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Population Genetics and Cultural History

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Population Genetics and Cultural History POPULATION GENETICS AND CULTURAL HISTORY. by Richard Pocklington B-Sc., McGill University, 1992 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF 7333 REQUIREMENTS FOR TmDEGREE OF Master of Science in the Department of Biological Sciences O Richard Pocklington 1996 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY October 1996 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. Matnmal Library Bibliothmw nationale l*a ofCanada du can ad^ Acquisitions 2nd Direction ties acqi~isltlonset Eibfiqraphk Services Branch des ssrdkes bibl~ographiques Your lde Vo:-e relerence Our hie Notre reference The author has granted an b'auteur a accorde une licence irrevocable non-exctusive f icence irrbocable et non exclusive allowing the National Library of perrnettant a la Biblioth6que Canada to reproduce, loan, nationale du Canada de distribute or self copies of reproduire, pr&ter, distribuer ou hislher thesis by any means and vendre des copies de sa these in any form or format, making de quelque maniere et sous this thesis available to interested quelque forme que ce soit pour persons. mettre des exemplaires de cette these a la disposition des personnes interessees. The author retains ownership of L'auteur conserve la propriete du the copyright in his/her thesis. droit d'auteur qui protege sa Neither the thesis nor substantial these. Ni la these ni des extraits extracts from it may be printed or substantieis de celle-ci ne otherwise reproduced without doivent Btre imprimes ou his/her permission. autrement reproduits sans son autorisation. ISBN 0-612-17058-6 PARTIAL COPY<RIGHTLICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis, project or extended essay (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Sin~onFraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me ur the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my writ ten permission. Title of ThesidProjeetiExtended Essay Author:. (signature) (date) APPROVAL Name: Richard PocHington Degree: MASTER OF SCIENCE Title of Thesis: POPULATION GENETICS AND CULTURAL HISTORY Examining Cornmime: Chair. Dr. B. Brandhorst, Professor Dr. Felix Breden, Associate Professor, Semor Supervisor Department of Biological Sciences, S.F.U. espi, Assistant Professor Departm t of iological Sciences, S.F.U. Dr. Sally OW, Assistant Professor Rparizieiii of Zoology, U.B.C. Public Examiner Abstract Three major questions musf he resolved hefore thc tt-reory of natural selection can be fruitfully applied to cultural sy sterns. The questions are. what are the units of selection, what is the fitness currency and what is the long term pattern of relationship among cultural elements. In this thesis I define units of selection as the largest repeatably, reliably replicating units in a cultural system and demonstrate a simple method for detecting such units in a model system. I argue that meme copy rate is a satisfactory fitness currency and show how this perspective encourages us to test hypotheses of selfish cultural adaptation. I propose a method for the detection of long term patterns of cultural transmission using population level genetic differences. As Darwin ( 1859) predicted, evolutionary trees based on linguistic information are similar to trees constructed from genetic distance measurements (Cavalii-Sforza et al. 1989, Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1992, Chen et al. 1995). It is as yet unknown to what degree cultural history in areas other than language follows popvfation history. I examined the degree to which the distributions of 47 cultural characteristics paralleled the history of 32 African populations. A multiple regression model based on the Mantel matrix correlation test (Mantel 1967, Smouse et al. 1986) was used to examine the fit of seven cultural dissimilarity matrices to genetic and geographic distance matrices. The partial regression of cultural distance on genetic distance was significant for two of the seven sets of characters: social hierarchy and kinship organization. These correlations suggest that over thousands of years, some cultural characteristics have been inherited in parallel with genetic lineages (Sokal et al. 1991, Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1993, Guglielmino et al. 1995) producing an 'historical signature'. However, most cultural changes appear to occur at a rate fast enough to obscure the signatures left by gene frequency changes detected through these methods. Dedication This thesis is dedicated to all those people whose. complex fives have been condeased down into a few distance matrices. Acknowledgments This thesis could not have been completed without the generous help of many people. f thank Dr. Eric Minch and Dr. Cavalfi-Sforza for atflowing my access to their data base of genetic information. 1 thank Dr. Barbara Thompson and Dr. Robert Sokal for the use of FORTRAN code used in my statistical analyses. Dr. Patrick Gray provided me with access to the coded ethnographic information I used. Bryan Crawford, Jeff Bryer, Dr. Eric Minch, Dr. Evan Cooch, Russ Watkins, Mike Best, Eric Weeks and Tim Coram all helped me with various aspects of the development of my programs through their knowledge of C, UNfX and miscellaneous Arcana. Dr. Bernie Crespi, Dr. Eric Minch and Richard McElreath provided comments on the manuscript. Dr. Felix Breden helped me in many ways and supported the project throughout. This work was supported by an NSERC PGSA to Richard Pocklington and an NSERC operating grant to Felix Breden. Please send any comments regarding this thesis to: pockling @sfu.ca Table of Contents . Approval ............................................................................................................................... 11 ... Abstract ................................................................................................................................. II~ Dedication .................................................................................................... .. ...................v Acknowledgments ....... ..... ........................................................................................ v i . ' Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... v I I .a. List of Tables ....................................................................................................................... I t I List of Figures .................................................................................................................... ix Inh-oduction..................................................................................................................... I Natural selection is a general principle ................................................................ 3 Chapter One .................... .... ....................................................................................... 5 Three fundamental problems in cultural replicator theory ........................5 I) Units of selection ...................... ...................................................................... 7 11) Fitness currency ............................................................................................ 2 0 111) Patterns of relationship ................................................................................... 3 X Summary ......................................................................................................................... .4 X Chapter Two ..................................................................................................................... 5 I Estimation of the transmission mode of cultural elements.......................... '5 1 Methods ......................................................................................................................... 5 9 Results ............................................................................................................................ 6 8 Discussion ............................................................................................................... 8 4 ConcIusions ....................................................................................................................... 4 9 Literahre Cited ............................................................................................................. 1 0 1 List of Figures Figure I .I ..................................................................., 4 1 Figure f -2.............................................................................................................................. 4 2 Figure f -3............................................................................................................................. 4 3 Figure 2.1 ..................... ,,., ................................................................................................ 5 3 Figure 2.2 .............................................................................................................................. 7 1 Figure 2.3.............................................................................................................................. 7 3 Figure 2.4 .............................................................................................................................
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