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Reproductive skew affects social information use

View ORCID ProfileMarco Smolla, Charlotte Rosher, R. Tucker Gilman, View ORCID ProfileSusanne Shultz
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/410886
Marco Smolla
1Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America
2School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
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Charlotte Rosher
2School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
3Department of Ecology & Genetics, Uppsala University, Sweden
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R. Tucker Gilman
2School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
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Susanne Shultz
2School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Manchester, United Kingdom
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Abstract

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. Individuals that experience high reproductive skew are expected to favour high-risk strategies, whereas those that experience low reproductive skew are expected to favour risk-averse strategies. Using an agent-based model, we tested the hypothesis that 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 females tend to be more risk averse than males. To explore how risk may affect sex differences in learning strategies, we simulated learning in sexually reproducing populations. Where both sexes share the same environment they adopt more extreme learning strategies, approaching pure individual or 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.

Footnotes

  • ↵* Email: smolla{at}sas.upenn.edu

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 06, 2018.
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Reproductive skew affects social information use
Marco Smolla, Charlotte Rosher, R. Tucker Gilman, Susanne Shultz
bioRxiv 410886; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/410886
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Reproductive skew affects social information use
Marco Smolla, Charlotte Rosher, R. Tucker Gilman, Susanne Shultz
bioRxiv 410886; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/410886

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