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When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations
Culture and demography jointly facilitate flexible human adaptation, yet it still remains unclear how social learning operates in populations with age structure. Here, we present a mathematical model of the evolution of social learning in a population with different age classes. We investigate how d...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9012401/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35427404 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267204 |
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author | Deffner, Dominik McElreath, Richard |
author_facet | Deffner, Dominik McElreath, Richard |
author_sort | Deffner, Dominik |
collection | PubMed |
description | Culture and demography jointly facilitate flexible human adaptation, yet it still remains unclear how social learning operates in populations with age structure. Here, we present a mathematical model of the evolution of social learning in a population with different age classes. We investigate how demographic processes affect the adaptive value of culture, cultural adaptation and population growth, and identify the conditions that favor learning from older vs. younger individuals. We find that, even with age structure, social learning can evolve without increasing population fitness, i.e., “Rogers’ paradox” still holds. However, a process of “demographic filtering”, together with cultural transmission, can generate cumulative improvements in adaptation levels. We further show that older age classes have higher proportions of adaptive behavior when the environment is stable and adaptive behavior is hard to acquire but important to survival. Through individual-based simulations comparing temporal and spatial variability in the environment, we find a “copy-the-old”-strategy only evolves when social learning is erroneous and the opposite “copy-the-young”-strategy can function as a compromise between individual and social information use. Our results reveal that age structure substantially changes how culture evolves and provide principled empirical expectations about age-biased social learning and the role of demography in cultural adaptation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9012401 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-90124012022-04-16 When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations Deffner, Dominik McElreath, Richard PLoS One Research Article Culture and demography jointly facilitate flexible human adaptation, yet it still remains unclear how social learning operates in populations with age structure. Here, we present a mathematical model of the evolution of social learning in a population with different age classes. We investigate how demographic processes affect the adaptive value of culture, cultural adaptation and population growth, and identify the conditions that favor learning from older vs. younger individuals. We find that, even with age structure, social learning can evolve without increasing population fitness, i.e., “Rogers’ paradox” still holds. However, a process of “demographic filtering”, together with cultural transmission, can generate cumulative improvements in adaptation levels. We further show that older age classes have higher proportions of adaptive behavior when the environment is stable and adaptive behavior is hard to acquire but important to survival. Through individual-based simulations comparing temporal and spatial variability in the environment, we find a “copy-the-old”-strategy only evolves when social learning is erroneous and the opposite “copy-the-young”-strategy can function as a compromise between individual and social information use. Our results reveal that age structure substantially changes how culture evolves and provide principled empirical expectations about age-biased social learning and the role of demography in cultural adaptation. Public Library of Science 2022-04-15 /pmc/articles/PMC9012401/ /pubmed/35427404 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267204 Text en © 2022 Deffner, McElreath https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Deffner, Dominik McElreath, Richard When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations |
title | When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations |
title_full | When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations |
title_fullStr | When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations |
title_full_unstemmed | When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations |
title_short | When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations |
title_sort | when does selection favor learning from the old? social learning in age-structured populations |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9012401/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35427404 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267204 |
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