Cultural Transmission, Disproportionate Prior Exposure, and the Evolution of Cooperation.

INTERGENERATIONAL relations; COOPERATION; CULTURAL transmission; CULTURAL maintenance; MCBRIDE, Michael; BIENENSTOCK, Elisa Jayne

The article presents responses of the author on the comments made by Elisa Jayne Bienenstock and Michael McBride on the model of cultural transmission. Bienenstock and McBride criticized the model on three counts. First, its tendency toward cooperation depends on a decoupling of behavior and fitness that is theoretically untenable. Secondly, the model is not a viable explanation for cooperation in small groups and thus, has ambiguous relevance to the understanding of real-world cooperation. Third, the model's tendency towards cooperation is not robust to minor changes in its specification. Bienenstock and McBride argue that if disproportionate prior exposure cannot account for the evolution of cooperation in the small societies of human pre-history, its relevance for explaining the evolution of cooperation is ambiguous. The author however emphasizes that the model discussed called attention to a previously unrecognized characteristics of cultural transmission— disproportionate prior exposure and showed how this characteristic could create a cultural evolutionary force toward cooperation.