It is often assumed in experiments and models that social learning abilities–how often
individuals copy others, plus who and how they copy–are species-typical. Yet there is …

Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species.
Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test …

In the past few decades, scholars from several disciplines have pursued the curious parallel
noted by Darwin between the genetic evolution of species and the cultural evolution of …

The Primate Origins of Human Nature (Volume 3 in The Foundations of Human Biology
series) blends several elements from evolutionary biology as applied to primate behavioral …

Teaching is cross-culturally widespread but few studies have considered children as
teachers as well as learners. This is surprising, since forager children spend much of their …

Why is culture the way it is? Here I argue that a major force shaping culture is subjective
(cultural) selection, or the selective retention of cultural variants that people subjectively …

Humans and the environment form a single complex system where humans not only
influence ecosystems but also react to them. Despite this, there are far fewer coupled human …

Dispersal has been suggested to be challenging, especially for species that heavily rely on
social learning for knowledge acquisition. One of the obstacles that migrants face is learning …

Innovation—the combination of invention and social learning—can empower species to
invade new niches via cultural adaptation. Social learning has typically been regarded as …

The evolutionary biologist WD Hamilton (Hamilton 1966 J. Theor. Biol. 12, 12–45.(doi:
10.1016/0022-5193 (66) 90184-6)) famously showed that the force of natural selection …