Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Can We Ever Learn More?

This paper investigates the dynamics of cumulative cultural evolution in a simulation concerning the evolution of language This simulation integrates the iterated learning model with the Talking Heads experiment in which a population of agents evolves a language to communicate geometrical coloured objects by playing guessing games and transmitting the language from one generation to the next The results show that cumulative cultural evolution is possible if the language becomes highly regular, which only happens if the language is transmitted from generation to generation.