Denmark

**Author(s):** Chira, A; Kirby, K.; Epperlein, T.; Kuehr, F; Bräuer, J. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Introduction: Dogs show an extraordinaire capacity to understand, communicate, and cooperate with us. However, what we know about the social-cognitive skills of dogs comes from observations and experiments performed in WEIRD societies. Around the world though, dogs are kept for various functions, they are perceived and treated differently, suggesting cross-cultural diversity in the strength of dog-human relationships, and perhaps departures from the ‘typical’ suite of skills dogs are thought to possess. &lt;br&gt;Materials &amp; Methods: Here we address these issues by collecting data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database. We hypothesize that dog-human relationships will be closer in societies where dog functions require intense cooperation between dogs and humans, i.e., hunting and herding versus guarding, defense, and carry animals. We characterize close dog-human relationships as increased primary caregiving (or positive care), decreased negative treatment, and an increased extent to which dogs are viewed as friends or kin. &lt;br&gt;Results &amp; Discussion: The number of functions dogs perform associates with closer dog-human relationships. Further, the presence of herding (and to a lesser extent, guarding herds, and carry roles) increases the odds of positive care given to dogs, while using dogs for hunting is linked with higher odds of dogs being treated akin to a person. These findings support the idea of cross-cultural variation in dog-human relationships and show how the strength of our bond with dogs can be linked with the function dogs fill in societies. The results are a first step towards challenging the notion that all dogs are the same, and fuel questions about the universality of cognitive and social skills we commonly associate with our canine friends.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Beyond WEIRD dogs - Cultural Differences In Dog Human Interactions

dog-human interactions ; domestication ; cross-cultural; non-weird

Welcome Seabirders! 

Welcome to Virtual World Seabird Conference 3 - vWSC3! Whether you are in your office or lab, at home, in a coffee shop or bar poaching some wifi, or at a remote field site or research vessel – we are very excited to welcome you to the third ever World Seabird Conference. 

We would like to thank ALL of you for being so patient as WSC3 was scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, revised to virtual, and scheduled again. Throughout all those iterations there was one message that remained perfectly clear – seabirders were eager to meet and share their science. If we could not meet in person then virtual it would have to be, but a 3rd WSC was something everyone wanted. That support and commitment helped the WSU Board of Directors and Member Societies sort through all of the challenges they faced to plan and hold this conference. 

The list of those that need to be thanked is long and, while we plan on recognizing many during the live closing plenary, it is important to do so here in writing as well. 

The Australasian Seabird Group was our Local Host for our plan to meet in Hobart, Tasmania. They invested substantial time and effort to find venues and plan events that we unfortunately were not able to visit. Nonetheless we appreciate their work on behalf of WSC3 and encourage all of you to thank them when you see their members in Gathertown or elsewhere during our virtual meeting. Their willingness to host created the initial excitement for WSC3 and without that our vWSC would not have been possible.

We also wish to thank the Science Program Committee, the Virtual Committee, and the Early Career Scientist Committee for their hard work planning the logistics, events, and schedule for vWSC3. These committees also had to deal with changing parameters and short timelines that made what is always a challenging task even more challenging. The Travel Awards Committee also invested time and effort in developing procedures for awarding travel funds that ultimately would not be implemented. 

Our ability to shift from an in-person to a virtual meeting, and to do so in a way that would be financially feasible, was due to the effective efforts of The International Fundraising Committee and to our financial sponsors. The IFC raised funds to support WSC3 and then, through the good relationships they built with sponsors, ensured we could re-envision how those funds could be used to support a virtual conference that would be affordable and high-quality.

We all owe the WSU Board of Directors and the Representatives of the Member Societies a great deal of thanks. They are the ones who manage the WSU and, for the past 18 months, have had to have a series of challenging meetings and conversations, have had to make a series of difficult choices, have had to do all of that while considering the short- and long-term health of WSU and the World Seabird Conferences, and did this while also managing their own challenges at their day jobs. We are grateful for their diligence, patience, foresight, and throughout all of the meetings, their collegiality. Also – a 6-year term is quite a commitment!

There would not be a WSC3 without a successful WSC1 and WSC2. Thanks go to the Pacific Seabird Group for their support of WSC1 in Victoria, Canada, and to the African Seabird Group for their support of WSC2 in Cape Town, South Africa. In each of these endeavors and for our current conference we were fortunate to work with a dependable and trustworthy partner in Podium Conferences. Michelle Smith and Marischal de Armond have become valued members of our team and have not only helped us plan conferences but have assisted and advised the WSU Chairs and Board on issues above and beyond conference planning. 

