Abstract
Niche construction is a process through which organisms modify their environment and, as a result, alter the selection pressures on themselves and other species. In cultural niche construction, one or more cultural traits can influence the evolution of other cultural or biological traits by affecting the social environment in which the latter traits may evolve. Cultural niche construction may include either gene-culture or culture-culture interactions. Here we develop a model of this process and suggest some applications of this model. We examine the interactions between cultural transmission, selection, and assorting, paying particular attention to the complexities that arise when selection and assorting are both present, in which case stable polymorphisms of all cultural phenotypes are possible. We compare our model to a recent model for the joint evolution of religion and fertility and discuss other potential applications of cultural niche construction theory, including the evolution and maintenance of large-scale human conflict and the relationship between sex ratio bias and marriage customs. The evolutionary framework we introduce begins to address complexities that arise in the quantitative analysis of multiple interacting cultural traits.
Highlights
Niche construction has recently received attention as an important evolutionary process by which organisms alter the evolutionary pressures on themselves and organisms that share their ecological niche [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Humans are unique in the extent and complexity of their cultural learning, and recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that ‘cultural niche construction,’ where one set of human cultural practices contributes to the evolutionary forces acting on genetic traits or a second set of culturally transmitted traits, can be a powerful force explaining human evolution and behavior [11,12,13,7]
We describe a model of cultural niche construction that formalizes a wide range of evolutionary interactions, including gene-culture interactions, in which a cultural trait can alter selection pressures on a genetic trait or vice versa, and cultureculture interactions, in which a cultural trait alters the evolutionary forces acting on another cultural trait
Summary
Niche construction has recently received attention as an important evolutionary process by which organisms alter the evolutionary pressures on themselves and organisms that share their ecological niche [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Niche construction has usually been considered in an ecological context, and typical examples include the aeration of soil by earthworms or the building of dams by generations of beavers [8,9]. These environmental changes are mediated by individual organisms and become part of the evolutionary niche into which their offspring (and those of other species) are born [10]. In this way, organisms inherit and develop in an ecological niche altered from previous generations. We follow the gene-culture and culture-culture frameworks proposed by Odling-Smee et al [4] and Ihara and Feldman [12] in formulating a general model capable of accounting for both
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