Evolutionary Explanations for Natural Language - Criteria from Evolutionary Biology

Theories of the evolutionary origins of language must be informed by empirical and theoretical results from a variety of different fields. Complementing recent surveys of relevant work from linguistics, animal behaviour and genetics, this paper surveys the requirements on evolutionary scenarios that derive from mathematical evolutionary biology. It presents a number of simple but fundamental models from population genetics, evolutionary gametheory and social evolution theory, and evaluates their applicability to natural language. This review yields a list of required elements of evolutionary explanations in general, and of explanations for language and communication in particular.