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 ...

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...

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...

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...

How and where are the universal features of language specified? We consider language users as situated agents acting as conduits for the cultural transmission of language. Using multi-agent computational models we show that certain hallmarks of language are adaptive in the context of cultural transmission. This observation requires us to reconsider the role of innateness in explaining the chara...

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...

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 ...