Cultural traits have long been used in anthropology as units of transmission that ostensibly reflect behavioural characteristics of the individuals or groups exhibiting the traits. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of an individual's cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss or partial alteratio...

In this paper we seek to build on existing mathematical studies of cultural change by exploring how the diversity of adaptive cultural traits evolves by innovation and cultural transmission when the payoff from adopting traits is both uncertain and frequency dependent. The model is particularly aimed at understanding the evolution of subsistence trait diversity, since the payoff from exploiting...

Whales and dolphins (Cetacea) have excellent social learning skills as well as a long and strong mother-calf bond. These features produce stable cultures, and, in some species, sympatric groups with different cultures. There is evidence and speculation that this cultural transmission of behavior has affected gene distributions. Culture seems to have driven killer whales into distinct ecotypes, ...

With introduction of social niche effects into a model of cultural change, the frequency of a practice cannot predict the frequency of its underlying belief. The combination of a general model with empirical data from a specific case illustrates the importance of collaboration between modellers and field researchers, and identifies the type of quantitative data necessary for analysing case stud...

Cultural psychologists have shown that people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries often exhibit different psychological processing to people from less-WEIRD countries. The former exhibit more individualistic and less collectivistic social orientation, and more analytic and less holistic cognition, than non-Westerners. Yet the mechanisms responsible for mai...

What is the mechanism that translates the individual properties of learners into the properties of the language they speak? This paper will investigate cultural transmission as this mechanism and will take up the Iterated Learning Model as a formal framework in which to address this claim. This model describes language as a special learning problem, where the output of one generation is the inp...