Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution.

ABSTRACT: Our species is characterized by a great degree of cultural variation, both within and between populations. Understanding how group-level patterns of culture emerge from individual-level behaviour is a long-standing question in the biological and social sciences. We develop a simulation model capturing demographic and cultural dynamics relevant to human cultural evolution, focusing on the interface between population-level patterns and individual-level processes. The model tracks the distribution of variants of cultural traits across individuals in a population over time, conditioned on different pathways for the transmission of information between individuals. From these data, we obtain theoretical expectations for a range of statistics commonly used to capture population-level characteris

SUBMITTER: Kandler A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5627126 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature