Tuesday 16th December 11.00am, DSB 1.17

From Item to System in Cultural Evolution Experiments

Simon Kirby (with Andrea Ravignani & Tania Delgado)

A wide range of iterated learning experiments show a strikingly similar pattern of results: over multiple transmission episodes systematicity increases cumulatively. What begin as independently learned behaviours start to form systems of interdependencies. Randomness transforms into structure; complexity yields to simplicity. This result is so common – despite very different framing of these experiments – it is tempting to see it as a universal law of the cultural evolution of sets of complex behaviours.

This matters because it leads us naturally to the hypothesis that the emergence of language in the real world involves a transition from independent signals to increasingly interconnected systems of signals. It leads us to treat the major design features of language as a natural consequence of cultural evolution.

In this talk I’ll address two questions:

1. Does this emerging systematicity depend on the task being one of first learning a set of explicitly language-like behaviours followed later by a production phase?

2. Are there phenomena other than language that we might characterise as involving cultural transmission of sets of complex behaviours?

My answers will be “no” and “yes” respectively, and I hope to demonstrate this by showing you some *very* preliminary results of an iterated drumming experiment.

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