Learning from others and innovation have undoubtedly helped advance civilization. But these behaviours can carry costs as well as benefits. And a new study by an international team of evolutionary biologists sheds light on how one particular cost - increased exposure to parasites - may affect cultural evolution in non-human primates.
The results, published Dec. 3, 2014, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that species with members that learn from others suffer from a wider variety of socially transmitted parasites, while innovative, exploratory species suffer from a wider variety of parasites transmitted through the environment, such as in the soil or water.
"We tend to focus on innovation and learning from others as a good thing, but their costs have received relatively little attention," says McGill University biologist Simon Reader, co-author of the study. "Here, we uncover evidence that socially transmitted pathogen burdens rise with learning from others - perhaps because close interaction is needed for such learning - and environmentally transmitted pathogen burdens rise with exploratory behaviour such as innovation and extractive foraging."
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