PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Human ecological success is often attributed to our capacity for social learning, which facilitates the spread of adaptive behaviours through populations. All humans rely on social learning to acquire culture, but there is substantial variation across societies, between individuals and over developmental time. However, it is unclear why these differences exist. Here, we present an evolutionary model showing that individual variation in social learning can emerge if the benefits of social learning are unpredictable. Unpredictability selects for flexible developmental programmes that allow individuals to update their reliance on social learning based on previous experiences. This developmental flexibility, in turn, causes some individuals in a population to end up consistently relying more heavily on social learning than others. We demonstrate this core evolutionary mechanism across three scenarios of increasing complexity, investigating the impact of different sources of uncertainty about the usefulness of social learning. Our results show how evolution can shape how individuals learn to learn from others, with potentially profound effects on cultural diversity.
摘要：
人类的生态成功通常归因于我们的社会学习能力，这促进了适应性行为在人群中的传播。所有人都依靠社会学习来获得文化，但是社会之间有很大的差异，在个体之间以及在发育时间上。然而,目前尚不清楚为什么会存在这些差异。这里,我们提出了一个进化模型，表明如果社会学习的好处是不可预测的，社会学习中的个体差异就会出现。不可预测性选择了灵活的发展计划，使个人可以根据以前的经验更新对社会学习的依赖。这种发展的灵活性，反过来,导致人口中的一些人最终比其他人更依赖社会学习。我们在三个复杂性不断增加的场景中展示了这种核心进化机制，调查不同不确定性来源对社会学习有用性的影响。我们的结果显示了进化如何塑造个体如何向他人学习，对文化多样性有潜在的深远影响。
