title: Language as a coordination tool evolves slowly.
abstract: Social living ultimately depends on coordination between group members, and communication is necessary to make this possible. We suggest that this might have been the key selection pressure acting on the evolution of language in humans and use a behavioural coordination model to explore the impact of communication efficiency on social group coordination. We show that when language production is expensive but there is an individual benefit to the efficiency with which individuals coordinate their behaviour, the evolution of efficient communication is selected for. Contrary to some views of language evolution, the speed of evolution is necessarily slow because there is no advantage in some individuals evolving communication abilities that much exceed those of the community at large. However, once a threshold competence has been achieved, evolution of higher order language skills may indeed be precipitate.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK; Facultad de Gobierno, CICS, Universidad del Desarrollo, Av. Plaza 680, San Carlos de Apoquindo, Las Condes, Santiago de Chile 7610658, Chile; Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiellinie 66, 24105 Kiel, Germany; Population Research Institute, Väestöliitto, Kalevankatu 16, Helsinki 00101, Finland.
authors.forename: Tamas
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8979-3136
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: David-Barrett
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK; Department of Computer Science, Aalto University School of Science, PO Box 15500, Espoo 00076, Finland.
authors.forename: Robin I M
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9982-9702
authors.initials: RI
authors.lastname: Dunbar
keywords: agent-based models; communication efficiency; costs of communication; language evolution; social coordination; social group size