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The extensive division of labor in human societies is one of the aspects that make them unique. There are many areas which are influenced by this division. The most obvious one might be the economy, where division of labor yields much higher production. However, as we will show in this survey, a lot of other areas which affect society are influenced by division of labor, such as population size and density, technology, trade, accumulation of knowledge, social stratification, political organization, and institutions. Even the size of the family is argued to be linked to division of labor and specialization.This review will discuss how specialization evolved, including both theoretical and empirical studies from several disciplines. We will also study different kinds of specialization, as well as how and in which areas specialization has an influence.

This paper studies the interaction between specialization and cul-tural evolution. Four key components are identified from publishedempirical studies: Culture, Specialization, Production and Popula-tion. Mathematical models are used to investigate the interactionsbetween the components and the behavior of the entire system. Theresults show that specialization is both a cause and an outcome of cul-tural cumulation, which creates feedback cycles in cultural evolution.The feedback cycles can explain the drastic increase in innovation ratewe have observed throughout human history. Specialization is there-fore argued to be an integral part in understanding cultural evolution.

In many models of cultural evolution, agents learn cultural elements either by individual learning (innovation) or social learning (copying). This paper investigates what kind of learning, or combination of the two kinds, maximizes the total number of cultural elements known in the population. In a model where both kinds of learning are equally efficient, we find that this maximum is achieved when only individual learning is used. Analysis and simulation is used to investigate how much more efficient social learning has to be for a mixed solution to appear. Two possible reasons for social learning being more efficient than innovation are identified.

The demographic and ecological success of our species is frequently attributed to our capacity for cumulative culture. However, it is not yet known how humans combine social and asocial learning to generate effective strategies for learning in a cumulative cultural context. Here we explore how cumulative culture influences therelative merits of various pure and conditional learning strategies, including pure asocial and social learning, critical social learning, conditional social learning and individual refiner strategies. We replicate the Rogers’ paradox in the cumulative setting. However, our analysis suggests that strategies that resolved Rogers’ Paradoxin a non-cumulative setting may not necessarily evolve in a cumulative setting, thus different strategies will optimize cumulative and non-cumulative cultural learning.

Social stratification is present in all modern societies. Do income dif-ferences simply reflect inherited differences in individual abilities and re-sources? If not, why does not everyone choose strategies that lead to highincome? This paper shows that the psychological phenomenon known astemporal discounting will lead to differences in educational attainmentand therefore social stratification in any society where the demand forworkers with a higher level of education is higher than for those witha lower level. The model is used to predict income differences betweenpeople with and without college education in seven developed countries,based only on official statistics of the cost and length of college education.The model explains 93 percent of the variance, strongly suggesting thattemporal discounting is a major factor behind income differences.