Cultural Evolution Podcasts

Within biology, cultural evolution is a relatively new field that looks at the change over time of socially learned behaviors within populations. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson effectively founded the field in 1985 when they published a book adapting the tools of population genetics to investigate how learned behaviors propagate and survive. Their subsequent work has argued that cumulative cultural evolution distinguishes humans from other animals and so has allowed humans to make enormous technological advances and expand into such a  variety of ecological niches, as explained in Sophie Robert‘s podcast:

 

Why is humans’ cultural evolution so massively cumulative? Jesse Ames presents the argument that the complexity of human language allows for efficient transmission of elaborate cultural traits:

 

Whales and dolphins provide a number of examples of groups defined by their socially learned culture. In his podcast, Danny Kirsch describes several of these examples, as well as the evidence that, in some cases, individuals will die rather than go against the traditions of their group:

 

“Mutation rates” of learned behaviors are very high compared to those of genes. Yet some learned traits are stable over time, while others have many forms. Kate Kennedy‘s podcast explores how cultural selection, on one hand, and drift (a random process), on the other, shape the distribution of bird songs and baby names, and affect the evolution of meanings in human language:

 

The transmission of information from one individual to another is the basis of cultural evolution. Glen Gallik‘s podcast explains the costs and benefits of different social structures and considers how individual behavior can work to maintain functional social structures and so promote the dissemination of information:

 

Sometimes socially learned behaviors are themselves the basis for defining a particular group. In her podcast, Emily Burch looks at how associations between individuals can be based on having similar behaviors (homophily), and then learning biases within such groups can shape population-specific behaviors:

 

Conformity, the practice of copying the behavior that is most common in a population, results in groups converging on a specific learned tradition. Payton Spencer‘s podcast examines the conditions and mechanisms that might favor a conformist bias when individuals choose what behaviors to copy:

 

Are cultural structures necessarily adaptive? In his podcast, Tucker Lemos asks whether the clans of sperm whales, defined by the learned vocal “codas” they sing, might be a byproduct of social learning – and so could potentially be neutral or maladaptive:

 

These podcasts are intended as an introduction to the cultural evolution of learned behaviors in biological systems.  If you’d like to explore further, here are links to some suggested readings: