Inheritance & Social Learning Across Scales
Phenotypes are shaped by more than genes. We investigates how extragenetic modes of inheritance– namely cultural transmission via social learning and the ecological inheritance of home ranges and territories— affect and are affected by social behavior, ecology, and genetic evolution.
The Inheritance & Social Learning Across Scales (ISLaS) group, led by Brendan Barrett, explores these questions across broad spatial (across a home range or continent) and temporal scales (over a lifespan and across generations). We aim to integrate quantitative theory with reproducible statistical modeling grounded in a firm appreciation for natural history and ethnography. Our work integrates theory and tools from cultural evolution, animal behavior, population biology, spatial ecology, and the quantitative social sciences. We value and utilize long-term behavioral, movement, and demographic datasets. We are keen to use insights from direct-observation longitudinal field sites to develop and validate remote methods of studying animal behavior and population ecology across a species’ range– particularly in unhabituated primate populations. Alongside basic research, methods development is a focus of our group— particularly in Bayesian data analysis and computer vision– to develop a variety of analytical and data processing tools that can be utilized by the global scientific community.
We are associated with MPI-AB Department of Animal Societies as well as the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. We often work with wild capuchin monkeys (genera Cebus and Sapajus). But we also work with and are keen to study cultural transmission, territorial inheritance, and related questions in myriad taxa. We tend to take a systems level approach to understanding biology, so we find diverse threads of connection between seemingly disparate fields. If you work with a system that melds well with our research interests, and are interested and collaborating please reach out.
Some key research topics we explore are
- How island ecology affects social behavior and drives the origins and spread of behavioral innovations and structures cultural diversity
- How and why learning changes over the lifespan
- Gene-culture coevolution and adaptation in insular primates
- Evolutionary drivers and ecological underpinnings of extractive foraging
- Territorial inheritance and its effects on fitness
- Navigating between- and within-group conflict over space use across generations
- Integration of cultural evolution and movement ecology
- Archaeological primatology and tool use
