The number of cultural traits, evolving genealogies, and the descendant process

Abstract: We consider a Moran-type model of cultural evolution, which describes how traits emerge, are transmitted, and get lost in populations. Our analysis focuses on the underlying cultural genealogies; they were first described by Aguilar (2015) and are closely related to the ancestral selection graph of population genetics, wherefore we call them ancestral learning graphs. We investigate their dynamical behaviour, that is, we are concerned with evolving genealogies. In particular, we consider the total length of the genealogy of a sample of individuals from a stationary population as a function of the (forward) time at which the sample is taken. This quantity shows a sawtooth-like dynamics with linear increase interrupted by collapses to near-zero at random times. We relate this to the metastable behaviour of the stochastic logistic model, which describes the evolution of the number of ancestors, or equivalently, the number of descendants of a given sample. We assume that new inventions appear independently in every individual, and all traits of the cultural parent are transmitted to the learner in any given learning event. The set of traits of an individual then agrees with the set of innovations along its genealogy. The properties of the genealogy thus translate into the properties of the trait set of a sample. In particular, the moments of the number of traits are obtained from the moments of the total length of the genealogy.