Finding a Mate With Eusocial Skills

Abstract

Sexual reproductive behavior has a necessary social coordination component as willing and capable partners must both be in the right place at the right time. It has recently been demonstrated that many social organizations that support sexual reproduction can evolve in the absence of social coordination between agents (e.g. herding, assortative mating, and natal philopatry). In this paper we explore these results by including social transfer mechanisms to our agents and contrasting their reproductive behavior with a control group without social transfer mechanisms. We conclude that similar behaviors emerge in our social learning agents as those that emerged in the non-social learning agents. Social learners were more inclined towards natal philopatry. Social learners also evolved a culture of eusociality including reproductive division of labor.

Divergent Cumulative Cultural Evolution

“…It also had mechanisms of horizontal transfer of cultural information between agents of multiple generations. Our implementation is an example of our dual inheritance model of cultural evolution (Marriott and Chebib, 2016a). Our implementation demonstrates divergent cumulative cultural evolution under both conditions of cooperative and competitive selection pressures.…”

Reproductive division of labor in a colony of artificial ants

“…We have chosen to focus our experimentation on the third stage in which RDoL emerges and the fourth stage in which cooperative foraging strategies can evolve. We have previously studied the emergence of eusocial behavior in foraging agents capable of social learning (Marriott and Chebib, 2016) and division of labor in artificial ants in the fourth stage (Marriott and Gershenson, 2011).…”