JoM-EMIT Paper: Cultural Transmission and the Capacity to Approve or Disapprove of Offspring’s Behaviour by Laureano Castro and Miguel A. Toro

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Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 12:22:15 BST

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From: Bruce Edmonds <b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk>
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Subject: JoM-EMIT Paper: Cultural Transmission and the Capacity to Approve or  Disapprove of Offspring’s Behaviour by Laureano  Castro and Miguel A. Toro
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                  Cultural Transmission and the Capacity
            to Approve or Disapprove of Offspring’s Behaviour

                   by Laureano Castro and Miguel A. Toro

    Abstract.

        We suggest that human cultural learning was made possible by
        the simultaneous appearance, in one of our hominid ancestors, of
        two capacities: the capacity to imitate others’ behaviour and the
        capacity to approve or disapprove of others’ behaviour. With the
        help of a mathematical model, we have studied the conditions that
        allow the evolution of both capacities. We consider four different
        genotypes: "the only-learner" that learns by trial and error, "the
        imitator" that learns by trial and error and imitation, "the
        only-assessor" that learns by trial and error but that can also
        approve or disapprove of offspring's behaviour and, finally, "the
        assessor", who behaves like the imitator but, he can approve or
        disapprove of offspring's behaviour. The assessor genotype is the
        best genotype and the only-learner genotype is the worst when
        the learned behaviour that would be culturally transmitted is
        adaptive. If this behaviour is maladaptive, the genotype
        only-assessor is the best genotype and the genotype assessor can
        be the worst genotype. Notwithstanding, in this situation, the
        assessor can also be better than the imitator and even better than
        the only-learner. The success of assessor is due to his capacity to
        increase the phenotypic correlation between parents and
        offspring, and thus speeding the rate at which natural selection, if
        present, will increase or decrease the frequency of learned
        behaviours.

        Keywords: Conceptual categorisation; assessor; imitation;
        teaching; cultural evolution.

    Available at:
            http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/2002/vol6/castro_l&toro_ma.html

    Also a Meeting Report: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
    Council Network on Evolvability in Biology and Software Systems
    Symposium on Software Evolution and Evolutionary Computation, University
    of Hertfordshire, UK 7th - 8th February 2002 by Beatriz Garmendia-Doval
    and Derek Gatherer

    Available at:
            http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/2002/vol6/gatherer_d_report.html

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