Cultural selection drives the evolution of human communication systems
Human communication systems evolve culturally, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this evolution are not well understood. Against a baseline that communication variants spread in a population following neutral evolutionary dynamics (also known as drift models), we tested the role of two cult...
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Published in | Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Vol. 281; no. 1788; p. 20140488 |
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Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
England
The Royal Society
07.08.2014
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Human communication systems evolve culturally, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this evolution are not well understood. Against a baseline that communication variants spread in a population following neutral evolutionary dynamics (also known as drift models), we tested the role of two cultural selection models: coordination- and content-biased. We constructed a parametrized mixed probabilistic model of the spread of communicative variants in four 8-person laboratory micro-societies engaged in a simple communication game. We found that selectionist 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 retained their own previously used communicative variants unless they encountered a superior (content-biased) variant, in which case it was adopted. This novel pattern of results suggests that (i) a theory of the cultural evolution of human communication systems must integrate selectionist models and (ii) human communication systems are functionally adaptive complex systems. |
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Bibliography: | istex:FC5E22B6C086D8D9FF792DB9E6D4B035056369DF href:rspb20140488.pdf ark:/67375/V84-F1GHXWMK-J ArticleID:rspb20140488 ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0962-8452 1471-2954 |
DOI: | 10.1098/rspb.2014.0488 |