Kevin N Laland
Biographic Data
| ID | 485803 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin N Laland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin N |
| FAMILY NAME | Laland |
| SIGNATURE | LALAND K N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2457-0900 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 308 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene‐Culture Coevolution
Gene‐culture coevolution (GCC)—an ambitious synthesis of biological and social sciences is often used to explain the evolution of key human traits. Despite the framework's broad conceptual appeal however, empirical evidence is often perceived as limited to a few key examples like lactase persistence. We argue this apparent gap between theoretical appeal and empirical evidence stems from conceptual ambiguities regarding the scope of relevant gene‐…
Romanticizing evolutionary biology: Gregory Rupik. Remapping biology with Goethe, Schelling, and Herder. Romanticizing evolution. 2024. Routledge, London
Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience
Although virtually all academics who study human ‘race’ agree that it is a social construct, members of the general public still commonly regard ‘race’ as a biological property (i.e. they think that ‘races’ are genetically distinct). Even though empirical data from genetics and other fields do not support biological conceptions of race, this erroneous viewpoint is widely held, suggesting that there are impediments to effective communication of th…
Culture and Evolvability: A Brief Archaeological Perspective
The role of food transfers in wild golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Support for the informational and nutritional hypothesis
Callitrichidae is a unique primate family not only in terms of the large number of food transfers to infants but also for the prevalence of transfers that are initiated by the adults. It has been hypothesized that, as well as provisioning infants, callitrichid food transfers might function to teach the receiver what food types to eat. If food provisioning has a teaching function, we would expect successful food transfers to be more likely with fo…
Attentional coordination in demonstrator-observer dyads facilitates learning and predicts performance in a novel manual task
Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds
Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind
Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for cultural production, from the arts and language to science and technology. How did the human mind—and the uniquely human ability to devise and transmit culture—evolve from its roots in animal behavior? This book presents a new theory of human cognitive evolution. It reveals how culture is not just the magnificent end product of an evolutionary process that produced a species unlike all others—it is als…
Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind
Social Learning Strategies: Bridge-Building between Fields
The Social Construction of Human Nature
What is the job that the term ‘human nature’ is expected to do? Three notions are prevalent but are problematic: (1) Distinguishing what is biological from what is cultural/environmental. Here the term fails. (2) Characterizing the defining features of humanity, thereby allowing us to be distinguished from other species. This stance is tenable but contributes little. (3) Characterizing what is universal or typical about humanity, because of our ‘…
Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior
) use food-offering calls to teach juveniles which substrate (i.e., microhabitat) to forage on, or in, for food. However, we do not yet know whether juveniles learn from this aspect of the adults' behavior. Here we examine whether juveniles learn to associate food-offering calls with a foraging substrate, as a step toward assessing whether these calls qualify as teaching behavior. We compared the performance of four wild juvenile golden lion tama…
Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind
How culture transformed human evolution Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for cultural production, from the arts and language to science and technology. How did the human mind—and the uniquely human ability to devise and transmit culture—evolve from its roots in animal behavior? Darwin's Unfinished Symphony presents a captivating new theory of human cognitive evolution. This compelling and accessible book reveals how culture is not just th…
Sex differences in confidence influence patterns of conformity
Lack of confidence in one's own ability can increase the likelihood of relying on social information. Sex differences in confidence have been extensively investigated in cognitive tasks, but implications for conformity have not been directly tested. Here, we tested the hypothesis that, in a task that shows sex differences in confidence, an indirect effect of sex on social information use will also be evident. Participants (N = 168) were administe…
An introduction to niche construction theory
Niche construction refers to the modification of selective environments by organisms. Theoretical and empirical studies of niche construction are increasing in importance as foci in evolutionary ecology. This special edition presents theoretical and empirical research that illustrates the significance of niche construction to the field. Here we set the scene for the following papers by (1) discussing the history of niche construction research, (2…
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences
Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their activities, interactions, and choices, modify their own and each other's niches. By using and transforming natural selection, niche construction generates feedback in evolution at various levels. Niche‐constructing species play important ecological roles by creating and modifying habitats and resources used by other species, thereby affecting the flow of matter and energy through …
The extended evolutionary synthesis: Its structure, assumptions and predictions
Scientific activities take place within the structured sets of ideas and assumptions that define a field and its practices. The conceptual framework of evolutionary biology emerged with the Modern Synthesis in the early twentieth century and has since expanded into a highly successful research program to explore the processes of diversification and adaptation. Nonetheless, the ability of that framework satisfactorily to accommodate the rapid adva…
Human cumulative culture: A comparative perspective
Many animals exhibit social learning and behavioural traditions, but human culture exhibits unparalleled complexity and diversity, and is unambiguously cumulative in character. These similarities and differences have spawned a debate over whether animal traditions and human culture are reliant on homologous or analogous psychological processes. Human cumulative culture combines high‐fidelity transmission of cultural knowledge with beneficial modi…
Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?
