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Evolúcia socio-kultúrnych adaptací člověka: Fylogenetická medzi-kultúrna perspektíva
ŠAFFA, Gabriel
This thesis investigates the adaptive significance of seemingly maladaptive human behaviors or cultural norms that are often viewed as responses to intra- and inter-sexual conflict. It combines behavioral ecological approach with phylogenetic comparative methods to study evolutionary origins and maintenance of these practices, using samples of ethnographically documented human societies. The thesis is divided into three sections. The first section is the introduction to evolutionary sciences of human behavior, including an overview of the theoretical perspectives and a critical evaluation of the methodological approaches to macro-evolutionary studies of human behavior and culture. The second section consists of three chapters - two published research papers and a manuscript that is currently under review. The first paper investigates female and male genital mutilation/cutting practices, their evolutionary history, and socio-ecological correlates; the second paper investigates restrictions on female premarital sex and evaluates the three hypotheses explaining them - male, female, and parental control hypothesis; the third paper investigates the causes of socially imposed monogamy and evaluates the competing hypotheses explaining its prevalence in stratified, agricultural societies. The last section summarizes the results of the three studies and concludes with perspectives of future research.
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Towards a general model of cultural inheritance
Hillerová, Pavlína ; Tureček, Petr (advisor) ; Šaffa, Gabriel (referee)
Hypertrophied human culture is based on a specific propensity for social learning. During the transmission of information, a myriad of external and internal influences act on both the transmitor and recipient. Previous studies have focused on various biases (prestige bias, which causes, among others, a tendency to learn from older and more experienced individuals, or negative information bias, which makes us more likely to remember what to avoid etc.) that influence which cultural variants will successfully spread and how they will evolve. Some works delve into (among other things, bias-induced) cultural attraction, i.e., the tendency to transform information in a particular direction, while others treat cultural elements as genes; as nearly immutable entities. Almost all of them, however, (1.) model culture as composed from discrete entities and (2.) move within a single framework that they try to explore thoroughly. The present thesis attempts to bridge these gaps and to show the possibilities of studying cultural traits on a continuous scale. Using data from an application styled as a trivia guessing game, it aims to quantify the influence of different factors on the transmission of cultural information. Participants are presented with previous participants' estimates of different lengths, weights and...
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Conformity and eccentricity; driving forces of cultural evolution
Kutsos, Peter ; Tureček, Petr (advisor) ; Šaffa, Gabriel (referee)
When deciding between alternative strategies, animals often have to operate with limited or conflicting information. In these situations, what source of information they prioritize can make a huge difference. Individuals relying on social information (social learners) economize on costs like the risk of eating the wrong food or the energy needed to survey the environment but run the risk of the information they use being out of date or of low quality. On the other hand, those who prioritize individual learning can be more confident in the accuracy of their information, but without any social learning are forced to "reinvent the wheel" every generation. Natural selection has shaped several adaptive heuristic rules which help inform social learning. One category of these rules is frequency-dependent, which means that the probability of behavioural pattern acquisition depends on how common (or rare) they are in a population. This work is a literature review regarding two such rules: conformity and anticonformity and the roles they play in cultural evolution. Keywords: Frequency-dependent transmission, cultural evolution, social learning, conformity bias, anticonformity
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