Ludovic MAISONNEUVE "The joint evolution of learning across the lifespan and culture"
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Tuesday 25 November 2025, 12:15Passed
Learning enables animals to adjust their behaviors to their environment, thereby improving their reproductive success. It can occur individually, when individuals modify their behavior based on their own interactions with the environment, or socially, when they benefit from acquiring the skills and knowledge of their conspecifics. Throughout their lives, animals adjust their learning behaviors and accumulate skills and knowledge that form a cultural capital they can mobilize to enhance their survival and reproduction. Under certain conditions, social learning and the capacity to build upon acquired cultural capital can lead to the accumulation of cultural capital across generations. In turn, population-level cultural dynamics shape what individuals can acquire through social learning, thereby modifying the selective pressures acting on learning throughout the lifespan. This evolutionary feedback between culture and lifelong learning gives rise to complex coevolutionary dynamics, further shaped by trade-offs between learning, survival, and reproduction, and modulated by ecological conditions. In this talk, I will present theoretical developments aimed at understanding these coevolutionary processes, with a particular focus on (i) how natural selection shapes age-structured cultural transmission, (ii) how teaching coevolves with lifelong learning, (iii) how random variation in learning influences the evolution of lifelong learning, and how these processes affect the accumulation of cultural capital at the population level.
