded a population’s cultural repertoire and out-competed an established inefficient behavior. Fine-scale, automated behavioral tracking revealed that turnover did not increase innovation rates, but instead acted on adoption rates, as immigrants disproportionately sampled novel, efficient behaviors relative to available social information. These results provide strong evidence for cultural selection for efficiency in animals, and highlight the mechanism that links population turnover to this process.

scholarly journals Population turnover facilitates cultural selection for efficiency in birds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Chimento ◽  
Gustavo Alarcón-Nieto ◽  
Lucy M. Aplin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Selection ◽  
Population Turnover ◽  
Selection For

scholarly journals Movement and conformity interact to establish local behavioural traditions in animal populations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Somveille ◽  
Josh A. Firth ◽  
Lucy M. Aplin ◽  
Damien R. Farine ◽  
Ben C. Sheldon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Parus Major ◽  
Diffusion Experiment ◽  
Cultural Diffusion ◽  
Animal Populations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
First Time ◽  
Animal Culture

ABSTRACTThe social transmission of information is critical to the emergence of animal culture. Two processes are predicted to play key roles in how socially-transmitted information spreads in animal populations: the movement of individuals across the landscape and conformist social learning. We develop a model that, for the first time, explicitly integrates these processes to investigate their impacts on the spread of behavioural preferences. Our results reveal a strong interplay between movement and conformity for determining whether local traditions establish across a landscape or whether a single preference dominates the whole population. The model is able to replicate a real-world cultural diffusion experiment in great tits Parus major, but also allows for a range of predictions for the emergence of animal culture under various initial conditions, habitat structure and strength of conformist bias to be made. Integrating social behaviour with ecological variation will be important for understanding the stability and diversity of culture in animals.

scholarly journals Parental effects and the evolution of phenotypic memory

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bram Kuijper ◽  
Rufus A Johnstone
Keyword(s):  
Local Environment ◽  
Parental Effects ◽  
Bet Hedging ◽  
Changing Environments ◽  
Structured Population ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Parental Phenotype ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Nongenetic Inheritance

Abstract Despite growing evidence for nongenetic inheritance, the ecological conditions that favor the evolution of heritable parental or grandparental effects remain poorly understood. Here, we systematically explore the evolution of parental effects in a patch-structured population with locally changing environments. When selection favors the production of a mix of offspring types, this mix differs according to the parental phenotype, implying that parental effects are favored over selection for bet-hedging in which the mixture of offspring phenotypes produced does not depend on the parental phenotype. Positive parental effects (generating a positive correlation between parental and offspring phenotype) are favored in relatively stable habitats and when different types of local environment are roughly equally abundant, and can give rise to long-term parental inheritance of phenotypes. By contrast, unstable habitats can favor negative parental effects (generating a negative correlation between parental and offspring phenotype), and under these circumstances even slight asymmetries in the abundance of local environmental states select for marked asymmetries in transmission fidelity.

The analysis of chromatin organisation allows selection of mouse antral oocytes competent for development to blastocyst

Zygote ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Zuccotti ◽  
Rubén H. Ponce ◽  
Michele Boiani ◽  
Stefano Guizzardi ◽  
Paolo Govoni ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Competence ◽  
Farm Animals ◽  
Cell Stage ◽  
Developmental Potential ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Chromatin Organisation ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Gamete Selection ◽  
Selection Of

Mouse antral oocytes can be classified in two different types termed SN or NSN oocytes, depending on the presence or absence, respectively, of a ring of Hoechst 33342-positive chromatin surrounding the nucleolus. The aim of the present study was to test the developmental competence to blastocyst of the two types of oocytes. Here we show that following isolation, classification and culture of cumulus-free antral oocytes, 14.7% and 74.5% of NSN and SN oocytes, respectively, reached the metaphase II stage. When fertilised and further cultured none of the metaphase II NSN oocytes developed beyond the 2-cell stage whilst 47.4% of the metaphase II SN oocytes reached the 4-cell stage and 18.4% developed to blastocyst. The findings reported in this paper may contribute to improved procedures of female gamete selection for in vitro fertilisation of humans and farm animals. Furthermore, the selection of oocytes with better developmental potential may be of interest for studies on nuclear/cytoplasm interaction, particularly in nuclear-transfer experiments.

scholarly journals SATzilla: Portfolio-based Algorithm Selection for SAT

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 565-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Xu ◽  
F. Hutter ◽  
H. H. Hoos ◽  
K. Leyton-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Algorithm Selection ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Algorithm Portfolios ◽  
Predicting Performance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Sat Solver ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Problem Instances

It has been widely observed that there is no single "dominant" SAT solver; instead, different solvers perform best on different instances. Rather than following the traditional approach of choosing the best solver for a given class of instances, we advocate making this decision online on a per-instance basis. Building on previous work, we describe SATzilla, an automated approach for constructing per-instance algorithm portfolios for SAT that use so-called empirical hardness models to choose among their constituent solvers. This approach takes as input a distribution of problem instances and a set of component solvers, and constructs a portfolio optimizing a given objective function (such as mean runtime, percent of instances solved, or score in a competition). The excellent performance of SATzilla was independently verified in the 2007 SAT Competition, where our SATzilla07 solvers won three gold, one silver and one bronze medal. In this article, we go well beyond SATzilla07 by making the portfolio construction scalable and completely automated, and improving it by integrating local search solvers as candidate solvers, by predicting performance score instead of runtime, and by using hierarchical hardness models that take into account different types of SAT instances. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these new techniques in extensive experimental results on data sets including instances from the most recent SAT competition.

Hazard Identification and Probablistic Scenario Selection for Shipship Collision Accidents

2014 ◽  
Vol 156 (A1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sampling Technique ◽  
Hazard Identification ◽  
Probability Density Distribution ◽  
Collision Risk ◽  
Near Misses ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Design Loads ◽  
Ship Collision ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Accident Scenarios

In collision risk-based design frameworks it is necessary to accurately define and select a set of credible scenarios to be used in the quantitative assessment and management of the collision risk between two ships. Prescriptive solutions and empirical knowledge are commonly used in current maritime industries, but are often insufficient for innovation because they can result in unfavourable design loads and may not address all circumstances of accidents involved. In this study, an innovative method using probabilistic approaches is proposed to identify relevant groups of ship-ship collision accident scenarios that collectively represent all possible scenarios. Ship-ship collision accidents and near-misses recently occurred worldwide are collated for the period of 21 years during 1991 to 2012. Collision scenarios are then described using a set of parameters that are treated individually as random variables and analysed by statistical methods to define the ranges and variability to formulate the probability density distribution for each scenario. As the consideration of all scenarios would not be practical, a sampling technique is applied to select a certain number of prospective collision scenarios. Applied examples for different types of vessels are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the method.

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