Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Sci Adv. 2019 Aug 14;5(8):eaaw0609. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw0609. eCollection 2019 Aug.
Cultural evolution relies on the social transmission of cultural traits along a population's social network. Research indicates that network structure affects information spread and thus the capacity for cumulative culture. However, how network structure itself is driven by population-culture co-evolution remains largely unclear. We use a simple model to investigate how populations negotiate the trade-off between acquiring new skills and getting better at existing skills and how this trade-off shapes social networks. We find unexpected eco-evolutionary feedbacks from culture onto social networks and vice versa. We show that selecting for skill generalists results in sparse networks with diverse skill sets, whereas selecting for skill specialists results in dense networks and a population that specializes on the same few skills on which everyone is an expert. Our model advances our understanding of the complex feedbacks in cultural evolution and demonstrates how individual-level behavior can lead to the emergence of population-level structure.
文化进化依赖于文化特征沿着人口的社会网络进行的社会传递。研究表明,网络结构会影响信息传播,从而影响累积文化的能力。然而,人口-文化共同进化如何驱动网络结构本身在很大程度上还不清楚。我们使用一个简单的模型来研究人口如何在获得新技能和提高现有技能之间进行权衡,以及这种权衡如何塑造社会网络。我们发现文化对社会网络以及反之亦然的意外生态进化反馈。我们表明,选择技能通才会导致具有多样化技能集的稀疏网络,而选择技能专家则会导致密集网络和一个专门从事少数几种技能的群体,而每个人在这些技能上都是专家。我们的模型增进了对文化进化中复杂反馈的理解,并展示了个体行为如何导致群体结构的出现。