Social Learning and Cumulative Cultural Evolution
In DIT, the evolution of culture is dependent on the evolution of social learning. Analytic models show that social learning becomes evolutionarily beneficial when the environment changes with enough frequency that genetic inheritance can not track the changes, but not fast enough that individual learning is more efficient. While other species have social learning, and thus some level of culture, only humans, some birds and chimpanzees are known to have cumulative culture. Boyd and Richerson argue that the evolution of cumulative culture depends on observational learning and is uncommon in other species because it is ineffective when it is rare in a population. They propose that the environmental changes occurring in the Pleistocene may have provided the right environmental conditions. Michael Tomasello argues that cumulative cultural evolution results from a "ratchet effect" that began when humans developed the cognitive architecture to understand others as mental agents. Furthermore Tomasello proposed in the 80s that there are some disparities between the observational learning mechanisms found in humans and great apes - which go some way to explain the observable difference between great ape traditions and human types of culture (see Emulation (observational learning)).
Read more about this topic: Dual Inheritance Theory
Famous quotes containing the words social, learning, cumulative, cultural and/or evolution:
“[In early adolescence] she becomes acutely aware of herself as a being perceived by others, judged by others, though she herself is the harshest judge, quick to list her physical flaws, quick to undervalue and under-rate herself not only in terms of physical appearance but across a wide range of talents, capacities and even social status, whereas boys of the same age will cite their abilities, their talents and their social status pretty accurately.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“With just enough of learning to misquote.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“If we can learn ... to look at the ways in which various groups appropriate and use the mass-produced art of our culture ... we may well begin to understand that although the ideological power of contemporary cultural forms is enormous, indeed sometimes even frightening, that power is not yet all-pervasive, totally vigilant, or complete.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)
“The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars, it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)