As we embark on our vWSC3 week we extend to all of you our thanks for showing up, for being patient, and most importantly for the work you do with seabirds. We are all part of a unique, global community that shares an interest, a fascination, and a passion for birds that make a living in our world’s oceans. We have advanced the science, conservation, and management of seabirds as well the ecosystems they inhabit. We are consistently impressed and motivated by the work you do. 

The WSU formed in 2010 because we saw the need for a global organization to address challenges at a global level. Over the past 11 years WSU has grown, adapted, and evolved to become the community that this week is making vWSC3 a reality. Enjoy the week, appreciate and support the friends and colleagues you have made in the community, and if you see us in a virtual hallway please stop and say hello! 

Thank you for the opportunity to serve all of you and the WSU over the past few years,

Nicholas Carlile, Interim Chair, WSU 
Patrick Jodice, 2nd Chair of the WSU 

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3rd World Seabird Conference

Join us for four days of science, networking and virtual engagement with delegates from around the world!

**Author(s):** Chira, A; Kirby, K.; Epperlein, T.; Kuehr, F; Bräuer, J. Introduction: Dogs show an extraordinaire capacity to understand, communicate, and cooperate with us. However, what we know about the social-cognitive skills of dogs comes from observations and experiments performed in WEIRD societies. Around the world though, dogs are kept for various functions, they are perceived and treated differently, suggesting cross-cultural diversity in the strength of dog-human relationships, and perhaps departures from the ‘typical’ suite of skills dogs are thought to possess. Materials & Methods: Here we address these issues by collecting data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database. We hypothesize that dog-human relationships will be closer in societies where dog functions require intense cooperation between dogs and humans, i.e., hunting and herding versus guarding, defense, and carry animals. We characterize close dog-human relationships as increased primary caregiving (or positive care), decreased negative treatment, and an increased extent to which dogs are viewed as friends or kin. Results & Discussion: The number of functions dogs perform associates with closer dog-human relationships. Further, the presence of herding (and to a lesser extent, guarding herds, and carry roles) increases the odds of positive care given to dogs, while using dogs for hunting is linked with higher odds of dogs being treated akin to a person. These findings support the idea of cross-cultural variation in dog-human relationships and show how the strength of our bond with dogs can be linked with the function dogs fill in societies. The results are a first step towards challenging the notion that all dogs are the same, and fuel questions about the universality of cognitive and social skills we commonly associate with our canine friends.

technical paper

### 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

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

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.

**Author(s):** Sobchuk, O; Youngblood, M; Morin, O Why do some artists achieve extreme popularity? A theory of first-mover advantage, developed in economics, may partly explain this. It suggests that companies that enter a new market niche early on become more successful. We hypothesize that the first-mover advantage can explain the popularity of songs. A musical genre is analogous to a niche, and early representatives of a genre may be considered first movers.

We use Spotify data: ~166,000 songs in 10 genres. To account for data biases, we do bootstrapping from a control mixed-genre dataset, built by sampling, for each genre, song corpora that are similar to the target genre: they have the exact same size and yearly distribution of releases but do not belong to any single genre. We have preregistered the prediction that the relationship between success (i.e. playcount) and time for the genre corpora should be more negative than for the samples taken from the mixed-genre corpora.

We find a more negative relationship between time and playcount for 8 genres, which supports the prediction; in the remaining 2 genres the difference is not significant.

Successful artists may owe their popularity to innovativeness in new artistic niches.

First-mover advantage in the evolution of music genres

**Author(s):** Barrett, B; Kandler, A; Aplin, L Cultural evolution is usually framed in terms of transmission biases or behavioral transformation via cognitive biases, although there is a third dimension that is often ignored: learning through reward. This process of internal selection that happens when socially learned behaviors are used by individuals, has been hypothesized to play a critical role in the evolution of adaptiveness of cultural traits, as they are either maintained or abandoned over the course of repeated production. To date, this has remained a verbal argument. To test this argument, we construct an agent based model where acquisition and production are linked, as acquisition is conditioned on association, as well as behavioral frequencies of associates. We show that variation in the learning rules that govern production influence the diffusion of a novel behavior. We further show that these effects can affect the inferential power of two popular models in the field of animal culture: Network Based Diffusion Analysis and Experience Weighted Attraction models. We then allow for dynamic networks of populations, and show how the social process of population turnover interacts with reinforcement learning to drive the cultural evolution of efficiency. Different regimes of population turnover generate optimal, neutral or sub-optimal selection for a more efficient behavior, when compared against static populations. These two studies generate new predictions for how reinforcement learning can influence cultural outcomes, and highlight un-discussed consequences for current practices in the field. The formulation of our model also encourages more rigorous definitions for social learning strategies and biases, as they might target the process of acquisition or production, or both, yet have been discussed interchangeably to date. They also provide theoretical support for the hypothesis that naive learners, introduced through population turnover, play a crucial role in resampling payoff landscapes.

