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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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Deffner, Dominik, McElreath, Richard
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
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.
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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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