Biology-Culture Co-evolution in Finite Populations.

ABSTRACT: Language is the result of two concurrent evolutionary processes: biological and cultural inheritance. An influential evolutionary hypothesis known as the moving target problem implies inherent limitations on the interactions between our two inheritance streams that result from a difference in pace: the speed of cultural evolution is thought to rule out cognitive adaptation to culturally evolving aspects of language. We examine this hypothesis formally by casting it as as a problem of adaptation in time-varying environments. We present a mathematical model of biology-culture co-evolution in finite populations: a generalisation of the Moran process, treating co-evolution as coupled non-independent Markov processes, providing a general formulation of the moving target hypothesis in precise pr

SUBMITTER: de Boer B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5775438 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature