Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This article examines the social conditions for the evolutionary emergence of language. Human psychology evolved in adaptation to a particular way of life, based on hunting and gathering. Evolving humans compensated for vulnerability to dangerous predators by developing unprecedented forms of social cooperation, material culture, and strategies for remembering, transmitting, and exchanging accumulated knowledge. One of the views known as deep social mind holds that distinctively human forms of cultural transmission necessarily co-evolved with cooperative mindreading together with increasing egalitarianism. Humans everywhere may share dispositions toward dominance as a part of the inherited psychological package but equally, humans have corresponding tendencies to resist being dominated. At a certain point in human evolution, the benefits of deploying Machiavellian intelligence to impose dominance over others became matched by the costs of overcoming the Machiavellian resistance of others. The increased human group sizes placed a premium on enhanced social intelligence, the ability to negotiate alliances, in turn driving selection pressures for neocortical expansion. Human hypersociality and intersubjectivity emerged initially under such selection pressures, with mothers increasingly willing to trust allocarers with their babies.

One question above all divides evolutionary psychologists. Do humans have digital minds in an analog world Or should this idea be completely reversed? Is it that we have analog minds, although unlike our primate relatives we inhabit a digital world This paper is a contribution intended in the philosophical spirit of Botha s (2003) Unravelling the Evolution of Language.

Many scholars assume a connection between the evolution of language and that of distinctively human group-level morality. Unfortunately, such thinkers frequently downplay a central implication of modern Darwinian theory, which precludes the possibility of innate psychological mechanisms evolving to benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Group level moral regulation is indeed central to public life in all known human communities. The production of speech acts would be impossible without this. The challenge, therefore, is to explain on a Darwinian basis how life could have become subject to the rule of law. Only then will we have an appropriate social framework in which to contextualize our models of how language may have evolved.

Many scholars assume a connection between the evolution of language and that of distinctively human group-level morality. Unfortunately, such thinkers frequently downplay a central implication of modern Darwinian theory, which precludes the possibility of innate psychological mechanisms evolving to benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Group level moral regulation is indeed central to sexual, social and political life in all known hunter-gatherer communities. The production of speech acts would be impossible without such regulation. The challenge, therefore, is to explain on a Darwinian basis how life could have become subject to the rule of law. Only then will we have an appropriate social framework in which to contextualize our models of how language may have evolved.

The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters—and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and ...