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...

This paper studies the population dynamics of preference traits in a model of intergenerational cultural transmission. Parents socialize and transmit their preferences to their offspring, motivated by a form of paternalistic altruism (``imperfect empathy''). In such a setting we study the long run stationary state pattern of preferences in the population, according to various socialization mech...

The evolution of the long, slow human life history is a major challenge to evolutionary biologists. A compelling theory states that our late age at maturity allows us to acquire the many skills needed to survive in the economically intensive human foraging niche. Cultural transmission may be a crucial part of this process, by exposing learners to a wealth of information and skills that they wou...

In this paper, we present a cultural evolutionary model in which norms for cooperation and punishment are acquired via two cognitive mechanisms: (1) payoff-biased transmission-a tendency to copy the most successful individual; and (2) conformist transmission-a tendency to copy the most frequent behavior in the population. We first show that if a finite number of punishment stages is permitted (...