Interactions between cultural, social and biological explanations for language evolution.

This is a reply to commentaries on a target article in this volume reviewing models for the cultural evolution of language. Many commentaries amplify positions taken in this article but they also cover novel issues in social evolution and biological evolution, which are briefly addressed here.

Modeling the cultural evolution of language.

The paper surveys recent research on language evolution, focusing in particular on models of cultural evolution and how they are being developed and tested using agent-based computational simulations and robotic experiments. The key challenges for evolutionary theories of language are outlined and some example results are discussed, highlighting models explaining how linguistic conventions get shared, how conceptual frameworks get coordinated through language, and how hierarchical structure could emerge. The main conclusion of the paper is that cultural evolution is a much more powerful process that usually assumed, implying that less innate structures or biases are required and consequently that human language evolution has to rely less on genetic evolution.