A growing body of research has examined how cultural capital, recently broadened to include not only high-status cultural activities but also a range of different parenting practices, influences children’s educational success. Most of this research assumes that parents’ current class location is the starting point of class transmission. However, does the ability of parents to pass advantages to...

Human evolution depends on the co-evolution between genetically determined behaviors and socially transmitted information. Although vertical transmission of cultural information from parent to offspring is common in hominins, its effects on cumulative cultural evolution are not fully understood. Here, we investigate gene-culture co-evolution in a family-structured population by studying the inv...

In this article we explore the theoretical limits of the inference of cultural transmission modes based on sparse population-level data. We approach this problem by investigating whether different transmission modes produce different temporal dynamics of cultural change. In particular, we explore whether different transmission modes result in sufficiently different distributions of the average ...

We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biologic...

The articles in this theme issue seek to understand the evolutionary bases of social learning and the consequences of cultural transmission for the evolution of human behaviour. In this introductory article, we provide a summary of these articles (seven articles on the experimental exploration of cultural transmission and three articles on the role of gene-culture coevolution in shaping human b...

A general formulation of cultural and genetic transmission is developed. The cultural transmission is vertical and the genetics may involve multiple loci. Each individual is represented by a phenogenotype, and conditions are given under which the evolutionary dynamics of phenogenotype frequencies are reducible to phenogametic or phenoallelic frequencies. The interaction between genes and cultur...