Social Transmission of Acquired Behavior: A Discussion of Tradition and Social Learning in Vertebrates

Publisher There are essentially three non-independent means by which the behavior characteristic of a population may remain constant from one generation to the next. First, adaptive behavior in population members may be largely endogenously organized and genetically transmitted as propensities influencing ontogeny. Second, similar patterns of behavior in successive generations of a population may result from similar histories of individual transaction with the physical environment. And, third, long-term homogeneity of behavior may result from the transmission of patterns of behavior from individual to individual within a population as a consequence of social interaction. In most species, the adaptive behavior acquired independently by an individual as a result of its transactions with the physical environment is not readily transmitted either to others of its generation or to members of future generations. Although the genetic material influencing the behavior of an individual that allowed it to acquire some pattern of behavior may be preserved and disseminated within a population via the mechanisms of Mendelian recombination and neo-Darwinian natural selection, the specific responses acquired by any individual are lost in every generation with the death of their acquirer. The social transmission of acquired behavior may be seen as providing an alternative to the genetic transmission of behavioral propensities, allowing a population to maintain the established patterns and to incorporate behavioral novelty into its repertoire rapidly. The chapter describes the examples of patterns of behavior apparently transmitted among conspecifies, as well as a variety of field and laboratory findings are reviewed, which have been or can be interpreted as demonstrating the social transmission of acquired behavior, and defines the range of phenomena to be considered.