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Cultural transmission and biological markets

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Abstract

Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior (sometimes called “teaching”) can be seen as a costly strategy: one for which its evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin selection-based proposals for the evolution of cultural capacities. We demonstrate how a biological market can account for the evolution of teaching when individual learners are the exclusive focus of social learning (such as in a fast-changing environment). We also show how this biological market can affect the dynamics of cumulative culture. The model works best when it is difficult to have access to the observation of the behavior without the help of the actor. However, in contrast to previous non-mathematical hypotheses for the evolution of teaching, we show how teaching evolves, even when innovations are insufficiently opaque and therefore vulnerable to acquisition by emulators via inadvertent transmission. Furthermore, teaching in a biological market is an important precondition for enhancing individual learning abilities.

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Notes

  1. Mathematically, this condition helps to prevent singularities: without it, a single learning agent suffices in order for all social learners in a large population to be able to acquire the innovation (\(N \gg 1\)). However, the number of social learners would abruptly collapse (and become 0) when the proportion of individual learners decreases from 1/N to 0. It is not incoherent to state that social learning is facilitated when the proportion of individual learners in the population is greater.

  2. We make no assumption concerning the specific social configuration of the teacher–apprentice relationship, except that there is some nonzerosumness or collaboration in the basic terms described in the model.

  3. See more details in Sect. 3 of the Online Appendix.

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Acknowledgements

HV received support from a La Caixa Foundation Scholarship at the initial stage of the preparation of this work. This article has benefited from feedback of audiences at the University of Cambridge, the University of Granada, the University of Louvain-la-neuve, and the University of Paris 1. Special thanks should be given to Camilo Cela-Conde, Jean Gayon, Gabi Lipede, Pierre Livet, Hugo Mercier, Susana Monso, Dan Sperber, Neftali Villanueva, and several anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this work. In remembrance of Jean Gayon (1949–2018).

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Correspondence to Hugo Viciana.

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Loverdo, C., Viciana, H. Cultural transmission and biological markets. Biol Philos 33, 40 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9649-8

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