Maladaptive behavior

I had Vicken, Tim and John over to watch the Canada vs. Slovakia tonight, and Vicken admitted to me that he used my ex in a lecture.  I'm like "really?! what was it about?"  And he smiled and said "maladaptive behavior."

The idea is that environmental variability makes it adaptive for humans to use social learning. Individual learning is costly, so social learning is more adaptive (because of a lower cost). Why pay the cost of individual R and D when some jackass has already done it for you?

There are different mechanisms for how social learning works. For example you could copy from prestigious, successful individuals, which might make sense, or it might make you do stupid shit (evolutionarily-speaking, of course) like rock climb without a rope, because climbers who do crazy shit without a rope get prestige, and become successful (such as Bachar and Croft).

So the capacity for social learning is adaptive, but it opens you up to adopting specific behaviors that are not adaptive...["and then you die" - Vicken].

There are a ton of other examples, like delaying reproduction (which I'm guilty of...).  Of course to get around this fitness cost of free soloing (and dying, should that happen), you could have a bunch of kids and make sure they are taken care of, and then go off and climb wtihout a rope. Of course, if gaining prestige through doing anything at all gets you lots of sex and you spawn offspring all over the world, then I guess it's not so maladaptive.

Vicken has some recommended reading on the subject:

Not By Genes Alone: How culture transformed human evolution

by Pete Richerson