Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 281, Issue 1788, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0488
Keywords
cultural evolution; language evolution; drift; coordination bias; content bias; selection
Categories
Funding
- ARC [DP120104237]
- UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/F017677/1]
- AHRC [AH/F017677/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Human communication systems evolve culturally, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this evolutionare notwell 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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