Modelling Cultural Transmission

Cultural traits spread via multiple mechanisms among individuals within social groups, including via transmission biases that occur when subordinates copy from dominants (prestige transmission), or via common cultural trait variants that are favoured over rare ones (consensus transmission). Most animal populations are subdivided into social groups where cultural learning occurs, yet theoretical studies of cultural trait transmission have tended to focus on within-group transmission dynamics. We developed an agent-based model of cultural transmission in socially structured populations in which a trait arises in one individual and either persists until a stable population equilibrium is reached, or goes extinct. With this model, we systematically varied group size, rates of dispersal among groups, mortality rates, transmission characteristics, the benefit of the cultural trait (including possibly negative benefits), and whether individuals disperse locally or randomly. We used generalized linear models to examine how changes in these parameters influence trait extinction, equilibrium prevalence and time to equilibrium. Four traits increased the probability of extinction: smaller group size, higher background mortality, lower transmission rate and more costly traits (although costly traits sometimes reached an equilibrium). Local dispersal and biased transmission mechanisms (prestige and consensus) had no significant effects on extinction probability, and similar patterns were found for equilibrium prevalence. We found that a lower dispersal rate and local dispersal slowed the time required for a trait to reach equilibrium, as did smaller groups, lower transmission rates and lower costs. Collectively, these analyses reveal that prestige and consensus transmission have weaker effects than other factors associated with demographic and social conditions.

Religious systems have the key properties of an evolutionary system: they are inherited over time, are subject to change, and differ in their ability to gain and retain members. The cultural macroevolutionary study of religion seeks to identify and understand generalizable patterns of religious change over human history. This chapter is structured around four questions about the macroevolution of religion. First, what are the modes of religion transmission? Second, what is the tempo of religious change? Third, how do religions coevolve with other cultural and environmental traits? Fourth, what factors explain the rise and fall of religious systems in human history? Each topic is explained from an evolutionary perspective, along with an overview of empirical research. This research has been a testing ground for theories of cultural evolution, though many key questions remain unresolved. Further research directed at answering these questions will provide a richer understanding of religion, as well as the dynamics of cultural evolution.

The aim of this article is to test and apply the developed methodology of research on the correlation between the physical learning environment and education, analysing Vilnius Geroji Viltis Progymnasium. The article analyses functional-spatial structure and usability of the selected school (applying the principles of post occupancy evaluation (POE), and analyses the school culture and the needs of school community groups, which are compared with modern Lithuanian educational goals and objectives. The functional-spatial structure of the analysed school is compared with the general school model of the 21st century formed in the author’s previous research, which distinguishes 7 features of the physical learning environment that define the quality of the modern learning environment. It also examines the extent to which the current physical school environment satisfies and meets the school culture and community needs. The article provides guidelines for the implementation of the harmony of school culture (values and needs) and its physical environment, which allows each school to self-assess the physical learning environment and its cultural and 21st century school physical environment characteristics and assumptions and opportunities to meet them.

We study the front propagation of a population that incorporates individuals of a second, pre-existing population. Previous models of such incorporation deal only with vertical cultural transmission (interbreeding) and horizontal cultural transmission (acculturation of individuals of the second population by members of the first one and of similar age). Here we present the first model of oblique transmission (acculturation by individuals of an older generation), which is more complicated because a model with age structure is necessary. We compare the new, age-structured model for oblique, horizontal and vertical transmission. The most powerful mechanism (fastest fronts) is oblique transmission. Two illustrative applications of Neolithic front propagation are presented. In one of them, the front was so fast that neither horizontal nor vertical transmission can explain it (but oblique transmission can). In the cases for which cultural transmission is a viable explanation, the observed front speed yields bounds on the intensity of cultural transmission. Our models are also of interest in many other Neolithic and non-Neolithic human range expansions, including major human migrations. Additionally, in future work the new age-structured models reported in this paper could be applied to model genetic gradients and, possibly, to similar phenomena in other species in which cultural transmission is well-known to occur.

Social learning has allowed humans to build up extensive cultural repertoires, enabling them to adapt to a wide variety of environmental and social conditions. However, it is unclear which social learning strategies people use, especially in social contexts where their payoffs depend on the behaviour of others. Here we show experimentally that individuals differ in their social learning strategies and that they tend to employ the same learning strategy irrespective of the interaction context. Payoff-based learners focus on their peers' success, while decision-based learners disregard payoffs and exclusively focus on their peers' past behaviour. These individual differences may be of considerable importance for cultural evolution. By means of a simple model, we demonstrate that groups harbouring individuals with different learning strategies may be faster in adopting technological innovations and can be more efficient through successful role differentiation. Our study highlights the importance of individual variation for human interactions and sheds new light on the dynamics of cultural evolution.