The interaction of learning rules and population turnover can drive cultural evolution

**Author(s):** Micheletti, AJC & Mace, R Introduction: Most major world religions require at least some of their practitioners to commit to lifelong celibacy. A recent evolutionary model has suggested that inducing a son to become a monk can be adaptive if it increases his brothers’ reproductive success and a sociodemographic study has shown that this is the case in a Tibetan Buddhist population. However, female celibates are present in other religions and parts of the world, and it remains unclear what might drive differences in their frequency relative to male celibates. Approach: Here, we develop an evolutionary, inclusive fitness model of the coevolution of male and female lifelong celibacy. Results: We find that the frequency of monks and nuns can be influenced by how parental resources are shared among offspring and how siblings compete for them. More monks than nuns are favoured when competition is more intense between brothers than sisters, that is when resources are more important for male than female reproductive success (bride price societies). The opposite is true when competition is more intense between sisters (dowry societies). We also find a role for the extent to which brothers and sisters compete for the same pool of resources, which is influenced by cultural inheritance rules and whether wealth is mainly immovable (land) or movable (money, cattle). Moreover, the sex that disperses less is favoured to have more celibates. Discussion: These results can help us explain observed differences in the frequency of monks and nuns in societies with different marriage systems, inheritance rules and post-marital residence rules.

Sibling competition and dispersal drive sex differences in religious celibacy

**Author(s):** Pichkar, Y; Creanza, N Introduction: Human culture is both a bearer of history and an active force in it. The history of cultures can resemble that of our genes, but the impact of cultural identity on long-term patterns of human interaction has not been extensively researched. We leverage increasingly available genetic and cultural databases to explore how culture has shaped populations in Great Britain. Approach: We used the Survey of English Dialects to produce a map of linguistic variation, a type of cultural variation. From the genetic data collected for the People of the British Isles project, we reconstruct previously found genetic clustering (Leslie et al. 2015). Using the genetic variation within and between clusters, we measured whether genetic variation coincides with dialect borders. Results: We find that these patterns are strongest in areas with larger cultural divides–near Scotland and Wales–but correlations also exist closer to the center of England. Conclusions: These patterns suggest that cultural boundaries have shaped people’s preferences for movement and marriage over the last millennium, and that cultural identity may contribute to establishing genetic differentiation in a region.

Cultural reinforcement of genetic boundaries in England

**Author(s):** Raymond C; Sánchez-Villagra MR; Rangel-de Lázaro G; Lynch, S; Ward S; Wilson LAB Intro: Intentional cranial modification (ICM), the application of materials to the cranium of infants to permanently alter the head shape, has a long history and is found throughout the world. We collated global records of ICM to trace the origin and dispersal of these practices. 
Methods: We collated published records for Central (n=271), South (n=53), and North America (n=54), the Caribbean (n=113), and Eurasia (n=252), recording geographic location (decimal coordinates), ICM type, biological sex, period, and date. The temporal sequence of ICM practice was assessed using spatiotemporal kernel density estimation in R with spatstat and sparr packages. 
Results: Our database comprised 743 records, spanning 40 countries across five regions. We found the highest incidence of ICM throughout the New World and identified clusters of diverse modification types and potential areas of missing data due to sampling bias in the archaeological record. 
Discussion: We present a global overview of potential areas and times of diffusion, and cultural convergence. There were probably multiple developments of CM, mirrored also in the different social contexts and modes in which CM has been recorded.

