Demographic transition theory is developed highlighting cultural transmission pattern as key driver. Individuals maximize cultural fitness, i.e. rate of own cultural type absorbtion by future generations. With low population density, one’s culture can be picked up only by own children, thus cultural fitness equals genetic fitness, individuals allocate all energy surplus to reproduction, and Mal...

Population geneticists have shown that the effects of local extinction and recolonization on selectively neutral genetic diversity are sensitive to the number of individuals that migrate between groups. Here, we employ a spatially explicit metapopulation model to investigate the extent to which the effects of local extinction on selectively neutral cultural diversity and change are sensitive to...

An important form of cultural evolution involves individual learning of behaviour by the members of a population of agents and cultural transmission of learned behaviour to the following generations. The selection of behaviours generated in the process of individual learning requires some "guiding criteria". As with behaviour, guiding criteria can be innate or originate from individual or socia...

Cultural transmission of reproductive success states that successful men have more children and pass this raised fecundity to their offspring. Balaresque and colleagues found high frequency haplotypes in a Central Asian Y chromosome dataset, which they attribute to cultural transmission of reproductive success by prominent historical men, including Genghis Khan. Using coalescent simulation, we ...

Twin and family studies establish the foundation for studying the genetic, environmental and cultural transmission effects for phenotypes. In this work, we make use of the well established statistical methods and theory for mixed models to assess cultural transmission in twin and family studies. Specifically, we address two critical yet poorly understood issues: the model identifiability in ass...

Conventional models of cultural evolution consider only panmictic populations. In many real world cases, however, random mating is constrained by the spatial or social structure of the population. A spatial population model of biased cultural transmission is proposed. Monte Carlo simulations produce results which show quantitatively different dynamics to those predicted by the more conventional...

It is shown that Lotka-Volterra interaction terms are not appropriate to describe vertical cultural transmission. Appropriate interaction terms are derived and used to compute the effect of vertical cultural transmission on demic front propagation. They are also applied to a specific example, the Neolithic transition in Europe. In this example, it is found that the effect of vertical cultural t...