School of Biology, Sir Harold Mitchell Building, Greenside Place, St Andrews, United Kingdom.
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, Germany.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2019 Apr 30;15(4):e1006821. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006821. eCollection 2019 Apr.
Human populations show rich cultural diversity. Underpinning this diversity of tools, rituals, and cultural norms are complex interactions between cultural evolutionary and demographic processes. Most models of cultural change assume that individuals use the same learning modes and methods throughout their lives. However, empirical data on 'learning life histories'-the balance of dominant modes of learning (for example, learning from parents, peers, or unrelated elders) throughout an individual's lifetime-suggest that age structure may play a crucial role in determining learning modes and cultural evolutionary trajectories. Thus, studied in isolation, demographic and cultural evolutionary models show only part of the picture. This paper describes a mathematical and computational framework that combines demographic and cultural evolutionary methods. Using this general framework, we examine interactions between the ways in which culture is spread throughout an individual's lifetime and cultural change across generations. We show that including demographic structure alongside cultural dynamics can help to explain domain-specific patterns of cultural evolution that are a persistent feature of cultural data, and can shed new light on rare but significant demographic events.
人类群体表现出丰富的文化多样性。在工具、仪式和文化规范的这种多样性的背后，是文化进化和人口过程之间的复杂相互作用。大多数文化变迁模型都假设个体在其一生中使用相同的学习模式和方法。然而，关于“学习生活史”（即在个体的一生中，主导学习模式（例如，向父母、同伴或无关的长辈学习）的平衡）的经验数据表明，年龄结构可能在确定学习模式和文化进化轨迹方面发挥着关键作用。因此，单独研究的人口统计学和文化进化模型只显示了部分情况。本文描述了一个将人口统计学和文化进化方法结合起来的数学和计算框架。使用这个通用框架，我们研究了个体一生中文化传播方式与代际文化变化之间的相互作用。我们表明，将人口统计学结构与文化动态结合起来，可以帮助解释文化数据中一直存在的特定领域的文化进化模式，并为罕见但重要的人口统计学事件提供新的见解。
