Abstract
The extent to which larger populations enhance cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is contentious. We report a large-scale experiment (n = 543) that investigates the CCE of technology (paper planes and their flight distances) using a transmission-chain design. Population size was manipulated such that participants could learn from the paper planes constructed by one, two, or four models from the prior generation. These social-learning conditions were compared with an asocial individual-learning condition in which individual participants made repeated attempts at constructing a paper plane, without having access to any planes produced by other participants. Larger populations generated greater variation in plane performance and gave participants access to better-adapted planes, but this did not enhance CCE. In fact, there was an inverse relationship between population size and CCE: plane flight distance did not improve over the experimental generations in the 2-Model and 4-Model conditions, but did improve over generations in the 1-Model social-learning condition. The incremental improvement in plane flight distance in the 1-Model social-learning condition was comparable to that in the Individual Learning condition, highlighting the importance of trial-and-error learning to artifact innovation and adaptation. An exploratory analysis indicated that the greater variation participants had access to in the larger populations may have overwhelmed their working memory and weakened their ability to selectively copy the best-adapted plane(s). We conclude that larger populations do not enhance artifact performance via CCE, and that it may be only under certain specific conditions that larger population sizes enhance CCE.
Highlights
The extent to which larger populations enhance cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is contentious
Demography may be crucial to Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE): in particular, larger populations provide access to better-adapted artifacts, greater artifact variation, and the opportunity this affords for recombination [5]. (By which, we mean members of an interacting “effective” population size, as opposed to a “census” population size in which many of its members are noninteracting.) Henrich [6] suggests that a decline in the complexity of Tasmanian technology following its isolation from mainland Australia can be explained by the consequent reduction in the population of interacting social learners
We report an exploratory test of the relationship between population size and success-biased copying
Summary
The extent to which larger populations enhance cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is contentious. The complexity of folk tales was unaffected by population size [14], and the CCE of technology (the flight distance of paper planes) was unaffected by the number of artifacts to which participants had access [15]. The experimental evidence supporting a direct link between population size and CCE is equivocal These conflicting experimental results may be explained by the greater opportunity for success-biased copying—the preferential copying of successful models—in some experiments compared with others In both of these studies, participants could select the single most successful demonstrators to learn from and could avoid encountering the artifacts produced by less successful demonstrators Performance improvements in these experiments may be accounted.
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