United Kingdom

The talk examines basic and applied research applications of evolutionary approaches to culture. First, studies of social learning among the Aka and other hunter-gatherers are considered. Six dyadic (vertical, remote generation, intrafamilial and extrafamilial oblique and intrafamilial and extrafamilial horizontal) and three group (conformist, concerted and cumulative) modes of transmission are discussed. Aka research on two key features of human cumulative culture, teaching and overimitation, are also briefly presented. Finally, the talk moves beyond basic research and discusses how evolutionary approaches to culture have been useful for understanding efforts to control Ebola (EVD) in central Africa. 

Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

From hunter-gatherer social learning to infectious disease control: Fifty years of utilizing evolutionary approaches to culture

keynote

Welcome to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) Conference 2024, which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference was hosted in Durham by the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) with administrative assistance from the CES Transformation Fund team.

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#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
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**Interdisciplinary study of cultural change and diversity**

We are a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers using evolutionary models to study cultural change and diversity.  We apply cultural evolutionary methods to a wide variety of topics including cognition, innovation, social learning, technology, art, music, narrative, religion, sociality, language and communication. We have a growing interest in applying cultural evolutionary theory to current societal challenges such as understanding the spread of prosocial health behaviours and health conspiracies.<br>
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The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

**Abstract:**

Social learning (SL) biases are a fundamental process in culture and its evolution. Many cultures have gender inequality in labour division, which originates from gender differences in adolescents’ school subject choices. Gender conformity remains high in adolescence, and we suggest that adolescents’ educational choices are influenced by a SL bias towards copying the behaviour of own-gender peers. 

The current pre-registered study asked adolescents (159 males, 249 females) to rate their interest in eight educationally aligned projects (e.g., physics) after being told that the previous cohort had a majority that was either their gender or another gender. Additionally, adolescents listed their actual subject choices (subsequently rated for gender typicality) and completed a gender stereotype scale. 

As predicted, interest in a pathway was significantly higher when there was an own- versus other-gender majority (= 2.75, t(3077) = 3.09, p = .002). Interest in own-gender-typical projects positively correlated with own-gender-typicality of actual subject choices (r = .54, P < .001) and, for girls only, an own-gender majority bias correlated with gender stereotype endorsement (p < .05). 

We will discuss how the identification of majority-based SL biases can help our understanding of real-world issues such as gender inequality in educational choices.  


**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @larawooduk

Adolescents’ own-gender majority biased social learning and educational choices

**Abstract:**

Cultural evolutionary theory has shown that social learning is adaptive across a broad range of conditions. However, experiments with humans frequently observe an unexplained underuse of beneficial social information (termed egocentric discounting). One hypothesis for this result is that individuals ignore social information that is likely to be untrustworthy. We tested this hypothesis using a two-player online task, where both players answered the same question in series. Player 2 was given two attempts, making the second after being shown advice from player 1 or their actual answer (spying). We manipulated the payoff structure of the task to have either a cooperative, neutral, or competitive incentive. As predicted, advice was the least honest and social information had the least influence in the competitive condition. Most player 2 participants also favoured spying rather than receiving advice when given the choice. Unexpectedly, a minority of participants favoured receiving advice and exhibited great social influence regardless of the payoff structure. Our results support the hypothesis that human’s may reduce their reliance on social information in contexts where it is more likely to be dishonest or manipulative. 

**Speaker's social media:**



Competitive incentives reduce honesty and social influence 

**Abstract:**

Cultural evolutionary processes can often lead to a statistical association between neutral and adaptive traits during episodes of population dispersal and the introduction of a beneficial technology in a geographic region. 
Here, we examine such cultural hitchhiking processes using an individual-based model portraying cultural and genetic interaction between a migrant and an incumbent population. 
The two populations are characterised by different variants for their neutral and adaptive cultural traits, with the latter set providing a reproductive advantage for the migrant communities over the incumbent ones. 
We explore how the neutral traits of the migrant population spread and how this process is conditioned by the following factors: 1) the possibility of transmission of the adaptive traits; 2) the extent of the increased reproductive advantage provided by the adaptive variants of the migrant population; 3) post-marital residence rules; and 4) how and when neutral traits are transmitted. 
Our results reveal a diverse range of outputs, highlighting the relevance of factors such as the nature of post-martial resocialisation and the specific combination of post-marital residence rules and sex-biased transmission. 

