The Evolution of Imitation Without Cultural Transmission

Abstract

The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic plasticity in the absence of cultural transmission, in phenotypes beyond behavior? We investigate a model in which imitation is unbundled from cultural transmission: an organism's adult phenotype is plastically altered by its experiences as a juvenile of other juveniles' genetically determined traits. The only information transmitted between generations is genetic. We find that during a period of directional selection towards a phenotypic optimum, natural selection favors modifiers which cause an organism to bias its plastic phenotype in the direction opposite to the mean phenotype of the population -- anti-imitation. As the population approaches the phenotypic optimum and shifts into stabilizing selection, selection on the modifier reverses and favors strong imitation of the population mean. Imitation can evolve to overshoot the target and produce an evolutionary pathology where mean fitness decreases. When purifying selection for an extreme phenotype is modeled, only selection for anti-imitation occurs, even at a mutation-selection balance. Imitation and anti-imitation emerge from these models in the absence of any goal representation, cognitive understanding of its purpose, or discernment of any kind. These theoretical outcomes are all novel evolutionary and biological phenomena, and we discuss their implications.