The Evolution of Teaching

Abstract

Teaching, alongside imitation, is widely thought to underlie the success of humanity by allowing high-fidelity transmission of information, skills, and technology between individuals, facilitating both cumulative knowledge gain and normative culture. Yet, it remains a mystery why teaching should be widespread in human societies but extremely rare in other animals. We explore the evolution of teaching using simple genetic models in which a single tutor transmits adaptive information to a related pupil at a cost. Teaching is expected to evolve where its costs are outweighed by the inclusive fitness benefits that result from the tutor's relatives being more likely to acquire the valuable information. We find that teaching is not favored where the pupil can easily acquire the information on its own, or through copying others, or for difficult to learn traits, where teachers typically do not possess the information to pass on to relatives. This leads to a narrow range of traits for which teaching would be efficacious, which helps to explain the rarity of teaching in nature, its unusual distribution, and its highly specific nature. Further models that allow for cumulative cultural knowledge gain suggest that teaching evolved in humans because cumulative culture renders otherwise difficult-to-acquire valuable information available to teach.

Cumulative culture and future thinking: Is mental time travel a prerequisite to cumulative cultural evolution?

“…Most prominent is the argument that cumulative culture rests on the human capacity for complex social learning mechanisms, such as imitation and teaching (Dean et al, 2012;Flinn, 1997;Fogarty, Strimling, & Laland, 2011;Tomasello, 1999). Teaching (broadly defined as "costly information donation" from tutor to pupil, Fogarty et al, 2011, p. 1) and imitation (broadly defined as copying behavioral acts or action sequences) play an essential role since these high fidelity social learning mechanisms allow complex behaviors to disseminate and be retained in populations until beneficial modification occurs.…”

Innovation in the collective brain

“…The factors that affect transmission fidelity relate to all aspects of the transmission process, including the model, the learner and the content being learned. Examples of factors that increase transmission fidelity include: -More social tolerance and prosociality-models that make themselves more accessible or are better teachers [47,48,91]. -Access to more models demonstrating variations in practices and skills [35].…”

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

“…However, we note that once it evolved, language had two key consequences for hunter-gatherer social evolution. First, language made teaching more effective, which provided more scope for cumulative cultural evolution and hence the development of new technologies [49,50]. Second, once in place, language enabled individuals to negotiate their rules of social interactions; that is, to start to create institutions for the first time.…”