The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation

Abstract

In the last 60,000 y humans have expanded across the globe and now occupy a wider range than any other terrestrial species. Our ability to successfully adapt to such a diverse range of habitats is often explained in terms of our cognitive ability. Humans have relatively bigger brains and more computing power than other animals, and this allows us to figure out how to live in a wide range of environments. Here we argue that humans may be smarter than other creatures, but none of us is nearly smart enough to acquire all of the information necessary to survive in any single habitat. In even the simplest foraging societies, people depend on a vast array of tools, detailed bodies of local knowledge, and complex social arrangements and often do not understand why these tools, beliefs, and behaviors are adaptive. We owe our success to our uniquely developed ability to learn from others. This capacity enables humans to gradually accumulate information across generations and develop well-adapted tools, beliefs, and practices that are too complex for any single individual to invent during their lifetime.cognitive niche | cultural evolution | human evolution | human adaptation | intelligence

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

“…In other domains, particularly those involving complex, novel or rapidly changing cultural traits, there are unlikely to be any innate cognitive or perceptual biases operating, and cultural traits may be so 'cognitively opaque' (Csibra and Gergely 2009) -i.e. cannot be easily reconstructed or understoodthat individual transformation would be unlikely to result in beneficial modification any more than chance (Boyd et al 2011). This likely includes complex technologies that have accumulated over multiple generations and that were shown above to appear and disappear with demography, such as fishing hooks, bows, and modern technology such as computers and spacecraft.…”

Innovation, cooperation, and the structure of three regional sustainable agriculture networks in California

“…Sometimes referenced under the term Bsocial capital,^social networks are hypothesized to facilitate social processes such as learning and cooperation that enable human societies to adapt to dynamic and complex social-ecological systems (Coleman 1988;Ostrom 1990;Boyd et al 2011). For example, Doughty (2016) highlights how local policy partnerships can build capacity for resilience by strengthening local networks.…”

Selective learning and teaching among Japanese and German children.

“…Indeed, human evolutionary success would not have been able without learning from others and teaching each other (Tomasello, 2009). Through observational learning and explicit instruction from others, collective constructs are cumulatively inherited, transmitted to individual subjects, differentiated and enriched (Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, 2011). Increasing evidence shows that children are very good social learners, selectively learning from a knowledgeable person over an ignorant person.…”