Digital media have today an enormous diffusion, and their influence on the behavior of a vast part of the human population can hardly be underestimated. In this review I propose that cultural evolution theory, including both a sophisticated view of human behavior and a methodological attitude to modeling and quantitative analysis, provides a useful framework to study the effects and the develop...

We generalize the Bisin and Verdier (2000, 2001) model of intergenerational transmission to permit an arbitrary number of cultural traits. A key observation – that this model is equivalent to an evolutionary game under replicator dynamics – allows us to exploit the extensive literature on replicator systems. For some substantively interesting special cases, we demonstrate global stability of eq...

The evolutionary foundations of helping among nonkin in humans have been the object of intense debates in the past decades. One thesis has had a prominent influence in this debate: the suggestion that genuine altruism, strictly defined as a form of help that comes at a net fitness cost for the benefactor, might have evolved owing to cultural transmission. The gene-culture coevolution literature...

The application of phylogenetic methods to cultural variation raises questions about how cultural adaption works and how it is coupled to cultural transmission. Cultural group selection is of particular interest in this context because it depends on the same kinds of mechanisms that lead to tree-like patterns of cultural variation. Here, we review ideas about cultural group selection relevant t...

Long-term field studies have revealed considerable behavioural differences among groups of wild Pan troglodytes. Here, we report three sets of cladistic analyses that were designed to shed light on issues relating to this interpopulation variation that are of particular relevance to palaeoanthropology. In the first set of analyses, we focused on the proximate cause of the variation. Some resear...

Simple and ubiquitous gene interactions create rugged fitness landscapes composed of coadapted gene complexes separated by "valleys" of low fitness. Crossing such fitness valleys allows a population to escape suboptimal local fitness peaks to become better adapted. This is the premise of Sewall Wright's shifting balance process. Here we generalize the theory of fitness-valley crossing in the tw...

The symposium papers at hand apply a population-biological modeling approach to the problems of cultural transmission and cultural evolution. The papers by Boyd and Richerson, by Chen et al., and by Pulliam are conceptually very similar, each advancing a variant on the additive transmission model of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981), in which the probability that pseudoparticulate "traits" [ess...