Cultural evolution: implications for understanding the human language faculty and its evolution.
Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world: it is socially learned and, as a consequence of its recursively compositional structure, offers open-ended communicative potential. The structure of this communication system can be explained as a consequence of the evolution of the human biological capacity for language or the cultural evolution of language itself. We argue, supported by a formal model, that an explanatory account that involves some role for cultural evolution has profound implications for our understanding of the biological evolution of the language faculty: under a number of reasonable scenarios, cultural evolution can shield the language faculty from selection, such that strongly constraining language-specific learning biases are unlikely to evolve. We therefore argue that language is best seen as a consequence of cultural evolution in populations with a weak and/or domain-general language faculty.
Smith
Kenny
K
Division of Psychology, Cognition and Communication Research Centre, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. kenny.smith@northumbria.ac.uk
Kirby
Simon
S
D005075:Biological Evolution; D003468:Cultural Evolution; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical
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