ArticlePLoS computational biology2019
The life history of learning: Demographic structure changes cultural outcomes.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Article
- Cultural processes and demography: implications for conservation and beyond.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Social tolerance and success-biased social learning underlie the cultural transmission of an induced extractive foraging tradition in a wild tool-using primate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The interplay between age structure and cultural transmission.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Modelling coupled human-environment complexity for the future of the biosphere: strengths, gaps and promising directions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations.PloS one · 2022Article
- Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.PloS one · 2022Article
- Children and innovation: play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- The fundamentals of cultural adaptation: implications for human adaptation.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The importance of life history and population regulation for the evolution of social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human populations show rich cultural diversity. Underpinning this diversity of tools, rituals, and cultural norms are complex interactions between cultural evolutionary and demographic processes. Most models of cultural change assume that individuals use the same learning modes and methods throughout their lives. However, empirical data on 'learning life histories'-the balance of dominant modes of learning (for example, learning from parents, peers, or unrelated elders) throughout an individual's lifetime-suggest that age structure may play a crucial role in determining learning modes and cultural evolutionary trajectories. Thus, studied in isolation, demographic and cultural evolutionary models show only part of the picture. This paper describes a mathematical and computational framework that combines demographic and cultural evolutionary methods. Using this general framework, we examine interactions between the ways in which culture is spread throughout an individual's lifetime and cultural change across generations. We show that including demographic structure alongside cultural dynamics can help to explain domain-specific patterns of cultural evolution that are a persistent feature of cultural data, and can shed new light on rare but significant demographic events.
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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.