Abstract
Verbal and mathematical models that consider the costs and benefits of behavioral strategies have been useful in explaining animal behavior and are often used as the basis of evolutionary explanations of human behavior. In most cases, however, these models do not account for the effects that group structure and cultural traditions within a human population have on the costs and benefits of its members' decisions. Nor do they consider the likelihood that cultural as well as genetic traits will be subject to natural selection. In this paper, we present an agent-based model that incorporates some key aspects of human social structure and life history. We investigate the evolution of a population under conditions of different environmental harshness and in which selection can occur at the level of the group as well as the level of the individual. We focus on the evolution of a socially learned characteristic related to individuals' willingness to contribute to raising the offspring of others within their family group. We find that environmental harshness increases the frequency of individuals who make such contributions. However, under the conditions we stipulate, we also find that environmental variability can allow groups to survive with lower frequencies of helpers. The model presented here is inevitably a simplified representation of a human population, but it provides a basis for future modeling work toward evolutionary explanations of human behavior that consider the influence of both genetic and cultural transmission of behavior.
Highlights
Many animals are adapted to survive in variable and challenging environments, but only humans can make a living in such a wide range of settings, from the savannah to the tropics, from the scorching desert to the frozen tundra
Environmental Harshness and Cooperative Breeding We present a model that includes certain key aspects of human life history and social structure for modern humans that are likely to have existed during the time of the last glaciation
We have presented a model of social evolution in a population of agents with a family group structure and individual life history roughly similar to that of humans living in small family-based communities – the kind of social environment in which almost all humans lived for most of their evolutionary history
Summary
Many animals are adapted to survive in variable and challenging environments, but only humans can make a living in such a wide range of settings, from the savannah to the tropics, from the scorching desert to the frozen tundra. The study of recent human evolution, including our cultural evolution, is likely to benefit from the development of a family of models which are even more complex, incorporating aspects of individual life history, social structure, social learning, and behavioral institutions. These models would be unified by a common framework, which could be modified or adapted to investigate a wide range of questions about how the evolution of humans and their groups (families and wider groupings) resulted in an animal with the characteristics we observe in modern humans. We will assume that cooperation is costly for reproductive-age females but that there is no net cost for other cooperating adults
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