ArticleScience advances2019
Cultural selection shapes network structure.
Article in Science advances, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
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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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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Opaque Social Instruments: A Cultural Evolutionary Approach to Pleistocene Symbolic Artifacts.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Article
- Higher-order interactions shape collective human behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Bayesian multiplex network models in R using STRAND: methods for biologists and social scientists.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution, social ratcheting and the evolution of human division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Multivariate analyses of Aurignacian and Gravettian personal ornaments support cultural continuity in the Early Upper Palaeolithic.PloS one · 2025Article
- Social ageing and higher-order interactions: social selectiveness can enhance older individuals' capacity to transmit knowledge.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Chimpanzees employ context-specific behavioral strategies within fission-fusion societies.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- The contribution of movement to social network structure and spreading dynamics under simple and complex transmission.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Network structure shapes the impact of diversity in collective learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Women's subsistence networks scaffold cultural transmission among BaYaka foragers in the Congo Basin.Science advances · 2024Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Group-level differences in social network structure remain repeatable after accounting for environmental drivers.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- The form of uncertainty affects selection for social learning.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Pathways to cultural adaptation: the coevolution of cumulative culture and social networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Hunter-gatherer foraging networks promote information transmission.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Not by transmission alone: the role of invention in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Underappreciated features of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cultural evolution relies on the social transmission of cultural traits along a population's social network. Research indicates that network structure affects information spread and thus the capacity for cumulative culture. However, how network structure itself is driven by population-culture co-evolution remains largely unclear. We use a simple model to investigate how populations negotiate the trade-off between acquiring new skills and getting better at existing skills and how this trade-off shapes social networks. We find unexpected eco-evolutionary feedbacks from culture onto social networks and vice versa. We show that selecting for skill generalists results in sparse networks with diverse skill sets, whereas selecting for skill specialists results in dense networks and a population that specializes on the same few skills on which everyone is an expert. Our model advances our understanding of the complex feedbacks in cultural evolution and demonstrates how individual-level behavior can lead to the emergence of population-level structure.
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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.