Program

Monday September 4th 2017

SESSION 1: 14:00 – 15:30

14:00 – 14:05 WELCOME

14:05 – 14:50 KEYNOTE

Simon Powers (Edinburgh Napier University, UK)

“Cooperation in large-scale human societies -- What, if anything, makes it unique, and how did it evolve?”

The functioning of human societies fundamentally relies on social forces, in particular cooperation in the exchange of resources and the solution of collective action problems. Scholars mostly agree evolutionary processes have selected for cooperation in our ancestral small-scale hunter-gatherer societies. However, there is still much controversy about which behavioural mechanisms maintain cooperation in large-scale societies. Are the same mechanisms at work, or is some new mechanism needed? Confusion over this has frustrated our understanding of one of the most pressing questions in both evolutionary biology and the social sciences -- how could large-scale societies ever have arisen? To address this, we first examine how, if at all, cooperation in large-scale societies is actually different to cooperation in small-scale societies. We then examine the possible behavioural mechanisms that could produce this cooperation. We stress that the behavioural mechanisms themselves could not plausibly have changed between small- and large-scale societies. Finally, we use the framework of behavioural mechanisms to review the most common hypothesis that has been proposed for the origin of large-scale societies: cultural group selection. We show that this relies on behavioural mechanisms that are incompatible with most of evolutionary biology and the social sciences. As a result, we introduce an alternative explanation for large-scale societies -- the institutional path hypothesis. Crucially, this relies only on behavioural mechanisms that are are compatible with evolutionary theory, behavioural ecology, economics and political science. We therefore suggest that this represents a more parsimonious alternative for why large-scale societies work.

14:50 – 15:10

James Borg (Keele University, UK)

Social information use leads to behavioural change, even when social information is non adaptive

Authors: James Borg and Alastair Channon

15:10 – 15:30

Masahiko Higashi (Nagoya University, Japan)

How Social Learning affects the Evolution on a Rugged Fitness Landscape

Author: Masahiko Higashi, Reiji Suzuki and Takaya Arita

15:30 – 16:00 COFFEE

SESSION 2: 16:00 – 17:30

16:00 – 16:05

Peter Andras (Keele University, UK)

Introduction to special Issue on social learning and cultural evolution

16:05 – 16:25

Nicolas Cambier (Universite de technologie de Compeigne, France)

Infleunce of a collective behavior on the Naming Game

Author(s): Nicholas Cambier, Vincent Fremont and Eliseo Ferrante

16:25 – 16:45

Chris Marriott (University of Washington, USA)

Social Learing in Non-Human Animals

Author(s): Chris Marriott

16:45 – 17:05

Julien Hubert (VU Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Open Questions and New Directions in Social Learning and Cultural Evolution

Author(s): Julien Hubert

17:05 – 17:15