Natural selection and cultural rates of change

Rogers, Deborah S.; Ehrlich, Paul R.

doi:10.1073/pnas.0711802105

Cited by 138 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In realms of human social learning such as the adoption of farming technologies and crops, hunting equipment, or symbolic traits, changes in trait frequency over time will be visible and thus a possible cue for adoption (Dow, Reed, & Olewiler, 2009;Mesoudi & O'Brien, 2008;Rogers & Ehrlich, 2008;Rogers, 1995). Like conformist transmission, a copy-increasing strategy will result in accelerating rate of adoption over time.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humans copy rapidly increasing choices in a multiarmed bandit problem

Toelch

Bruce

Meeus

et al. 2010

Evolution and Human Behavior

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Humans copy rapidly increasing choices in a multiarmed bandit problemToelch, U.; Bruce, M.J.; Meeus, Marius; Reader, S.M. Published in: Evolution and Human Behavior Document version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. AbstractConformist social learning, the tendency to acquire the most common trait in a group, allows individuals to rapidly acquire established beneficial traits from a multitude of options. However, conformist strategies hinder acquisition of novel advantageous behavior patterns, because such innovations are by definition uncommon. This raises the possibility that proxy cues of the success of novel traits may be utilized to identify and acquire advantageous innovations and disregard failing options. We show that humans use changes in trait frequency over time as such a cue in an economic game. Participants played a three-alternative forced choice game (i.e., a multi-armed bandit), using social information to attempt to locate a high reward that could change location. Participants viewed temporal changes in how many players chose each option in two successive rounds. Participants supplemented conformist strategies with a "copy-increasing-traits" strategy. That is, regardless of the traits absolute population frequencies, participants' choices were guided by changes in trait frequencies. Thus, humans can detect advantageous innovations by monitoring how many individuals adopt these over time, adopting traits increasing in frequency, and abandoning traits decreasing in frequency. Copying rapidly increasing traits allows identification and acquisition of advantageous innovations, and is thus potentially key in facilitating their early diffusion and cultural evolution.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humans copy rapidly increasing choices in a multiarmed bandit problem

Toelch

Bruce

Meeus

et al. 2010

Evolution and Human Behavior

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“…The Jaccard distance for each pair of folktale variants was calculated as the sum of the number of traits that are present in one variant but not the other, divided by the sum of the number of traits that are present in one or both of the variants. The Jaccard distance is particularly appropriate for analysing this cultural dataset because it standardizes for the number of traits observed for each pair and shared absences do not contribute to similarity [44].…”

Section: Materials and Methods (A) Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fourth, given that variation in this folktale was likely to have been predominantly selectively neutral (i.e. not 'functional' in the sense of being tested against the natural environment [34,44]), it may provide a plausible 'null' model of cultural diffusion, akin to IBD in population genetics, against which the effects of selection, population boundaries and cultural ancestry can be tested. Finally, the folktale variants in the dataset were independently coded for narrative content by a noted folklore scholar [42] according to the well-established historic-geographic method of folklore analysis [43].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population structure and cultural geography of a folktale in Europe

2013

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Despite a burgeoning science of cultural evolution, relatively little work has focused on the population structure of human cultural variation. By contrast, studies in human population genetics use a suite of tools to quantify and analyse spatial and temporal patterns of genetic variation within and between populations. Human genetic diversity can be explained largely as a result of migration and drift giving rise to gradual genetic clines, together with some discontinuities arising from geographical and cultural barriers to gene flow. Here, we adapt theory and methods from population genetics to quantify the influence of geography and ethnolinguistic boundaries on the distribution of 700 variants of a folktale in 31 European ethnolinguistic populations. We find that geographical distance and ethnolinguistic affiliation exert significant independent effects on folktale diversity and that variation between populations supports a clustering concordant with European geography. This pattern of geographical clines and clusters parallels the pattern of human genetic diversity in Europe, although the effects of geographical distance and ethnolinguistic boundaries are stronger for folktales than genes. Our findings highlight the importance of geography and population boundaries in models of human cultural variation and point to key similarities and differences between evolutionary processes operating on human genes and culture.

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“…Abundant research (see Kirch 1997) indicates that the frequency of transmission between local populations in Remote Oceania declined during the first 500 years. Thus all else being equal, correlations between pairwise distance and motif similarity matrices for early sites should be greater than for late sites, because as transmission between local populations declines, these populations will probably diverge in their production and the use of stylistic motifs owing to drift (Dunnell 1978;Rogers & Ehrlich 2008).…”

Section: Phylogenetic Analyses Of Lapita Pottery E E Cochrane and C mentioning

confidence: 99%

Phylogenetic analyses of Lapita decoration do not support branching evolution or regional population structure during colonization of Remote Oceania

Cochrane

Lipo

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Intricately decorated Lapita pottery (3100-2700 BP) was made and deposited by the prehistoric colonizers of Pacific islands, east of the main Solomon's chain. For decades, analyses of this pottery have focused on the ancestor-descendant relationships of populations and the relative degree of interaction across the region to explain similarities in Lapita decoration. Cladistic analyses, increasingly used to examine the evolutionary relationships of material culture assemblages, have not been conducted on Lapita artefacts. Here, we present the first cladistic analysis of Lapita pottery and note the difficulties in using cladistics to investigate datasets where a high degree of horizontal transmission and non-branching evolution may explain observed variation. We additionally present NeighborNet and phenetic distance network analyses to generate hypotheses that may account for Lapita decorative similarity.

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Natural selection and cultural rates of change

Cited by 138 publications

References 42 publications

Humans copy rapidly increasing choices in a multiarmed bandit problem

Humans copy rapidly increasing choices in a multiarmed bandit problem

Population structure and cultural geography of a folktale in Europe

Phylogenetic analyses of Lapita decoration do not support branching evolution or regional population structure during colonization of Remote Oceania

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