The problem of adaptive individual choice in cultural evolution

This paper tries to explain how individuals manage adaptive individual choice (i.e., the decision to acquire a fitter than average behavior or idea rapidly and tractably) in cultural evolution, despite the fact that acquiring fitness information is very difficult. I argue that the means of solving this problem suggested in the cultural evolution literature largely are various types of decision rules employing representations of fitness correlated properties or states of affairs. I argue that the problem of adaptive individual choice is best solved where some of these learning rule representations are socially transmitted and some are biologically transmitted.

[1]  Alan R. Rogers,et al.  Does Biology Constrain Culture , 1988 .

[2]  D. Buss,et al.  Evolutionary Psychology: A New Paradigm for Psychological Science , 1995 .

[3]  C. Frith,et al.  Mapping the Mind , 1998 .

[4]  J. Henrich,et al.  The evolution of cultural evolution , 2003 .

[5]  P. Richerson,et al.  Culture and the Evolutionary Process , 1988 .

[6]  B. Hewlett,et al.  Cultural variation in Africa: role of mechanisms of transmission and adaptation. , 1995, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[7]  J. Henrich,et al.  The evolution of prestige: freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. , 2001, Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

[8]  Jon Altman,et al.  Why Hunter-Gatherers Work: An Ancient Version of the Problem of Public Goods [and Comments and Reply] , 1993, Current Anthropology.

[9]  P. Richerson,et al.  Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare , 1996 .

[10]  R. Selten,et al.  Bounded rationality: The adaptive toolbox , 2000 .

[11]  L. Cavalli-Sforza Genes, peoples and languages. , 1991, Scientific American.

[12]  R. Boyd,et al.  The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of between-group differences. , 1998 .

[13]  R. Dawkins The Extended Phenotype , 1982 .

[14]  R Boyd,et al.  Why people punish defectors. Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas. , 2001, Journal of theoretical biology.

[15]  M. Feldman,et al.  Gene-culture coevolutionary theory. , 1996, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[16]  E. Visalberghi,et al.  Social Facilitation of Eating Familiar Food in Tufted Capuchins (Cebus apella): Does it Involve Behavioral Coordination? , 2005, International Journal of Primatology.

[17]  Andrew Whiten,et al.  Primate culture and social learning , 2000, Cogn. Sci..

[18]  S. Blackmore The Meme Machine , 1999 .

[19]  Elliott Sober,et al.  Models of Cultural Evolution , 1992 .

[20]  Cecilia Heyes,et al.  Evolution of Cognition , 2001 .

[21]  P. Richerson,et al.  Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. , 2004 .

[22]  M. Feldman,et al.  Individual Versus Social Learning: Evolutionary Analysis in a Fluctuating Environment , 1996 .

[23]  M. Ghiselin,et al.  Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity , 1991, Politics and the Life Sciences.

[24]  E. Smith,et al.  The hunting handicap: costly signaling in human foraging strategies , 2001, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

[25]  L. Cosmides,et al.  Mapping the mind: Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization , 1994 .

[26]  M. Feldman,et al.  Cultural transmission and evolution: a quantitative approach. , 1981, Monographs in population biology.

[27]  P. Richerson,et al.  Climate, Culture, and the Evolution of Cognition , 2000 .