Evolution and communication

Abstract

The connections between communication, culture, and cognition are complex, and some insights into these connections arise from evolutionary approaches. One such recent insight is that, as Tomasello (1999, p. 78) notes, ‘Humans inherit their environments as much as they inherit their genomes’. Equally striking is the possibility that genes and culture may interact, perhaps that they have a symbiotic relationship and constitute a ‘double helix’ (Levinson, 2005). This chapter will introduce some key issues in the evolutionary analysis of communication and cultural transmission; it suggests that much everyday communication is strategic, geared towards persuading others and achieving adaptive goals, even when it does not appear so to the parties to that communication (contrasting with the ideas discussed in Chapters 6 and 12). The principal argument is that evolutionarily inspired accounts of communication and cultural transmission can further benefit from insights from ‘embodied’ cognition (such embodiment also has an impact on how we view the basic processes of communicative exchange; see Chapter 5). Cognition, on such a view, is simultaneously ‘extended’ beyond the skin into the environment, and ‘grounded’ by intrinsic connections to action, emotion, and bodily experience, leading to an egocentric view of communication (a similar conclusion is reached on the basis of a different perspective, in Chapter 9).