Niche construction, innovation and complexity
Social Learning: An Introduction to Mechanisms, Methods, and Models
Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (MPB-37)
The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new line of thinking about evolution. Yet niche construction--as this process of organism-driven environmental modification is known--has hidden complexities. By transforming biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in external environments, niche construction generates feedback in evol…
Social Learning: An Introduction to Mechanisms, Methods, and Models
Many animals, including humans, acquire valuable skills and knowledge by copying others. Scientists refer to this as social learning. It is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of behavioral research and sits at the interface of many academic disciplines, including biology, experimental psychology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience. This book provides a comprehensive, practical guide to the research methods of this important …
Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology
This article argues that the niche-construction approach is particularly germane to students of human evolution and to researchers using evolutionary methods to interpret human behaviour and society. Reasoning on the basis of niche-construction theory repudiates the suggestion, voiced by some leading evolutionary psychologists, that humans experience an atypically large ‘adaptive lag’, the idea that modern humans experience a gross discordance in…
Culture evolves
Genes, Culture, and Agriculture: An Example of Human Niche Construction
Theory and empirical data from a variety of disciplines strongly imply that recent human history involves extensive gene-culture coevolution, much of it as a direct result of human agricultural practices. Here we draw on niche-construction theory (NCT) and gene-culture coevolutionary theory (GCT) to propose a broad theoretical framework (NCT-GCT) with which archaeologists and anthropologists can explore coevolutionary dynamics. Humans are enormou…
Niche Construction Theory and Archaeology
Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny: Cross-cultural Evidence and Implications [and Comments and Reply]
Physical attractiveness and its relation to the theory of sexual selection deserve renewed attention from cultural and biological anthropologists. This paper focuses on an anomaly associated with physical attractiveness-in our species, in contrast to many others, males seem to be more concerned than females with the attractiveness of potential sexual partners, perhaps because humans show far more age-related variance in female than in male fecund…
The niche construction perspective: Implications for evolution and human behaviour
The vibrancy of the field of evolution and human behaviour belies the fact that the majority of social scientists are deeply unhappy with evolutionary accounts of human behaviour. In part, this reflects a problem within evolutionary biology: neo-Darwinism fails to recognize a fundamental cause of evolutionary change, "niche construction", by which organisms modify environmental states, and consequently selection pressures, thereby acting as co-di…
Niche construction, innovation and complexity
Primate Innovation: Sex, Age and Social Rank Differences
Gene-Culture Coevolutionary Theory: A Test Case
Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds
Culture and Evolvability: A Brief Archaeological Perspective
Science, Evolution and Cultural Anthropology a Response to Ingold (This Issue)
Sex differences in confidence influence patterns of conformity
Lack of confidence in one's own ability can increase the likelihood of relying on social information. Sex differences in confidence have been extensively investigated in cognitive tasks, but implications for conformity have not been directly tested. Here, we tested the hypothesis that, in a task that shows sex differences in confidence, an indirect effect of sex on social information use will also be evident. Participants (N = 168) were administe…
Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior
) use food-offering calls to teach juveniles which substrate (i.e., microhabitat) to forage on, or in, for food. However, we do not yet know whether juveniles learn from this aspect of the adults' behavior. Here we examine whether juveniles learn to associate food-offering calls with a foraging substrate, as a step toward assessing whether these calls qualify as teaching behavior. We compared the performance of four wild juvenile golden lion tama…
The mathematical modelling of human culture and its implications for psychology and the human sciences
Recent years have seen the growth of a new and exciting field of theoretical research concerned with the mathematical modelling of human culture, and of its interaction with genetics. Drawing on analogies between genetic and cultural processes, mathematically sophisticated biologists have used population genetics models as the basis for the development of analogous models of cultural transmission, cultural evolution and gene‐culture co‐evolution.…
The mathematical modelling of human culture and its implications for psychology and the human sciences
Recent years have seen the growth of a new and exciting field of theoretical research concerned with the mathematical modelling of human culture, and of its interaction with genetics. Drawing on analogies between genetic and cultural processes, mathematically sophisticated biologists have used population genetics models as the basis for the development of analogous models of cultural transmission, cultural evolution and gene‐culture co‐evolution.…
Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny: Cross-cultural Evidence and Implications [and Comments and Reply]