Event Abstract Back to Event Spatial dynamics of transmission and persistence of African swine fever in wild boar populations: insight for control Kim M. Pepin1* 1 National Wildlife Research Center, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, United States ASF is a devastating disease for swine producers that is hypothesized to persist in wild boar populations in Eastern Europe through contact with contaminated carcasses and/or continual re-introductions, depending on host density and spatial ecology. However, the role of different transmission and persistence mechanisms remain poorly understood despite their importance for planning allocation of surveillance and control resources across space. We predicted that carcass-based transmission would be important for persistence, especially in low-density host populations because carcasses can increase transmission probability when contact rates are low. We also predicted that host density and social structure would be important for predicting the amount of environmental transmission. We developed a spatially-explicit model of African swine fever (ASF) in wild boar, and fit the model to surveillance data from Eastern Poland (2014-16) using Approximate Bayesian Computation. A total of 4625 wild boar samples were collected through hunters and 271 samples were through reports of dead carcasses. Thus, hunter harvests made up most of the surveillance samples (94.5%). We estimated new introduction rates, and daily probabilities of direct and carcass-based transmission that best explained the data. Our prior distributions were vague such that new introduction rates ranged from a single event to 60 introductions per year (i.e., continuous spillover at the border). Likewise for transmission probabilities by both mechanisms, we considered prior distributions where the probabilities ranged from no transmission to transmission to all neighbors daily. This design allowed us to quantify the relative role of these three persistence mechanisms at explaining the data. We also evaluated three different spatial models of contact structure, a process that is poorly understood, to identify which spatial processes are important for prediction and to account for their uncertainty. Using estimated parameters we derived the relative number of direct and carcass-based transmission events that most likely occurred to generate the observed data. To understand the potential role of carcass-based transmission beyond this particular outbreak, we conducted sensitivity analyses on the three parameters that affect persistence: introduction frequency, direct transmission probability, and carcass-based transmission probability; over a range of host population densities. The purpose of this latter analysis was to understand how host density drives mechanisms of persistence. We inferred that between 50-68% of transmission events occurred through contact with a contaminated carcass, depending on host density and contact structure. Carcass-based transmission was higher at low host density and when social grouping was considered in the contact structure. Carcass-based transmission was necessary for autonomous persistence under realistic parameters for this system. Autonomous persistence by direct transmission alone required higher host densities. Persistence also became possible with direct transmission alone when re-introductions occurred more than once per year and direct transmission probabilities were moderately high. We showed how the relative role of different persistence mechanisms can differ based on small changes in host population density and assumptions about spatial contact processes. Social structure was an important consideration to capture along with standard spatial spreading processes in order to best explain the data, and thus infer of the role of different transmission mechanisms. Management policies should emphasize removal of carcasses and consider how reductions in host densities may affect carcass-based transmission. Understanding the ecological conditions that determine the frequency of different transmission mechanisms is important for choosing optimal management strategies across different ecological contexts. Acknowledgements KMP was funded by the USDA-APHIS National Feral Swine Damage Management Program. TP was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (grant number 2014/15/B/NZ9/01933). We thank M. Łyjak, A. Kowalczyk, K. Śmietanka, and G. Woźniakowski from Department of Swine Diseases, National Veterinary Research Institute in Pulawy, Poland, for surveillance data. N. Selva provided valuable information on carcass persistence time. Keywords: African Swine Fever, wild boar, Approximate Bayesian Computation, Spatially-explicit transmission model, Contact structure, environmental transmission, Disease persistence Conference: GeoVet 2019. Novel spatio-temporal approaches in the era of Big Data, Davis, United States, 8 Oct - 10 Oct, 2019. Presentation Type: Regular oral presentation Topic: Special topic on African Swine Fever (ASF) Citation: Pepin KM (2019). Spatial dynamics of transmission and persistence of African swine fever in wild boar populations: insight for control. Front. Vet. Sci. Conference Abstract: GeoVet 2019. Novel spatio-temporal approaches in the era of Big Data. doi: 10.3389/conf.fvets.2019.05.00009 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 20 Jun 2019; Published Online: 27 Sep 2019. * Correspondence: Mx. Kim M Pepin, National Wildlife Research Center, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Fort Collins, United States, kim.m.pepin@usda.gov Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. 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Computational models of the transmission of cultural information usually neglect that cultural transmission between individuals occurs mainly as a consequence of complex social interactions. We analyze the requirements for a computational model of a social psychological theory of cultural transmission, a theory which postulates that actors in a joint activity build on their common ground to align their information to a degree sufficient for them to carry out their activity. This grounding process adds to their common ground and thus contributes to a diffusion of cultural information. The proposed tentative formal account exploits the Shared Plan model of joint activities and uses an argumentation-based dialogue as the representation of the grounding process. This work advances the social-psychological study of cultural dynamics and the exploration of computational methods for the modeling of social systems.

