Coevolution of life history and culture.


Motohide Seki
(Kyushu Univ.)

2016/5/24, 14:30 - , at W1-C-909


Social learning, by which an individual acquires pieces of information carried by neighbouring individuals, is often considered to provide lower cost than individual learning does, and thus it is a kind of free-riding behaviour. I examined evolutionary stability of life history with vertical or oblique cultural transmission, where an infant individual "copies" useful information of his/her post-reproductive parent or a random individual from the parental generation. I found that evolutionarily stable length of the infant stage monotonically increases with increasing information transmission efficiency under vertical transmission, whereas it is a one-humped and non-smooth function of the efficiency under oblique transmission.


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