Denmark

 Humans evolved cultural cognition that allows for the fastest and highest fidelity social learning in the animal world. Our derived cultural cognition enhances cooperative-communication, develops early in infancy and is not shared with other great ape species. I will present evidence that domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) possess cognition that allows for similar forms of cooperative-communication as seen in human infants. I will make the case (relying on comparisons between dogs, wolves and foxes) that these human-like abilities evolved in dogs convergently as a result of self-domestication. The unusual skills dogs demonstrate for working and communicating with humans are by-products of selection for friendliness toward humans that altered their cognitive development. I will also argue that dogs provide a model for how human cultural cognition evolved through a similar process of self-domestication.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Dogs and humans evolved cooperative-communication through self-domestication

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. 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.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

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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.

technical paper

**Author(s):** Theofanopoulou, C. It has been long thought that the kind of social interaction modern humans display should have been a key feature in the evolution of language (Tomasello et al., 2003). At the same time, our increased prosociality has independently been hypothesized to be very similar to the one we witness in domesticated species (e.g., Thomas, 2014). In this talk, I will connect the dots between several studies I have run in the past years around the topic of human self-domestication and its relevance to speech evolution. I will present genomic evidence suggesting that modern humans provide a good case for self-domestication, based on the significant convergence in signs of positive selection found in the genomes of domesticated species and modern humans (Theofanopoulou et al. 2017). I will show evidence supporting that the oxytocin-vasotocin system is a good candidate for the neurobiology underlying the vocal complexity differences we observe in domesticated vs. wild avian species (Tobari, Theofanopoulou et al. 2021), and propose how these findings can shed light on the evolution of human speech. Lastly, I will present modern human specific alleles we identified in the oxytocin and vasotocin receptors, when compared to archaic humans and non-human primates (Theofanopoulou et al. 2022) and will explain how these sites could have impacted the evolution of human prosociality via self-domestication.

Human self-domestication and speech evolution through the lens of the oxytocin and vasotocin gene family

 Swarm Robotics studies collective behaviours of large populations of interacting robots with simple embodied cognition, and is an ideal testbed to study the effect of prosociality on cultural evolution. Building on our previous work, we developed a category game whereby agents collectively discriminate and name regions of an environment that contains food items that are randomly spread around sources. Robots choose their foraging place within “named categories”, thus the category game affects the efficiency of foraging. Agents interact according to two novel features (a) an innate prosociality factor and (b) experience: successful communication between robots reduces their aggression toward each other and increases their chances of interacting again. We observe that when food is spread widely, higher prosociality results in the collection of more items, as collective categories form around the sources. The lexicon created by the robots is a complex cultural artefact that affects foraging efficiency and is subjected to agents’ prosociality. Since foraging efficiency is a factor of survival, our results potentially indicate an evolutionary advantage for prosociality. Higher prosociality would, in turn, enable more complex cultural artefacts to emerge.

Impact of prosociality on culturally evolving foraging habits: a swarm robotics approach

**Author(s):** Kido, Y., Takezawa, M. People are willing to pursue virtues or social rules often incurring material costs. It has been argued that evolving such norm psychology was a crucial step on the path to large-scale human cooperation. Research on social norms has broadly identified two types of norms: injunctive and descriptive norms. It has been shown that if cooperative dilemmas were the only adaptive problem humans faced, the tendency to follow descriptive norms (i.e., conformity) would never evolve from scratch (Kido & Takezawa, 2021). However, conformity was selected for allowing us to develop adaptive behaviors over a wide range of domains. Thereby, it remains unclear how norm psychology and cooperation coevolve. In the present study, we explored the impact of exapted conformity by modeling the coevolution of cooperation and norm psychology. In our simulations, agents make a decision, maximizing a utility function that captures three motives: gaining material payoff, following injunctive and descriptive norms. Group and individual level selective pressures drive evolution of utility function. We show that evolved conformity could radically change what type of norm psychology is evolutionarily adaptive. Our findings suggest that injunctive norms encouraging only punishments will not be internalized under evolved conformity. Rather, humans tend to embody norms for cooperation per se and exhibit cooperation.

