ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2013
The interplay between social networks and culture: theoretically and among whales and dolphins.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sociability Under Anthropogenic Change: From Individual Behaviour to Population-Level Consequences.Ecology and evolution · 2026Review
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- Cooperative foraging between dolphins and fish-eating killer whales.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The coevolution of cognition and sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Cultural processes and demography: implications for conservation and beyond.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Ecology and conservation of socially learned foraging tactics in odontocetes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Social and genetic connectivity despite ecological variation in a killer whale network.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Group-level signatures in bonobo sociality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Ageing in a collective: the impact of ageing individuals on social network structure.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Biased cultural transmission of a social custom in chimpanzees.Science advances · 2023Article
- Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Review
- Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Reconstructing social networks of Late Glacial and Holocene hunter-gatherers to understand cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Patterns of association and distribution of estuarine-resident common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in North Carolina, USA.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- Review
- Modelling collective navigation via non-local communication.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- The modularity of a social group does not affect the transmission speed of a novel, socially learned behaviour, or the formation of local variants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Social network architecture and the tempo of cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Culture is increasingly being understood as a driver of mammalian phenotypes. Defined as group-specific behaviour transmitted by social learning, culture is shaped by social structure. However, culture can itself affect social structure if individuals preferentially interact with others whose behaviour is similar, or cultural symbols are used to mark groups. Using network formalism, this interplay can be depicted by the coevolution of nodes and edges together with the coevolution of network topology and transmission patterns. We review attempts to model the links between the spread, persistence and diversity of culture and the network topology of non-human societies. We illustrate these processes using cetaceans. The spread of socially learned begging behaviour within a population of bottlenose dolphins followed the topology of the social network, as did the evolution of the song of the humpback whale between breeding areas. In three bottlenose dolphin populations, individuals preferentially associated with animals using the same socially learned foraging behaviour. Homogeneous behaviour within the tight, nearly permanent social structures of the large matrilineal whales seems to result from transmission bias, with cultural symbols marking social structures. We recommend the integration of studies of culture and society in species for which social learning is an important determinant of behaviour.
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