Tue 6th May, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

Monica Tamariz

Evidence for selection in the evolution of human communication systems

Human communication systems evolve, but the cultural evolutionary mechanisms that drive their evolution are not well understood. To better understand them, we constructed a parameterized mixed probabilistic model of the spread of communicative variants in four 8-person laboratory micro-societies engaged in a simple communication game. The parameters weight the contributions of selection pressures (Conformity bias and Content bias) against a neutral (Drift) evolutionary model. Drift alone explains the spread of communication variants in a minority of cases. Selection models, working in combination, explain the majority of the empirical data. The best fitting parameter setting includes an egocentric bias and a content-bias, suggesting that participants retain their own previously used communicative variants unless they encounter a superior variant, in which case the latter is adopted. This novel pattern of results suggests that 1) a theory of the cultural evolution of human communication systems must integrate drift and also selection dynamics and that 2) human communication systems are functionally adaptive complex systems.

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