I n "Cultural Transmission, Disproportionate Prior Expos ure, and th e Evolu ti on of Cooperation," Mark (2002) claims to have "condueted a formal theoretical analysis that isolated the logic of cultural transmission (to] reveal an evolutionary force toward cooperation under conditions previously thought to make the evolution of cooperation impossible" (p. 324). The most striking aspect of Mark...

Phylogenetic methods have recently been applied to studies of cultural evolution. However, it has been claimed that the large amount of horizontal transmission that sometimes occurs between cultural groups invalidates the use of these methods. Here, we use a natural model of linguistic evolution to simulate borrowing between languages. The results show that tree topologies constructed with Baye...

This paper shows how the performance of a genetic programming system can be improved through the addition of mechanisms for non-genetic transmission of information between individuals (culture). Teller has previously shown how genetic programming systems can be enhanced through the addition of memory mechanisms for individual programs [Teller 1994]; in this paper we show how Teller’s memory mec...

Cooperative behavior depends on cultural environment, so what happens when people move from to a new culture governed by a new norm? The dynamics of culture-induced cooperation has not been well understood. We expose lab participants to a sequence of different subject pools while playing a constrained Trust Game. We find prior exposure to different subject pools does in fact influence cooperati...

Field reports suggest that orangutans acquire local traditions by observing neighbouring conspecifics. However, there is little direct evidence of social learning to support this conclusion. The present study investigated whether orangutans would learn a novel foraging method through observation of a conspecific in a diffusion-chain paradigm testing for the spread of the behaviour. A foraging b...

We provide a cultural explanation to the phenomenon of corruption in the framework of an overlapping generations model with intergenerational transmission of values. We show that the economy has two steady states with di erent levels of corruption. The driving force in the equilibrium selection process is the education e ort exerted by parents which depends on the distribution of ethics in the ...

In a narrow critique of two early papers in the literature on cumulative cultural evolution, Vaesen et al. (1) misunderstand the work they criticize, mischaracterize multiple lines of research, and selectively ignore much evidence. While largely recycling prior criticisms, they provide no new models, evidence, or explanations (2). Not only do their criticisms of Henrich’s (3) and Powell et al.’...

The evolution and maintenance of social learning, in competition with individual learning, under fluctuating selection have been well-studied in the theory of cultural evolution. Here, we study competition between vertical and oblique cultural transmission of a dichotomous phenotype under constant, periodically cycling, and randomly fluctuating selection. Conditions are derived for the existenc...

When individuals in a population can acquire traits through learning, each individual may express a certain number of distinct cultural traits. These traits may have been either invented by the individual himself or acquired from others in the population. Here, we develop a game theoretic model for the accumulation of cultural traits through individual and social learning. We explore how the ra...

Historically, imitation has frequently been proposed as the central mechanism mediating the reproduction, spread, intergenerational transmission and stabilization of human cultural forms, population-specific behavioral traditions found in groups of non-human primates, or both (Baldwin 1894; Bandura 1986; Blackmore 2000; Byrne and Russon 1998; Dawkins 1976; Dennett 1995; Donald 1991; Meltzoff 19...