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @simoncarrignon

RECORDING - Post-marital residence rules and transmission pathways in cultural hitchhiking

**Abstract:**

Language provides humans a remarkably flexible and abstract way to transmit information. Here, we tested the hypothesis that language allows cultural evolution to improve our representation – or model – of the world. To do so, we investigated the role of language in cultural evolution from a reinforcement learning perspective that proposes that adaptative behavior is based on learning from rewards and punishments. Using a combination of experiments, computational models, and large language models, we aimed to uncover the processes through which language fuels cultural evolution. We implemented a sequential decision-making task, requiring a mental model of the task structure within an online transmission chain design (n = 1000, 10 generations). Trough an evolutionary selection algorithm, best performing participant were sampled and provided written advice about their model of the task for the next generation. Consistent with the idea that language is important for cultural evolution, we observe an increase in performance and model knowledge over generations. Analysis using large-language models reveal an intergeneration improvement in the model knowledge communicated via written advice. Overall, these results suggest that language allows CE to grow better representations of the world by successive combination and refinement of individual world models.


**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @BlubluDoScience

LIVE - Language allows cultural evolution to improve world models

**Abstract:**

Across cultures, mothers face trade-offs between childcare and labour. In hunter-gatherer societies, carrying infants during foraging can drain maternal energy and constrain mobility, and childcare duty during foraging may lower mothers’ work efficiency. These costs can be mitigated with other individuals’ help. 
Yet, it remains unclear how infant presence in foraging groups affects mothers’ mobility and foraging outcomes, such as travel duration, distance, exploration range, net energy expenditure, and net food returns. 
This study uses detailed GPS, heart rate, and food returns’ data from 359 foraging trips of 23 BaYaka mothers, through Bayesian analyses, to answer those questions.
It was found that infant presence increases foraging duration but not travel distance, range, energy expenditure, or food returns. Nevertheless, mothers travel longer distances and explore larger areas when in groups, particularly with more adults and females. 
It highlights that women might have to travel for longer to compensate for childcare costs, but also that group foraging enables BaYaka mothers to travel greater distances and ranges, regardless of infant presence. 
As a follow-up study, focal-follows of BaYaka mothers’ foraging trips were conducted. This data will provide insights into the individual and group-level strategies of hunter-gatherer mothers to balance childcare and foraging work.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @AmandineVisine

LIVE - Compatibility between childcare and subsistence tasks during collaborative foraging of BaYaka mothers in Congo Basin

**Abstract:**

Prior work has suggested that environmental variability can drive the evolution of social learning strategies, such as a frequency dependent or payoff-biased learning (Kendal et al. 2018, Aoki & Feldman 2014). Furthermore, moving to a novel environment might increase neurological plasticity (Park et al. 2021) and an individual’s sensitivity to social information (Deffner et al. 2020, Morchen et al. 2023). A prior experiment tested how great tits (Parus major) respond to temporal variability in payoffs (Aplin et al. 2017), although little is known about how tits respond to spatial variability. Here, we present results from a large scale cultural diffusion experiment with 18 micro-populations of great tits (N=144). We simulated an immigration event between pairs of populations with contrasting preferences for solving an automated foraging puzzle. Furthermore, the experiment had a 2x2 factorial design, where environmental cues were either symmetric or asymmetric, and rewards for solving preferences were also symmetric or asymmetric. We find that immigrant birds were most likely to adopt the residents’ preference when both environments and rewards were asymmetric. Using a bayesian dynamic learning model, we found that these birds were most sensitive to social information, and relied on a payoff-biased social learning strategy. In other conditions, birds were less sensitive to social information and did not evidence any strategic learning. This study provides empirical support for existing theory related to social learning strategies in a non-human animal. It also gives insight into when and why great tits evaluate the rewards of conspecifics.

Aoki K, Feldman MW. Evolution of learning strategies in temporally and spatially variable environments: a review of theory. Theoretical population biology. 2014 Feb 1;91:3-19.

