The Costly Information Hypothesis
The costly information hypothesis is used to explore how adaptive biases relate to cultural evolution within the field of dual inheritance theory. The focus is on the evolutionary trade-offs in cost between individual learning, (e.g., operant conditioning) and social learning. If more accurate information that could be acquired through individual learning is too costly, evolution may favor learning mechanisms that, in turn, are biased towards less costly, (though potentially less accurate), information via social learning.
Read more about this topic: Adaptive Bias
Famous quotes containing the words costly, information and/or hypothesis:
“O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
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—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Oversimplified, Mercier’s Hypothesis would run like this: “Wit is always absurd and true, humor absurd and untrue.””
—Vivian Mercier (b. 1919)