The temporal sequence and global spatial distribution of intentional cranial modification practices

**Author(s):** Hrnčíř, V; Chira, A Introduction: Alcohol is the most widely used human psychoactive and mind-altering drug. This is partly because its production is very straightforward: any substance that contains sugar can be converted into alcoholic beverage through the natural process of fermentation. Yet, many societies around the world did not know alcohol or forbade its consumption. Our goal is to discover which cultural and ecological factors can explain why some societies produce alcoholic drinks, while others do not.
 Materials & Methods: We coded data for native alcoholic beverages in 186 non-industrial societies (Standard Cross-Cultural Sample). We tested the effect of potentially predictive variables (obtained from D-PLACE) on alcohol production in Bayesian logistic regressions, while accounting for spatial proximity and common ancestry. 
 Results & Discussion: Our results confirm the intuitive assumption that the presence of Islamic religion and the absence of fruit trees and cereals cultivation predict the absence of alcohol. Importantly, we also confirm the strong correlation between the presence of alcoholic beverages and cultural complexity, which has been pointed out before but has not yet been empirically tested. The next step will be to uncover the evolutionary dynamics of this relationship.

Why don't they get drunk? Alcoholic beverages in non-industrial societies

**Author(s):** Tamariz, M.; Papa, A.; Cristea, M.; McGuigan, N. Introduction During our lifetime we typically learn several variants of a given cultural trait, e.g., from family, peers and experts. Social biases affecting which variants are adopted by learners are well-studied. Considerably less is known about influences on the selection of variants for onward transmission by transmitters. This study tests whether a social context congruence effect is in place, i.e., do we tend to transmit to friends behaviours that we learned from friends, to our children behaviours learned from our parents, and to novices behaviours learned from experts? Methods Each of 64 participants learned two cultural variants (methods to solve a puzzle): “E” from an Expert and “P” from a Peer. Then, we

Associative learning and cultural transmission: We teach to novices the variants we learned from experts, and to peers the variants we learned from other peers!

INTRODUCTION: Phylogenetic methods are used for the reconstruction of historical relationships between cultural lineages. These methods, designed for biological evolution, assume traits can only be transferred via inheritance. Little work has been done to determine how the introduction of horizontal transmission, potentially ubiquitous in cultural evolution, affects their accuracy. OBJECTIVE: In this study we tested the robustness of phylogenetic methods when applied to a demographic process with horizontal transmission of traits between groups. APPROACH: We generated synthetic population histories represented as phylogenetic trees. We then simulated variant data on the trees, sampled the terminal nodes and used standard phylogenetic reconstruction methods to construct best fitting trees from the leaf data. We assessed the accuracy of the phylogenetic reconstruction as the distance between the best fitting tree and the ‘true’ tree representation of the demographic history. FINDINGS: Phylogenetic methods are reliable only when the borrowing is constrained to groups with a recent common ancestor. In addition, borrowing can be constrained by either shared ancestry or spatial proximity, leading to significantly divergent inferred trees. CONCLUSION: Preliminary results suggest that the introduction of demographic complexity, including extinction of groups and horizontal transmission events, significantly decreases the accuracy of phylogenetic inference.

Can cultural phylogenies accurately capture spatially explicit demographic scenarios?

 As one of the two moderators, I will predominantly lead the theoretical discussion of what are social norms and how could they be identified in animals. I come from the perspective that rather than focusing on some cognitive mechanism that is taken to be necessary for having normativity, investigations into social norms should focus on community level patterns that are supported by social maintenance—positive and negative reinforcement by community members.

Theoretical angles on framing and identifying norms in nonhuman taxa

**Author(s):** Lee, H; Schönwiesner, M; Jacoby, N; Park, M

Background: Music is a rich cultural product that is practiced across all known cultures and throughout history, making it an attractive medium to study the transmission and evolution of culture. However, previous research on empirical analysis of music predominantly relied on Western songs, limiting our understanding to WEIRD countries. 
 Method: We introduce a novel dataset called GlobalPOP, which gathers music records from 55 countries since the 1950s by crawling web pages and manually transcribing from books and magazines. The dataset contains over 4 million entries and 254,234 songs with acoustic information, lyrics, and other meta-data gathered from various sources. 
 Results: Using this rich dataset, we provide a quantitative picture on how the general preference of music has converged and diverged across the globe over the last seven decades. Our preliminary findings indicate that most acoustic features reveal a country-specific or regional trend (e.g., danceability, tempo, energy) that can be grouped by the spoken-language and geographical proximity, whereas only a handful of low-level features can be considered as a global trend (e.g., song duration, loudness). 
 Conclusion: We present the first empirical work on the evolution of cross-cultural music preferences by making use of the most comprehensive longitudinal music chart data which will become open-access.

Beyond WEIRD dogs - Cultural Differences In Dog Human Interactions

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First-mover advantage in the evolution of music genres

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