Abstract:

Cultural practices perceived to be adaptive – from clearing land for food production to medical innovations – can disseminate quickly through human populations. However, these same practices often have unintended maladaptive effects. A particularly onsequential effect is the emergence of diseases. In numerous instances, a cultural change is followed by the appearance of a new pathogen. Here, we develop mathematical models to analyse the population processes through which cultural evolution precipitates he emergence of a new disease. We find that when a risk-bearing cultural practice spreads, emergence can be an unavoidable cost even if a safer alternative practice eventually evolves from the original. Social learning and a fitness advantage associated with the volving practice drive early disease emergence but the two factors have distinct effects on the time to mutation of the pathogen and significant stochastic variation is observed. For example, a disease can take longer to emerge in a population that adopts the risk- earing practice quickly than in a population that is slow to transition. Extending the model to explore the effects of an alternative practice evolving from the original, we find a non-monotonic relationship between relative risk of the two practices and the median time to disease emergence. Our findings contribute to understanding how cultural evolution can shape pathogen evolution and highlight the unpredictability of disease emergence.

Speaker's social media:

@jeremykendal.bsky.social