A general formulation of cultural and genetic transmission is developed. The cultural transmission is vertical and the genetics may involve multiple loci. Each individual is represented by a phenogenotype, and conditions are given under which the evolutionary dynamics of phenogenotype frequencies are reducible to phenogametic or phenoallelic frequencies. The interaction between genes and culture is specified by an association measure, and results on the order of magnitude of this association at equilibrium are presented.

Sewall Wright's (1943) concept of isolation by distance is as germane to cultural transmission as genetic transmission. Yet there has been little research on how the spatial scale of social learning—the geographic extent of cultural transmission—affects cultural diversity. Here, we employ agent-based simulation to study how the spatial scale of unbiased social learning affects selectively neutral cultural diversity over a range of population sizes and densities. We show that highly localized unbiased cultural transmission may be easily confused with a form of biased cultural transmission, especially in low-density populations. Our results have important implications for how archaeologists infer mechanisms of cultural transmission from diversity estimates that depart from the expectations of neutral theory.

Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes in the job market). It is, however, the pervasive evidence of the resilience of ethnic and religious traits across generations that motivates a large fraction of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural transmission. This article reviews the main contributions of models of cultural transmission, from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It presents their implications regarding the long-run population dynamics of cultural traits and cultural heterogeneity, the world's geographical fragmentation by ethic and religious traits, at any given time. Finally, the paper reviews the empirical literature which estimates various properties of cultural transmission mechanisms as well as the population dynamics of specific traits.

In dynamic magnetically coupled contactless power transmission, the fluctuation of mutual inductance is caused by the relative motion between transmission and receiving coils, which affects the stability of power transmission. In order to reduce the fluctuation characteristics of power transmission, the mutual inductance calculation model of transmission mechanism including a racetrack coil with deflection angle is established by using Neumann formula, and the influence of different deflection angle and layout on mutual inductance fluctuation characteristics is analyse and compare. Then the power transmission system with LCC-S compensation for the transmission mechanism is established. The transmission characteristics of the racetrack coil with deflection angle are studied. The results show that reasonable design of the deflection angle can reduce the fluctuation of the mutual inductance and the power output in dynamic transmission. The fluctuation of power output can also be reduced by changing the distance between transmission coils and the length of straight side of receiving coils.

I propose a mathematical model of cultural evolution to explain why false theories and meaning systems or maladaptive beliefs may spread and become fixed in a population while assuming that their diffusion rates are lower than their true counterparts. By combining ideas from judgment aggregation and the Condorcet Jury theorem with cultural evolution dynamics, I introduce a new epistemic stage in the cultural evolution process where culturally transmitted theories not only spread “horizontally” (across individuals in the same generation) and “vertically” (from one generation to the next), but also inside individual brains (“personal reflection process”). This occurs when a brain adopts a maladaptive theory (not received from outside) by means of internal inference from other false premise/idea that was indeed received culturally. In this context, false theories may favor the assumption of other false theories after the individuals have been exposed to true information about their logical connection, and increase their presence in the population within the normal and adaptive logical working of our brains. Using a simple stylized model and subsequent simulations I identify the parametric conditions in which false theories become universally accepted, so that the model could be tested empirically.

Species evolve, very slowly, through selection of genes that give rise to phenotypes well adapted1 to their environments. The cultures, including the languages, of human communities evolve much faster, maintaining at least a minimum level of adaptedness to the external, noncultural environment. In the phylogenetic evolution of species, the transmission of information across generations is via copying of molecules, and innovation is by mutation and sexual recombination. In cultural evolution, the transmission of information across generations is by learning, and innovation is by sporadic invention or borrowing from other cultures. This much is the foundational bedrock of evolutionary theory.

Spatial modelling and ecology of Echinococcus multilocularis transmission in China

Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior (sometimes called “teaching”) can be seen as a costly strategy: one for which its evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin selection-based proposals for the evolution of cultural capacities. We demonstrate how a biological market can account for the evolution of teaching when individual learners are the exclusive focus of social learning (such as in a fast-changing environment). We also show how this biological market can affect the dynamics of cumulative culture. The model works best when it is difficult to have access to the observation of the behavior without the help of the actor. However, in contrast to previous non-mathematical hypotheses for the evolution of teaching, we show how teaching evolves, even when innovations are insufficiently opaque and therefore vulnerable to acquisition by emulators via inadvertent transmission. Furthermore, teaching in a biological market is an important precondition for enhancing individual learning abilities.