Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Quantitative phylogenetic methods have been used to study the evolutionary relationships and divergence times of biological species, and recently, these have also been applied to linguistic data to elucidate the evolutionary history of language families. In biology, the factors driving macroevolutionary processes are assumed to be either mainly biotic (the Red Queen model) or mainly abiotic (the Court Jester model) or a combination of both. The applicability of these models is assumed to depend on the temporal and spatial scale observed as biotic factors act on species divergence faster and in smaller spatial scale than the abiotic factors. Here, we used the Uralic language family to investigate whether both ‘biotic’ interactions (i.e. cultural interactions) and abiotic changes (i.e. climatic fluctuations) are also connected to language diversification. We estimated the times of divergence using Bayesian phylogenetics with a relaxed-clock method and related our results to climatic, historical and archaeological information. Our timing results paralleled the previous linguistic studies but suggested a later divergence of Finno-Ugric, Finnic and Saami languages. Some of the divergences co-occurred with climatic fluctuation and some with cultural interaction and migrations of populations. Thus, we suggest that both ‘biotic’ and abiotic factors contribute either directly or indirectly to the diversification of languages and that both models can be applied when studying language evolution.

Communication is ubiquitous in biology, and agreement on terms essential for scientific progress. Yet there is no agreed definition of biological communication. Definitions couched in terms of adaptation are often used, but there is significant variability in exactly which criteria are invoked. An alternative is to define communication in terms of information transfer. This article reviews the merits of these approaches, and argues that the former is to be preferred, so long as we demand that both the signal and the response be adaptive, rather than just one or the other, as is common. Specific concerns with the definition are addressed, and it is then explained why an account of communication predicated on information transfer is necessarily derivative upon such an approach. Other alternatives and some variants of the adaptationist definition are also briefly discussed.

In several communication systems that rely on social learning, such as bird song, and possibly human language, the range of signals that can be learned is limited by perceptual biases - predispositions - that are presumably based on genes. In this paper, we examine the coevolution of such genes with the culturally transmitted communication traits themselves, using deterministic population genetic models. We argue that examining how restrictive genetic predispositions are is a useful way of examining the evolutionary origin and maintenance of learning. Under neutral cultural evolution, where no cultural trait has any inherent advantage over another, there is selection in favour of less restrictive genes (genes that allow a wider range of signals to recognized). In contrast, cultural conformity (where the most common cultural trait is favoured) leads to selection in favour of more restrictive genes.