maandag 25 november 2019

The Coevolutionary Romance of Social Learning and Parasitic Behavior



"The coevolution of parasitic behavior and social learning is analogous to a romance, in which behavior wants the learner to fall in love, but the easiest path to the learner’s heart may transform the behavior and have unanticipated consequences for both parties. Either or both behavior and psychology may wind up frustrated or rather elated."

"In this model, parasitic behavior can become prevalent and substantially reduce host fitness. However, it may also evolve to be mutualistic and raise the mean fitness of the host organism. When this occurs, natural selection may favor psychological susceptibility to parasitic behavior. Both social learning and socially learned behavior can enjoy a happy ending. "

"Social learning entails a dilemma: Learning from others requires some credulity, and so our psychology may be defended, but a clever idea can nevertheless penetrate it. "

"Just like breathing entails exposure to pathogens, social learning entails exposure to manipulation, either by other individuals or by behavior itself. "

"This argument does not suggest that brains are helpless victims of parasitic behavior. Any psychology capable of sophisticated social learning must have coevolved in the shadow of such parasitic behavior. And so the design of social learning, whether innate or rather developmentally acquired, reflects a tradeoff between the acquisition of adaptive behavior and defense against manipulation. "

“when “manipulative” behavior successfully guides a learner to adaptive behavior, the situation seems less manipulative and more mutualistic. Thus under the right circumstances, it may be evolutionarily advantageous for a social learner to be susceptible to parasitic behavior.”




The Coevolutionary Romance of Social Learning and Parasitic Behavior  https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/055889v2.fullRichard McElreath
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_McElreath

(about rogers paradox "Rogers (1988) considered a population of individual learners tracking a temporally varying environment. Because social learners acquire information cheaper than individual learners, they are selected for when introduced. However, this eventually results in there being too few individual learners tracking the environment for up-to-date information to spread. Consequently, social learners’ fitness declines until an evolutionary stable state (ESS) is reached, with the population becoming a mix of both types of learners."https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/rogers-paradox/ )