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The spontaneous emergence of conventions: an experimental study of cultural evolution.

ABSTRACT: How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology, and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal or informal institutions, such as incentives for global agreement, coordinated leadership, or aggregated information about the population, are needed to facilitate a solution. Evolutionary theories of social conventions, by contrast, hypothesize that such institutions are not necessary in order for social conventions to form. However, empirical tests of this hypothesis have been hindered by the difficulties of evaluating the real-time creation of new collective behaviors in large decentralized populations. Here, we present experimental results--replicated at several scales--that demonstrate the spontaneous creation of universally adopted social conventions and show how simple changes in a population's network structure can direct the dynamics of norm formation, driving human populations with no ambition for large scale coordination to rapidly evolve shared social conventions.

SUBMITTER: Centola D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4343158 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The spontaneous emergence of conventions: an experimental study of cultural evolution.

Centola Damon D Baronchelli Andrea A

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20150202 7

How do shared conventions emerge in complex decentralized social systems? This question engages fields as diverse as linguistics, sociology, and cognitive science. Previous empirical attempts to solve this puzzle all presuppose that formal or informal institutions, such as incentives for global agreement, coordinated leadership, or aggregated information about the population, are needed to facilitate a solution. Evolutionary theories of social conventions, by contrast, hypothesize that such inst ...[more]

PMID: 25646462

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Project description:Background and objectivesTo understand how organisms evolve, it is fundamental to study how mutations emerge and establish. Here, we estimated the rate of mutation accumulation of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro and investigated the repeatability of its evolution when facing a new cell type but no immune or drug pressures.MethodologyWe performed experimental evolution with two strains of SARS-CoV-2, one carrying the originally described spike protein (CoV-2-D) and another carrying the D614G mutation that has spread worldwide (CoV-2-G). After 15 passages in Vero cells and whole genome sequencing, we characterized the spectrum and rate of the emerging mutations and looked for evidences of selection across the genomes of both strains.ResultsFrom the frequencies of the mutations accumulated, and excluding the genes with signals of selection, we estimate a spontaneous mutation rate of 1.3 × 10 -6 ± 0.2 × 10-6 per-base per-infection cycle (mean across both lineages of SARS-CoV-2 ± 2SEM). We further show that mutation accumulation is larger in the CoV-2-D lineage and heterogeneous along the genome, consistent with the action of positive selection on the spike protein, which accumulated five times more mutations than the corresponding genomic average. We also observe the emergence of mutators in the CoV-2-G background, likely linked to mutations in the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase and/or in the error-correcting exonuclease protein.Conclusions and implicationsThese results provide valuable information on how spontaneous mutations emerge in SARS-CoV-2 and on how selection can shape its genome toward adaptation to new environments. Lay Summary: Each time a virus replicates inside a cell, errors (mutations) occur. Here, via laboratory propagation in cells originally isolated from the kidney epithelium of African green monkeys, we estimated the rate at which the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates-an important parameter for understanding how it can evolve within and across humans. We also confirm the potential of its Spike protein to adapt to a new environment and report the emergence of mutators-viral populations where mutations occur at a significantly faster rate.

Dataset Information

The spontaneous emergence of conventions: an experimental study of cultural evolution.

Publications

The spontaneous emergence of conventions: an experimental study of cultural evolution.

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