Abstract
As a uniquely human behavior, language is crucial to our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. Despite centuries of research into how languages have historically developed and how people learn them, fully understanding the origin and evolution of language remains an ongoing challenge. In parallel, researchers have studied the divergence of birdsong in vocal-learning songbirds to uncover broader patterns of cultural evolution. One approach to studying cultural change over time, adapted from biology, focuses on the transmission of socially learned traits, including language, in a population. By studying how learning and the distribution of cultural traits interact at the population level, we can better understand the processes that underlie cultural evolution. Here, we take a two-fold approach to understanding the cultural evolution of vocalizations, with a focus on the role of the learner in cultural transmission. First, we explore previous research on the evolution of social learning, focusing on recent progress regarding the origin and ongoing cultural evolution of both language and birdsong. We then use a spatially explicit population model to investigate the coevolution of culture and learning preferences, with the assumption that selection acts directly on cultural phenotypes and indirectly on learning preferences. Our results suggest that the spatial distribution of learned behaviors can cause unexpected evolutionary patterns of learning. We find that, intuitively, selection for rare cultural phenotypes can indirectly favor a novelty-biased learning strategy. In contrast, selection for common cultural phenotypes leads to cultural homogeneity; we find that there is no selective pressure on learning strategy without cultural variation. Thus, counterintuitively, selection for common cultural traits does not consistently favor conformity bias, and novelty bias can stably persist in this cultural context. We propose that the evolutionary dynamics of learning preferences and cultural biases can depend on the existing variation of learned behaviors, and that this interaction could be important to understanding the origin and evolution of cultural systems such as language and birdsong. Selection acting on learned behaviors may indirectly impose counterintuitive selective pressures on learning strategies, and understanding the cultural landscape is crucial to understanding how patterns of learning might change over time.
Highlights
We propose that the evolutionary dynamics of learning preferences and cultural biases can depend on the existing variation of learned behaviors, and that this interaction could be important to understanding the origin and evolution of cultural systems such as language and birdsong
Given a large number of individuals to speak with, how do humans decide which features of language to learn, and how do these learning strategies shape the evolution of language? In the songbirds, the largest radiation of vocal learning species, we can ask, how do learning preferences influence the evolution of birdsong and potentially reinforce speciation events in the avian lineage?
We first briefly survey the literature on the evolution of human language and learned birdsong, focusing on cultural transmission from the perspective of the learner: how do learning predispositions and preferences shape the evolution of learned behaviors? We propose an agent-based cultural evolutionary model to simulate the relationships between learning preferences and cultural dynamics
Summary
CULTURAL EVOLUTIONAND VOCAL LEARNINGFor decades, scientists and linguists have studied the evolution of language, searching for the genetic and neural underpinnings of this uniquely human ability as well as exploring changes in languages over time and space (Bateman et al, 1990; Deacon, 1998; Nowak and Krakauer, 1999; Hauser et al, 2002; Kirby et al, 2007, 2008; Croft, 2008; Joseph and Mufwene, 2008; Gray et al, 2009; Fitch, 2010; White, 2010; Bouckaert et al, 2012; Dediu et al, 2013; Mufwene, 2013; Bybee, 2015; Creanza et al, 2015; Tamariz and Kirby, 2016; Blasi et al, 2019; Jarvis, 2019). We propose an agent-based cultural evolutionary model to simulate the relationships between learning preferences and cultural dynamics We use this simple model to point to challenges and guide the study of vocal learning. Most changes in language are products of cultural modifications rather than genetic mutations, with some aspects of language such as sound-level variation in individual vocalizations evolving under neutral cultural evolution (drift), and other aspects such as regularization of verbs and frequency of word-use in a population potentially under cultural selection (Pagel et al, 2007; Creanza et al, 2015; Graham and Fisher, 2015; Newberry et al, 2017; Bentz et al, 2018). Since learned traits can alter the selection pressures on genes as well as on other cultural traits, the study of systems such as language must integrate cultural and genetic evolution (Odling-Smee, 1995; Laland et al, 2000, 2001; Rendell et al, 2011; Creanza et al, 2012; John Odling-Smee et al, 2013; Creanza and Feldman, 2014; Fogarty and Creanza, 2017)
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