Sex Differences in Food Consumption and Dental Attrition in Hadza Hunter-Gatherers

Berbesque, Julia; Crittenden, Alyssa N.; Marlowe, Frank W.

doi:10.1037/e644792011-001

Cited by 1 publication

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“…In a society with highly complex or large numbers of cultural traits, successful social learning would affect survival and ultimately reproductive success. More ecologically relevant studies might give us an opportunity to find differences in social learning where they exist [84]. Future work should consider the implications of sex differences in risk-taking on learning strategies, and how they could lead to a new understanding of sex roles in the evolution of culture.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reproductive skew affects social information use

et al. 2019

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Individuals vary in their propensity to use social learning, the engine of cultural evolution, to acquire information about their environment. The causes of those differences, however, remain largely unclear. Using an agent-based model, we tested the hypothesis that as a result of reproductive skew differences in energetic requirements for reproduction affect the value of social information. We found that social learning is associated with lower variance in yield and is more likely to evolve in risk-averse low-skew populations than in high-skew populations. Reproductive skew may also result in sex differences in social information use, as empirical data suggest that females are often more risk-averse than males. To explore how risk may affect sex differences in learning strategies, we simulated learning in sexually reproducing populations where one sex experiences more reproductive skew than the other. When both sexes compete for the same resources, they tend to adopt extreme strategies: the sex with greater reproductive skew approaches pure individual learning and the other approaches pure social learning. These results provide insight into the conditions that promote individual and species level variation in social learning and so may affect cultural evolution.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%