Fig. 4. Trade-off between social inheritance and random connections depends on average connectivity.

(A) Specialists benefit from convergence of traits in their neighborhood, which is achieved by increasing p_n (at low connectivity) or increasing p_r (at high connectivity). The opposite is the case for generalists who try to avoid trait convergence in their neighborhood. (B) This leads on average to shorter path lengths in specialists and longer paths in generalists (lines indicate possible combinations of p_n and p_r given degree k). (C) Populations are mainly made up of generalists at low connectivity and specialists at high connectivity. At intermediate connectivity, this is mediated by path length and clustering.