Cultural Evolution in Humans

The complexity of human behavior relies not only on hard-wired instinctual processes, but also on mechanisms of learning that drives cultural evolution. The learned behavioral repertoire in humans is transmitted from individual to individual within a social network through social learning. In essence, cultural evolution serves as an adaptive mechanism that results in an increased fitness within particular environments. The sophisticated cognitive processes that govern human learning are unique among animal groups, and presumably correlated with the evolution of the human brain.
Culture
A culture refers to the information or sum of traditions individuals acquire through group learning. As a result of its dependence on a society for transmission, cultures may differ among groups. The survival and reproduction of a species is strongly dependent on the information the species has regarding the environment . When this information is not available innately, it can be acquired through individual learning or cultural learning . These mechanisms are categorized into two different forms of biased transmissions, which occur when some cultural variants are favored over others during the process of cultural transmission . They are labeled: content biases and context biases.
Content Biases
Content biases “cause us to more readily acquire certain beliefs, ideas or behaviours because some aspect of their content makes them more appealing” . Other members of society will notice the deference and how people are acting towards this model, which demonstrates the model’s prestige. Psychological experiments have demonstrated that individuals acquire opinions from prestigious sources, especially in uncertain or difficult situations . A study done by Wasserman showed that committing suicide and the methods used, are imitated according to prestige and self similarity. Studies in US and Japan showed that suicide rates significantly rose after a celebrity had committed suicide. In the Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers (I995) there is a chapter that explains how the diffusion of new ideas, technologies, and practices is influenced by social leaders (those with high in social status, well respected, widely connected, and effective social models for others) .
Conformist Bias
An issue arises when an observable difference in skill, success and prestige among individuals do not match up with the observable differences in behavior, beliefs and practices. If there is an individual who uses different strategies from the rest of society yet still appears to be successful, the learner needs to chose wisely who to gather information from. One way to choose is to copy the methods of the majority.
A simple model demonstrates that if social learning does not decrease the cost of individual learning, then social learning will not lead to increased fitness . In this model, the fitness of individual learners remains constant independent of the frequency of social learners. On the other hand, the fitness of social learners decreases as their frequency increases . Today, less than 0.005 percent of the world's human population of over 6.8 billion uses foraging as a main means of subsistence. The foraging efficiency of Norway rats were seen to increase in observer rats when they had previously watched a trained demonstrator rat unearth buried carrots. All aspects of human culture reflect the significant meanings of plants due to its vital influence on the development of civilization.. It has been associated with the increase in population densities, increase in social inequality between genders and divergences in social structure . Less than a millennium after the transition to agriculture, dramatic increases in birth rate and as a result, population growth rate occurred. The differences in the transition times from food foraging to agriculture in human societies may lead to differences in technological developments and social organizations<ref name="putterman"/>.

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