Cumulative cultural evolution of systematic structure and grammatical complexity in humans and baboons
Simon Kirby (CLE, University of Edinburgh)
Tuesday, December 10
11:30am – 12:30pm
DSB, room 1.17
In this talk, I will present new analyses of some old iterated sequence learning experiments in humans and a newer version of the same experiment run with Nicolas Claidiere, Kenny Smith and Joel Fagot on a population of captive baboons. Mostly, I have been trying to figure out how to test the intuition that in these experiments cultural evolution is both making sequences simpler and making them more complex depending on what you think those terms mean. I’ll try and show that we can use different algorithms for compressing the data from these experiments to capture this intuition, and in doing so reveal that humans and baboons both exhibit cumulative cultural evolution, but in importantly different ways. I hope to convince you that this captures something fundamental about the products of cultural evolution including human language.