Michelle Kline: The University of California, Los Angeles

Humans are heavily reliant on cultural adaptation, and have coevolved
with culture for millennia. Teaching enhances the fidelity of cultural
transmission and should be common in such a culture-dependent species.
However, existing data present a puzzle concerning the role of
teaching in human evolution. While biologists have documented
teaching in a number of non-human animal species, extant ethnographic
work suggests that teaching is rare in non-Western human societies.
Both sets of findings are hotly debated. I argue that disputes about
the nature and prevalence of teaching across human societies can be
resolved within an evolutionary framework that distinguishes among a
range of teaching behaviors with varying costs and benefits to
teachers and learners. This framework predicts that some teaching
behaviors should be common across societies, within particular
relationships, and for the learning of particular kinds of skills.
Here I present this new theoretical framework and confirm a number of
its predictions using two data sets from fieldwork with
fishing-horticultural villages on Yasawa Island, Fiji.