Anne Kandler

Senior Scientist

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture
Deutscher Platz 6 04103 Leipzig  

Phone: +49 341 3550 307
Email: anne_kandler@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de

Office: level 1, room u1.16

Curriculum Vitae
Publications

I am an applied mathematician interested in the underlying principles of cultural change especially in changing environmental conditions. Cultural change is often expressed by frequency changes of cultural traits, i.e. behaviour learnt socially, within and across populations. Social learning, however, can occur in a large variety of ways and my research aims at establishing why certain learning mechanisms evolved and in which situations they are expected to be present.  In particular I am interested in bridging theoretical and empirical work in cultural evolution and focus on understanding the limits of inferability of underlying evolutionary processes from population-level data. I explore the question of how much information about social learning mechanisms is contained in observed frequency distributions describing a specific episode of cultural change. To do so I develop simulation and statistical inference methods to create frameworks for analysing cultural change accounting for the problem of equifinality.