Aplin LM, Sheldon BC, McElreath R. Conformity does not perpetuate suboptimal traditions in a wild population of songbirds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2017 Jul 25;114(30):7830-7.

Deffner D, Kleinow V, McElreath R. Dynamic social learning in temporally and spatially variable environments. Royal Society open science. 2020 Dec 2;7(12):200734.

Kendal RL, Boogert NJ, Rendell L, Laland KN, Webster M, Jones PL. Social learning strategies: Bridge-building between fields. Trends in cognitive sciences. 2018 Jul 1;22(7):651-65.

Mörchen J, Luhn F, Wassmer O, Kunz J, Kulik L, Van Noordwijk M, Van Schaik C, Rianti P, Atmoko SS. Migrant orangutan males use social learning to adapt to new habitat after dispersal. Frontiers Ecology And Evolution. 2023 Jul 5;11.

Park AJ, Harris AZ, Martyniuk KM, Chang CY, Abbas AI, Lowes DC, Kellendonk C, Gogos JA, Gordon JA. Reset of hippocampal–prefrontal circuitry facilitates learning. Nature. 2021 Mar 25;591(7851):615-9.

**Speaker's social media:**

twitter: @evogom; bluesky: mchimento.bsky.social

RECORDING - Great tits use payoff-biased learning when encountering spatial variability

**Abstract:**

Language exhibits systematicity in the way a set of discrete units, such as words or syllables, are used and reused to form larger linguistic sequences. This kind of systematicity is reflected by cross-linguistic regularities in the distributional statistics of language: Syllable transitions are more probable within words than at the boundary between words, and the frequency distributions of words follow a Zipfian power law. Both the statistical coherence of words and their skewed frequency distribution can aid language learning. However, it is still unclear how they arise in language in the first place. Here, we investigate whether their emergence may be driven by learnability pressures during cultural transmission. We conducted a non-linguistic iterated learning study in which participants observed and reproduced sets of color sequences that were produced by a previous participant. We show that during transmission, initially random sets of sequences evolve to have statistically coherent units with a skewed frequency distribution, and that these properties make them easier to reproduce. In doing so, we show how cultural transmission can shape the statistical structure of language and how learning pressures alone, in the absence of meaning or communication, can explain the presence of two cross-linguistic properties of language.

**Speaker's social media:**



LIVE - Universal statistical properties of language emerge in a cultural evolution experiment

**Abstract:**

The study of cultural evolution through music has often focused on a single musical component (e.g., harmonic progression), overlooking how different subcomponents of music might independently interact within and across cultures. What hinders having such a comprehensive view is the limited cross-cultural dataset and the reliance on music transcription, which is labour-intensive and biased towards Western music. We introduce a novel methodological pipeline that bypasses the steps of transcription and works directly on the raw audio, enabling a large-scale, non-Western-centric study of global musical cultures. We compiled a novel dataset of 28,540 popular songs from 58 countries and analyzed their melodic and rhythmic regularities. Our approach empirically quantifies the global musical landscape and reveals distinct cultural characteristics that align with qualitative musicological research. Interestingly, we find melodic and rhythmic components demonstrate independent characteristics - a culture's variety in melody did not necessarily reflect variety in rhythm, nor does similarity to other cultures in one dimension correspond to similarity in the other. We found a strong correlation between a culture's ethnic diversity and rhythmic variability, but not melodic variability, suggesting rhythm may be more culturally ingrained and less permeable to change than melody.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @TweetHarin, BlueSky: @harinblue.bsky.social

RECORDING - Melodic and rhythmic regularities of music around the world reveal independent cultural clusters

Studying the emergence of rituals in childhood provides insight into the complex dynamics of social group cognition. This talk will examine how children identify and acquire ritual to affiliate with social groups and preliminary work uncovering the relationship between ritual and cooperation in development. Insights within and across populations are drawn from diverse methodologies, including behavioral experiments, multivocal ethnography, and group paradigms. The results illuminate a deep-rooted proclivity towards in-group preference, suggesting rituals as pivotal mechanisms fostering group cohesion. I posit that humans are psychologically prepared to engage in ritual, serving as a means for in-group affiliation and inclusion.

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Adolescents’ own-gender majority biased social learning and educational choices

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