Coevolution of norm-psychology and cooperation under exapted conformity

**Author(s):** Nirjhor, M.S.A.; Nakamaru, M. Introduction: Division of labor is based on cooperation among players with various roles on various network structures. It is common in our society but rarely studied from the viewpoint of the evolution of cooperation. We focus on the effects of two possible sanction systems: the defector-sanction system and the 1st role-sanction system, on the evolution of cooperation in the linear division of labor arranged in a unidirectional linear chain. Method: By using the replicator equations of the asymmetric game, we analyze our model; there is a finite number of roles each of which is assigned to one group with cooperators and defectors. A cooperator in an upstream group produces or modifies a product, paying a cost of cooperation, and hands it to a player in a downstream group who obtains a benefit from the product. Costs and benefits are different among groups. If players in all roles cooperate, a final product can be completed. However, if a player in a group chooses defection, the division of labor stops, the final product cannot be completed, and all players in all roles suffer damage. Results & Conclusion: We find that not the benefit but the cost matters to the evolutionary dynamics. We also find that the probability of finding a defector and the initial demography of the groups determine which sanction system promotes cooperation.

Effects of sanction systems on the evolution of cooperation in the linear division of labor with finite roles

Introduction: Inferences about others' minds seem necessary for successful human social life, but Opacity of Mind (OoM) norms against mentalizing in small, traditional communities challenge this notion. This research employs the concept of relational mobility – or the capacity to freely move among social groups – as an index of the socio-cultural adaptive pressure that might promote the evolution of mentalizing norms. Method: This research recruits Indigenous iTaukei Fijians with Opacity of Mind norms (n=90), New Zealanders with mind-centric norms (n=280), and Pacific people living in New Zealand (n=600) who live in a cultural middle-zone. I test whether preference for outcome focus (rather than a more mentalizing intent focus) can be explained by ToM measures or ecological factors like relational mobility with pre-existing mentalizing scales and vignettes assessing social judgments. Results: Results suggest OoM norms mitigate relational (im)mobility by shifting focus to external, observable behaviors, rather than focusing on intent which may be perceived as more hostile when relational mobility is low. Discussion: Cognitive capacities like mentalizing form the backbone of human social life. Core cognitive functions may be modulated to suit particular environmental constraints via inheritance pathways of norm psychology.

Do Opaque Minds Make Better Neighbors? Examining Relational Mobility as a Predictor of Outcome Focus Across Three Folk Theories of Mind

**Author(s):** Walldén, C; Gunst, A; Westerlund, M; Santtila, P; Antfolk, J. We tested the hypothesis that anti-immigration tendencies (e.g., discrimination and negative attitudes towards immigration) can partly be the result of intrasexual competition for mates, especially among heterosexual men. That is, the more an immigrant group is perceived as increasing intrasexual competition, the more anti-immigration tendencies will be displayed by natives. We predicted that native men would display more anti-immigration tendencies than women and that immigrant-specific variables (relationship status, ethnicity-specific prejudice concerning sexual behavior) would predict native men’s anti-immigration tendencies. We presented participants with online vignettes presenting a large group of immigrants of reproductive age and of the participant’s own gender entering into the participant’s home county. We manipulated the relationship status and ethnicity of the immigrant groups. After each vignette, participants reported their anti-immigration tendencies towards the described immigrant group. We also measured participants' self-reported mate access, mate value, and intrasexual competition. We recruited 485 Finnish adults between 25 and 44 years and used available data on their home county’s sex-ratio for their age group as a proxy measure for mate access. As expected, men displayed more anti-immigration tendencies than women and men reported more anti-immigration tendencies against immigrants from the Middle East compared to against immigrants from South-East Asia. Contrary to our hypothesis, intrasexual competition did not predict anti-immigration tendencies among men, but among women. We discuss these findings further.

