ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Social learning and culture in birds: emerging patterns and relevance to conservation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- On the interface between cultural transmission, phenotypic diversity, demography and the conservation of migratory ungulates.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
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Immigrant birds learn from socially observed differences in payoffs when their environment changes.PLoS biology · 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
- In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2024Article
- Cumulative route improvements spontaneously emerge in artificial navigators even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Agentic processes in cultural evolution: relevance to Anthropocene sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Generative cultural learning in children and adults: the role of compositionality and generativity in cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cognitive flexibility supports the development of cumulative cultural learning in children.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Cultural diffusion dynamics depend on behavioural production rules.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Cumulative cultural evolution and mechanisms for cultural selection in wild bird songs.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Complex foraging behaviours in wild birds emerge from social learning and recombination of components.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Recent studies in several taxa have demonstrated that animal culture can evolve to become more efficient in various contexts ranging from tool use to route learning and migration. Under recent definitions, such increases in efficiency might satisfy the core criteria of cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). However, there is not yet a satisfying consensus on the precise definition of efficiency, CCE or the link between efficiency and more complex, extended forms of CCE considered uniquely human. To bring clarity to this wider discussion of CCE, we develop the concept of efficiency by (i) reviewing recent potential evidence for CCE in animals, and (ii) clarifying a useful definition of efficiency by synthesizing perspectives found within the literature, including animal studies and the wider iterated learning literature. Finally, (iii) we discuss what factors might impinge on the informational bottleneck of social transmission, and argue that this provides pressure for learnable behaviours across species. We conclude that framing CCE in terms of efficiency casts complexity in a new light, as learnable behaviours are a requirement for the evolution of complexity. Understanding how efficiency greases the ratchet of cumulative culture provides a better appreciation of how similar cultural evolution can be between taxonomically diverse species-a case for continuity across the animal kingdom. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.
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