IMPLAUSIBLY COOPERATIVE ROBOTS MEET THEIR SELFISH GENE COUNTERPARTS

The use and testing of computational models has become a core methodology for formalising, operationalising and testing theories across the natural sciences. Applied to language origins research, such methods can make explicit the assumptions needed to make a particular theory work, leading to conclusions potentially useful to evolutionary linguists, psychologists, archaeologists and anthropologists.

A frequent objection to the computational models and experiments developed by Steels and his team (e.g. Steels 2009) is that they are biologically implausible. Steels' robotic agents spontaneously evolving lexicons and grammars as they repeatedly interact are not Darwinian organisms. Lacking selfish genes, they don't fight or deploy their signalling capacities for purposes of deception. Since their signals need not demonstrate honesty or reliability, the strategic costs of producing an effective signal in the animal world (Maynard Smith & Harper 2003) are absent by experimental design. Many of the problems likely to have been encountered by ancestral humans attempting to establish linguistic communication are consequently not represented.

Steels' work is useful to the extent that it differentiates problems already solved from those which cry out to be addressed using other methods and assumptions. Symbolic communication by its very nature presupposes intentional honesty and communal coherence. Speakers might occasionally cheat once a linguistic code is in place, but a shared code cannot be established unless honesty is the default. It is not difficult to release robots into a community free of competition or conflict. Signallers may then communicate on the basis of infinite trust. In fact, levels of trust beyond anything biologically plausible have been shown to be optimal for linguistic self-organization across a community (Steels 2009). This is an interesting result, confronting Darwinians with a theoretical challenge. Can natural selection design minds to expect 'infinite trust'?

What if Steels' robots could be designated male and female, each male seeking out fertile females and calculating whether to invest in his current partner's offspring or abandon her in favour of mating opportunities elsewhere? Female robots seeking to attract investment for their offspring would develop strategies aimed at maximizing the costs of philanderering. The Female Cosmetic Coalitions (FCC) model (Power 2009) sets out from assumptions in Darwinian behavioural ecology. Instead of invoking principles such as kin selection or reciprocal altrusim in the abstract, it accounts for distinctively human ultrasociality under specified conditions, distinguishing female fitness-enhancing strategies from male ones, differentiating between adjacent generations and connecting the logic at all stages to palaoanthropological and archaeological data. It posits costly communal ritual as the mechanism capable of enforcing cooperation across whole communities, and explains why such ritual should be focused on initiation, especially female initiation timed to coincide with first menstruation. It explains how the experience of initiation transposes language-ready minds from 'brute' reality into 'virtual' or 'institutional' reality – a world of patent fictions collectively taken on trust. It makes fine-grained predictions testable in the light of archaeological data – predictions recently vindicated by finds of Middle Stone Age ochre pigments at Blombos Cave and comparable South African sites. Until a rival hypothesis emerges, FCC seems the most promising way of connecting Steels' experiments and findings with the available archaeological and other empirical data.

Note from Publisher: This article contains the abstract and references.