Intrasexual Competition and Anti-Immigration Tendencies

**Author(s):** Schimmelpfennig, R; Ehret, S; Voigt, S; Efferson, C Theoretical and empirical research suggests that human social learning is both frequency- and payoff-dependent. Less evidence exists about the joint effect of both types of social information. We ran a two-staged incentivised online experiment in Kenya (N=1400). First, participants were ranked based on their performance in a Raven Matrices Task. Second, participants were grouped to make decisions in a sequential task in which participants receive a private signal and can observe the decisions of upstream participants. In a 2x2 factorial design, we manipulated whether high-performing participants would make their decisions early or late in the sequence and whether participants are informed about the ordering or not. We find strong evidence for frequency-dependent social learning across all conditions. However, while frequency- and payoff-dependent cues interact to increase the accuracy of decisions, we don’t find any significant interaction effect on social learning. To understand how learning shapes decisions in complex real-world scenarios, research should further investigate the joint effects of social learning biases for decision-making.

Leveraging social influence for the wisdom of the crowd

**Author(s):** Gunst A, Pedersen I, Antfolk J Introduction: Sibling conflicts are frequent in sibling relationships during childhood and adolescence. However, little is known about the dynamics behind sibling conflicts. Based on the evolutionary theory of parental-offspring conflict, we hypothesized that more conflicts would arise between siblings close (vs. further apart) in age, as they compete for the same type of parental investment. We also studied the alternative hypotheses that more conflicts would arise between siblings close in age as they are more similar and closer to each other. Materials and Methods: We analyzed retrospective survey data from 379 parents in Finland who had at least two children and whose oldest child was a minor. We performed multiple regressions with sibling conflict as the dependent variable, age difference as the dependent variable, and sibling similarity and sibling closeness as mediating variables. Results: We present descriptive results and results from the structural regression model. Discussion: We discuss our findings and the limitations of our study.

Parental investment theory, sibling conflicts and age difference between siblings

**Author(s):** Hersh, T; De Gregorio, C; Kwong, A; Whitehead, H; Gero, S; Rendell, L; Muldoon, M; Lewis, R; Soma, M; Anichini, M; de Reus, K; Berry, C; Ravignani, A Introduction: Small integer ratio (SIR) categorical rhythms—where intervals separating sounds are distributed around SIRs—dominate human music and some birdsong, and are thought to emerge from or foster cultural transmission of learned vocalizations. Other species with culturally transmitted, socially learned vocalizations should thus also have rhythm categories.
 Methods: We looked for categorical rhythms in sperm whale codas, Java sparrow songs, and harbour seal pup calls. All three species learn vocalizations, but only the first two show extensive evidence of culture. We calculated ratios of adjacent sound intervals and quantified whether there were significant distribution peaks at SIRs.
 Results: Sperm whale codas and Java sparrow songs exhibit SIR categorical rhythms. As in humans, exact ratio preferences vary by whale cultural group. In Java sparrows, sons mirror the rhythms of their social, but not genetic, father. Harbour seal pup calls show no evidence of categorical rhythms.
 Conclusions: These human/animal parallels emphasize that culture can drive rhythmic similarities in communication systems even when underlying sound production anatomies and acoustic environments differ.

Does culture spur rhythmic categories in animal communication? Evidence from sperm whales, Java sparrows, and harbour seals

**Author(s):** Vale, G; McGuigan, N; Whiten, A Humans are distinctive in their propensity for cumulative cultural evolution, yet few studies directly compare human and non-human abilities to solve and socially learn the same increasingly complex tasks. Here we explore chimpanzees’ and children’s solving of an extractive foraging and tool use task, designed to offer opportunities for the emergence of cumulative culture. Groups of 3-4-year-old children and adult chimpanzees were each presented with a large puzzlebox incorporating four increasingly difficult levels of solution. Some required tool use, or building on this, tool modification, to retrieve increasingly preferred rewards. Overall, children, but not chimpanzees, showed some indication of cumulative progress, with group-tested children’s solution complexity surpassing what individuals invented when tested alone. However, after controlling for test time, such that asocial controls and groups received the same exposure to the task, this species difference disappeared. Direct species comparisons further suggest there were no significant differences in the highest task level reached by chimpanzees and children, nor in the number of individuals that solved each task level. Our results suggest that young children may not outperform adult chimpanzees on a cumulatively evolving tool use task.

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Dogs and humans evolved cooperative-communication through self-domestication

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Human self-domestication and speech evolution through the lens of the oxytocin and vasotocin gene family

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