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Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Age Structured Populations: a simulation study

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dc.contributor.advisor DEY, SUTIRTH en_US
dc.contributor.author BAGAWADE, RISHABH en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2020-06-17T10:51:15Z
dc.date.available 2020-06-17T10:51:15Z
dc.date.issued 2020-04 en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://dr.iiserpune.ac.in:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/4755
dc.description.abstract Cumulative culture, i.e. the knowledge that builds over one another across generations, is considered to be a unique aspect of humans since it provides massive adaptive advantage and allows humans to colonize a wide range of habitats on earth. Culture can be socially transmitted via transmission modes such as vertical (VT), horizontal (HT), and oblique (OT) transmission. These transmission modes have been studied previously in the context of cultural traits which are non-cumulative in nature. We built an age structured individual based model which would capture the effect of pure and mixed transmission modes on cumulative cultural dynamics. Pure transmission modes showed considerable differences in terms of rate of change, complexity reached at equilibrium, as well as the distribution of cultural values at equilibrium. Agreeing with the previous results, the rate of accumulation followed the order HT>OT>VT, however, the complexity of cumulative culture at equilibrium followed the order OT>VT>HT, suggesting the efficiency of transmission modes would depend on the time frame in which one is comparing them. The comparison of mixed transmission modes, in the form of ‘agriculturalist’ and ‘hunter-gatherer’ learning life histories, showed that, keeping all else equal, agriculturalist strategy can sustain more complex cumulative culture than the hunter-gatherers. Further, populations with higher survival showed higher ability to sustain complex cultures. Comparison of learning mechanisms, defined in terms of cost and hierarchy, in tandem with pure transmission modes showed that learning from elders would help reach higher complexity at equilibrium in majority of the cases. Age structure plays a key role in explaining all the results. At the end we suggest several directions in which one can expand this model. en_US
dc.description.sponsorship Inspire, IISER Pune en_US
dc.language.iso en en_US
dc.subject Culture, cultural evolution en_US
dc.subject Cumulative cultural evolution en_US
dc.subject CCE en_US
dc.subject Age structure en_US
dc.subject Cultural transmission modes en_US
dc.subject Learning life histories en_US
dc.subject 2020 en_US
dc.title Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Age Structured Populations: a simulation study en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US
dc.type.degree BS-MS en_US
dc.contributor.department Dept. of Biology en_US
dc.contributor.registration 20151135 en_US


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  • MS THESES [1705]
    Thesis submitted to IISER Pune in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the BS-MS Dual Degree Programme/MSc. Programme/MS-Exit Programme

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