School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, 900 S. Cady Mall, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, 951 S. Cady Mall, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2020 Jul 20;375(1803):20190504. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0504. Epub 2020 Jun 1.
Humans possess an unusual combination of traits, including our cognition, life history, demographics and geographical distribution. Many theories propose that these traits have coevolved. Such hypotheses have been explored both theoretically and empirically, with experiments examining whether human behaviour meets theoretical expectations. However, theory must make assumptions about the human mind, creating a potentially problematic gap between models and reality. Here, we employ a series of 'experimental evolutionary simulations' to reduce this gap and to explore the coevolution of learning, memory and childhood. The approach combines aspects of theory and experiment by inserting human participants as agents within an evolutionary simulation. Across experiments, we find that human behaviour supports the coevolution of learning, memory and childhood, but that this is dampened by rapid environmental change. We conclude by discussing both the implications of these findings for theories of human evolution and the utility of experimental evolutionary simulations more generally. This article is part of the theme issue 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.
人类拥有独特的特质组合，包括认知、生活史、人口统计学和地理分布。许多理论提出，这些特质是共同进化的。这些假说在理论和实证上都得到了探讨，实验检验了人类行为是否符合理论预期。然而，理论必须对人类思维做出假设，这在模型和现实之间造成了一个潜在的问题。在这里，我们采用一系列“实验进化模拟”来缩小这一差距，并探讨学习、记忆和童年的共同进化。该方法通过将人类参与者作为代理插入进化模拟中，结合了理论和实验的各个方面。在一系列实验中，我们发现人类行为支持学习、记忆和童年的共同进化，但快速的环境变化会削弱这种共同进化。最后，我们讨论了这些发现对人类进化理论的意义，以及实验进化模拟更广泛的应用。本文是主题为“生活史和学习：儿童期、养育和老年如何塑造人类和其他动物的认知和文化”的特刊的一部分。