Physical attractiveness and its relation to the theory of sexual selection deserve renewed attention from cultural and biological anthropologists. This paper focuses on an anomaly associated with physical attractiveness-in our species, in contrast to many others, males seem to be more concerned than females with the attractiveness of potential sexual partners, perhaps because humans show far more age-related variance in female than in male fecund…
Gene-Culture Coevolutionary Theory: A Test Case
Niche Construction
Primate Innovation: Sex, Age and Social Rank Differences
Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates
Despite considerable current interest in the evolution of intelligence, the intuitively appealing notion that brain volume and “intelligence” are linked remains untested. Here, we use ecologically relevant measures of cognitive ability, the reported incidence of behavioral innovation, social learning, and tool use, to show that brain size and cognitive capacity are indeed correlated. A comparative analysis of 533 instances of innovation, 445 obse…
Sense and nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour
Animal Innovation
In 1953 a young female Japanese macaque called Imo began washing sweet potatoes before eating them, presumably to remove dirt and sand grains. Soon other monkeys had adopted this behaviour, and potato washing gradually spread throughout the troop. When, three years after her first invention, Imo devised a second novel foraging behaviour, that of separating wheat from sand by throwing mixed handfuls into water and scooping out the floating grains,…
Experimental Studies of Innovation in the Guppy
Animal innovation
Do animals have culture
Culture is probably not rare in animals, although hard experimental evidence is lacking. The strongest case for culture is found in the species most amenable to experimental manipulation, rather than in nonhuman primates. Human culture is much more likely to be cumulative than animal culture, but the reasons for this are not well established. At this point, there is no reason to assume that cumulative culture depends critically on teaching, imita…
Perspective: Is Human Cultural Evolution Darwinian? Evidence Reviewed From the Perspective of the Origin of Species
The claim that human culture evolves through the differential adoption of cultural variants, in a manner analogous to the evolution of biological species, has been greeted with much resistance and confusion. Here we demonstrate that as compelling a case can now be made that cultural evolution has key Darwinian properties, as Darwin himself presented for biological evolution in The Origin of Species. Culture is shown to exhibit variation, competit…
Trade‐Offs in the Adaptive Use of Social and Asocial Learning
Age differences in neophilia, exploration, and innovation in family groups of callitrichid monkeys
The prevailing assumption in the primate literature is that young or juvenile primates are more innovative than adult individuals. This innovative tendency among the young is frequently thought to be a consequence, or side effect, of their increased rates of exploration and play. Conversely, Reader and Laland's [International Journal of Primatology 22:787–806, 2001] review of the primate innovation literature noted a greater reported incidence of…
Towards a unified science of cultural evolution
We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to …
Niche construction, human behavior, and the adaptive-lag hypothesis
Niche construction is the process whereby organisms modify selective environments, thereby affecting evolution. The niche-construction perspective is particularly relevant to researchers using evolutionary methods to interpret human behavior and society. On the basis of niche-construction theory, we argue against the hypothesis that modern humans experience an atypically large adaptive lag. We stress that humans construct their world largely to s…
Science, Evolution and Cultural Anthropology a Response to Ingold (This Issue)
The niche construction perspective: Implications for evolution and human behaviour
The vibrancy of the field of evolution and human behaviour belies the fact that the majority of social scientists are deeply unhappy with evolutionary accounts of human behaviour. In part, this reflects a problem within evolutionary biology: neo-Darwinism fails to recognize a fundamental cause of evolutionary change, "niche construction", by which organisms modify environmental states, and consequently selection pressures, thereby acting as co-di…
How culture shaped the human genome: Bringing genetics and the human sciences together
Niche construction, co-evolution and biodiversity
Niche Construction Theory and Archaeology
Cultural Niche Construction: An Introduction
Cognitive culture: Theoretical and empirical insights into social learning strategies
Sex ratio affects sex‐specific innovation and learning in captive ruffed lemurs ( Varecia variegata and Varecia rubra )
Recent years have witnessed extensive research into problem solving and innovation in primates, yet lemurs have not been subjected to the same level of attention as apes and monkeys, and the social context in which novel behavior appears has rarely been considered. We gave novel foraging puzzlebox devices to seven groups of ruffed lemurs ( Varecia variegata and Varecia rubra ) to examine the factors affecting rates of innovation and social learni…
Detecting social learning using networks: A users guide
Controversy over claims of cultures in nonhuman primates and other animals has led to a call for quantitative methods that are able to infer social learning from freely interacting groups of animals. Network‐based diffusion analysis ( NBDA ) is such a method that infers social transmission of a behavioral trait when the pattern of acquisition follows the social network. As, relative to other animals, primates may be unusual in their heavy relianc…
Biology (31 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (25 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Language and cultural evolution (17 works) · Evolutionary biology (16 works) · Niche construction (14 works) · Ecology (12 works) · Ecology (11 works)