Abstract
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.
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Notes
There is an extensive literature showing that the conditions under which social learning is fitter than individual learning are much more constrained than what originally thought; for example, social learning is useful when where the environment changes often, but not too often (because socially learnt information goes out of date quickly) (Feldman et al. 1996; Rogers 1988); it is not very useful when rare (because there will be no cumulative cultural evolution) (Boyd and Richerson 1996). Some cultural evolutionists have argued that conditions likely to promote social learning probably obtained in the Pleistocene, and therefore can explain the origin of culture in their sense [e.g., see Richerson and Boyd (2000)].
The relationship between individual learning and social learning is not as straightforward as it may appear here; there are cases, especially in primates where the individual is learning from the non-social environment on their own, but where they employ social cues which facilitate their learning in the right places from the right things [for example, primates learning which foods are appropriate to eat (Galloway et al. 2005; Whiten 2000)].
When I use the term “biologically transmitted” of a phenotype in this paper I mean that that phenotype develops from the genotype reliably across many normal environments, regardless of the cultural and learning environment; and that there are no specifically psychological processes required in its acquisition. I make this distinction to contrast acquisition which employs primarily “biological” causes from processes which also employ psychological causes such as different types of learning, not to claim that the acquisition process for learnt traits does not involve genetic and regulatory processes, epigenetic effects and so on. Socially learnt traits are those which have as an important cause of their acquisition psychological learning mechanisms which use information about the social environment; individually learnt traits are acquired by mechanisms which use information about the non-social environment. As should be obvious, the social/non-social distinction here is not hard and fast, and hence neither is the individual/social learning distinction; furthermore, it is at least possible for there to be both social and individual learning mechanisms employed in the acquisition of a trait.
I should point out that I take cases of borderline individual/social learning like stimulus enhancement described by Whiten (2000) to really be cases of social learning.
By social transmission of representations I mean (very roughly) a causal process by which one individual A can convey information or structures another individual B’s environment in such a way that B reliably comes to have the same or very similar representations to A.
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Driscoll, C. The problem of adaptive individual choice in cultural evolution. Biol Philos 23, 101–113 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9070-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9070-1