Abstract
As a cooperative act decreases an individual's fitness for others to benefit, it is expected to be selected against by natural selection. That, how contrary to this naive expectation cooperation has evolved, is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and social sciences. Here, by introducing a mathematical model, we show that coevolution of cooperation and language can provide an avenue through which both cooperation and language evolve. In this model, individuals in a population play a prisoner's dilemma game and at the same time try to communicate a set of representations by producing signals. For this purpose, individuals try to build a common language, which is composed of a set of signal-representation associations. Individuals decide in language learning based on their payoff from the prisoner's dilemma game and decide about their strategy in the prisoner's dilemma game based on their success in conveying symbolic information. The model shows cooperators are able to build a common language and protect it against defectors' attempt to decode it. The language channels the benefit of cooperation toward cooperators, and defectors, being banished from the language, are unable to exploit cooperators, and are doomed to extinction.
Highlights
The evolution of cooperation poses a fundamental challenge in evolutionary biology: If individuals are to be selected based on their fitness, any altruistic trait that reduces an individual’s fitness for the sake of others is to be selected against [1,2]
Our analysis reveals a fundamentally new way in which network structure promotes cooperation by facilitating coordination between cooperators to build a common set of conventions to communicate symbolic information
While it had been suggested that language may have played an important role in the evolution of cooperation in human groups [28], and language’s positive role in the evolution of cooperation may have contributed to the evolutionary pressure to develop language [29,30], a mathematical model that shows how this could happen was missing
Summary
The evolution of cooperation poses a fundamental challenge in evolutionary biology: If individuals are to be selected based on their fitness, any altruistic trait that reduces an individual’s fitness for the sake of others is to be selected against [1,2]. A mathematical model which shows how language and cooperation can co-evolve is still lacking. We provide this missing piece of the puzzle. To this goal, we consider a model in which individuals in a population are paired to play a collective action game [prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game] and at the same time, try to communicate a set of representations by producing signals. We consider a model in which individuals in a population are paired to play a collective action game [prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game] and at the same time, try to communicate a set of representations by producing signals For this purpose individuals try to learn a set of associations between signals and representations. Being banished from the common language, defectors are unable to exploit cooperators and are doomed to extinction
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