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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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Vol. 281; no. 1788; pp. 1 - 6
Main Authors Tamariz, Monica, Ellison, T. Mark, Barr, Dale J., Fay, Nicolas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published The Royal Society 07.08.2014
Subjects
Communication systems
Communications
Cultural evolution
Data models
Evolution
Humans
Language
Materials
Soap operas
Social evolution
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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.
ISSN:0962-8452