For acquired behaviour to count as cultural, two conditions must be met: it must propagate in a social group, and it must remain stable across generations in the process of propagation. It is commonly assumed that imitation is the mechanism that explains both the spread of animal culture and its stability. We review the literature on transmission chain studies in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and other animals, and we use a formal model to argue that imitation, which may well play a major role in the propagation of animal culture, cannot be considered faithful enough to explain its stability. We consider the contribution that other psychological and ecological factors might make to the stability of animal culture observed in the wild. -- Keywords: imitation, cultural evolution, animal culture -- See addendum commentary "The natural selection of fidelity in social learning" in Commun Integr Biol, volume 3 (2010) -- Both downloaded to Tab S2

Book chapter - Exploring the cognitive basis of the social sciences and trying to ground the social in the cognitive requires taking an explicit stance on reduction(ism) as discussed in philosophy of science. In social science and the humanities, the question of reductionism has been especially salient in the study of religion. This chapter begins with a philosophical analysis of reduction; after that, two relatively new research programs in the study of religious thought and behavior are discussed: the standard model of the cognitive science of religion and approaches based on gene-culture coevolutionary theories. Finally, the question of reductionism is addressed and the possibility of combining multilevel explanations of religious phenomena is evaluated. -- Downloaded to Tab S2

Acerbi, A. & Mesoudi, A. Biol Philos (2015) 30: 481. doi:10.1007/s10539-015-9490-2 -- Biology & Philosophy, July 2015, Volume 30, Issue 4, pp 481–503 -- Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. -- Keywords -- Cultural attraction, Cultural attractors, Cultural evolution, Cultural transmission

Max M Krasnow, Andrew W Delton, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby -- PLoS ONE 04/2015; 10(4):e0124561. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0124561 (Impact Factor: 3.23). -- ABSTRACT -- Humans everywhere cooperate in groups to achieve benefits not attainable by individuals. Individual effort is often not automatically tied to a proportionate share of group benefits. This decoupling allows for free-riding, a strategy that (absent countermeasures) outcompetes cooperation. Empirically and formally, punishment potentially solves the evolutionary puzzle of group cooperation. Nevertheless, standard analyses appear to show that punishment alone is insufficient, because second-order free riders (those who cooperate but do not punish) can be shown to outcompete punishers. Consequently, many have concluded that other processes, such as cultural or genetic group selection, are required. Here, we present a series of agent-based simulations that show that group cooperation sustained by punishment easily evolves by individual selection when you introduce into standard models more biologically plausible assumptions about the social ecology and psychology of ancestral humans. -- downloaded pdf to Note

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Herbert A. Simon,The American Economic Review, Vol. 83, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Hundred and Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1993), pp. 156-161 -- overview of how he models "utility" to handle bounded rationality, and how groups need to be included in utility behavior models to get at "altruism" or preferences for other-regarding behavior -- basic message is public choice and rational choice have such an impoverished concept of "rationality" they will never be able to get their axiomatic models to work with what requires rich empirical observations -- doesn't say it, but their limited concept of rationality is less an empirically verified theory re how the world works, but rather a bundle of normative assumptions -- and when they try to extend what's really prescriptive to areas like the family, they've gotten way outside their lane -- downloaded pdf to Note

Excellent basic explainers, teaching materials and resource ljbrary

Human characteristics are the product of gene–culture coevolution, which is an evolutionary dynamic involving the interaction of genes and culture over long time periods. Gene–culture coevolution is a special case of niche construction. Gene–culture coevolution is responsible for human other-regarding preferences, a taste for fairness, the capacity to empathize and salience of morality and character virtues. -- Keywords: gene–culture coevolution, sociobiology, epistatic information transfer -- Published 14 February 2011 doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0310 -- downloaded pdf to Note

School of Biology, University of St Andrews, -- Cultural niche construction is a uniquely potent source of selection on human populations, and a major cause of recent human evolution. Previous theoretical analyses have not, however, explored the local effects of cultural niche construction. Here, we use spatially explicit coevolutionary models to investigate how cultural processes could drive selection on human genes by modifying local resources. We show that cultural learning, expressed in local niche construction, can trigger a process with dynamics that resemble runaway sexual selection. Under a broad range of conditions, cultural niche-constructing practices generate selection for gene-based traits and hitchhike to fixation through the build up of statistical associations between practice and trait. This process can occur even when the cultural practice is costly, or is subject to counteracting transmission biases, or the genetic trait is selected against. Under some conditions a secondary hitchhiking occurs, through which genetic variants that enhance the capability for cultural learning are also favoured by similar dynamics. We suggest that runaway cultural niche construction could have played an important role in human evolution, helping to explain why humans are simultaneously the species with the largest relative brain size, the most potent capacity for niche construction and the greatest reliance on culture. Keywords: niche construction, cultural transmission, gene–culture coevolution, human evolution, spatially explicit models -- doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0256 -- didn't download