K N Laland

..These analyses shed light on how genes and culture shape each other, and on the significance of feedback mechanisms between biological and cultural processes...

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..Here, we collate these data, highlighting the considerable potential for cross-disciplinary exchange to provide novel insights into how culture has shaped the human genome...

..We conclude that none of these are strong criticisms of the niche-construction perspective and maintain that there are compelling reasons for treating niche construction as a major evolutionary process...

..Here we suggest that, rather than attributing behaviour to explanatory categories, researchers would often be better advised to partition variance in behaviour to alternative sources...

..New experimental evidence shows that policing behaviour by dominant monkeys stabilizes and integrates macaque societies...

..We argue that Mayr's formulation has acted to stabilize the dominant evolutionary paradigm against change but may now hamper progress in the biological sciences...

..We end by drawing on theoretical insights to suggest processes that may have played important roles in the evolution of the human cultural capability...

..Reliance on social learning strategies may be organized hierarchically, their being employed by animals when unlearned and asocially learned strategies prove ineffective but before animals take recourse in innovation...

..These observations suggest that copying confers on cultural populations an adaptive plasticity, allowing them to respond to changing environments rapidly by drawing on a wider knowledge base...

..Importantly, we provide the first compelling evidence that the spread of novel behaviours can result from social learning in the absence of social transmission, a phenomenon that we refer to as an untransmitted social effect on learning...

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..Our findings have important implications for our understanding of adaptive foraging strategies in animals and for understanding the way information diffuses through populations...

..The winning strategy (discountmachine) relied nearly exclusively on social learning and weighted information according to the time since acquisition...

..The methods are potentially widely applicable by researchers wishing to detect social learning in natural and captive populations of animals, and to facilitate this we provide code to implement OADA and TADA in the statistical package R...

..Finally, we consider the relative merits of critical and conditional social learning under various conditions...

..Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://lb.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental...

..We argue that human mating strategies are unlikely to conform to a single universal pattern...

..It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences...

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..Finally, surprising discoveries have been made about the imprint of cultural evolution in the predispositions of human minds for cultural transmission...

..Understanding when, how and why individuals learn from others is a significant challenge, but one that is critical to numerous fields in multiple academic disciplines, including the study of social cognition...

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..These findings are consistent with the predictions of the costly information hypothesis, and imply that minnows adopt a 'copy-when-asocial-learning-is-costly' learning strategy...

..Control conditions with non-feeding demonstrators showed that this was not simply the result of a preference for shoaling with larger groups, implying that nine-spined sticklebacks copy in a conformist manner...

..Our analysis provides strong support for the hypothesis that human social learning is regulated by adaptive learning rules...

..Further models that allow for cumulative cultural knowledge gain suggest that teaching evolved in humans because cumulative culture renders otherwise difficult-to-acquire valuable information available to teach...

..This inability to identify social learning in social settings has also contributed to the failure to test evolutionary hypotheses concerning the social learning strategies that animals deploy...

..Drawing on both mechanistic and functional arguments, we integrate teaching with the broader field of animal social learning, and show how this aids understanding of how and why teaching evolved, and the diversity of teaching mechanisms...

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..The tags were easily detected via video, and tagged and non-tagged fish did not differ in terms of growth, activity levels or shoaling behaviour...

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..The study suggests that public-information use is an adaptation that allows animals vulnerable to predation to acquire valuable foraging information at low risk...

..The ability to learn from others, invent new behaviors, and use tools may have played pivotal roles in primate brain evolution...

..This essay reviews the arguments put forward in favor of the niche-construction perspective...

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