ArticlePloS one2013
Simulating the evolution of the human family: cooperative breeding increases in harsh environments.
Article in PloS one, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social restructuring during harsh environmental conditions promotes cooperative behaviour in a songbird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Relationship between energy acquisition and family composition in hunter-gatherers.Anthropological science : journal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon = Jinruigaku zasshi · 2024Article
- Intergroup conflict: origins, dynamics and consequences across taxa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Harsh environments promote alloparental care across human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- What Makes a Partner Ideal, and for Whom? Compatibility Tests, Filter Tests, and the Mating Stability Matrix.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- The evolution of parental cooperation in birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- The ecology of religious beliefs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
- Loneliness, social integration and consumption of sugar-containing beverages: testing the social baseline theory.PloS one · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Verbal and mathematical models that consider the costs and benefits of behavioral strategies have been useful in explaining animal behavior and are often used as the basis of evolutionary explanations of human behavior. In most cases, however, these models do not account for the effects that group structure and cultural traditions within a human population have on the costs and benefits of its members' decisions. Nor do they consider the likelihood that cultural as well as genetic traits will be subject to natural selection. In this paper, we present an agent-based model that incorporates some key aspects of human social structure and life history. We investigate the evolution of a population under conditions of different environmental harshness and in which selection can occur at the level of the group as well as the level of the individual. We focus on the evolution of a socially learned characteristic related to individuals' willingness to contribute to raising the offspring of others within their family group. We find that environmental harshness increases the frequency of individuals who make such contributions. However, under the conditions we stipulate, we also find that environmental variability can allow groups to survive with lower frequencies of helpers. The model presented here is inevitably a simplified representation of a human population, but it provides a basis for future modeling work toward evolutionary explanations of human behavior that consider the influence of both genetic and cultural transmission of behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.