Lately I’ve come to think of human civilization as largely built on the backs of intelligence and virtue signaling.
In case some people are not convinced of this, Geoffrey Miller argued in How did language evolve? that language itself evolved to allow our ancestors to signal intelligence:
This makes human language look puzzling from a Darwinian viewpoint. Why do we
bother to say anything remotely true, interesting, or relevant to anybody who is not
closely related to us? In answering this question, we have to play by the evolutionary
rules. We can’t just say language is for the good of the group or the species. No trait in
any other species has even been shown to be for the benefit of unrelated group
members. [...]
Burling’s theory also has the same trouble explaining content as Dunbar’s theory. I think
this problem can be solved by thinking about what a big-brained species would want to
advertise during sexual courtship. If intelligence is important for survival and social life,
then it would be a good idea to choose sexual partners for their intelligence. Language
makes a particularly good intelligence-indicator precisely because it has rich content.
We put our thoughts and feelings into words – so when we talk to a potential mate, they
can assess our thoughts and feelings. We can read each other’s minds through
language, so we can choose mates for their minds, not just their bodies or songs. No
other species can do this.
Do you agree that signalling intelligence is the main explanation for the evolution of language? To me, it seems like coalition-building is a more fundamental driving force(after all, being attracted to intelligence only makes sense if intelligence is already valuable in some contexts, and coalition politics seems like an especially important domain) Miller has also argued that sexual signalling is a main explanation of art and music, which Will Buckingham has a good critique of here.
I think signaling loyalty (which is very important for coalition-building) and other virtues is probably comparable in importance as a function of language to signaling intelligence, so Miller does seem to over-emphasize the latter as an explanation, and he does also seem to have a tendency to over-emphasize sexual selection.
Ability to cooperate is important, but I think that status-jockeying is a more ‘fundamental’ advantage because it gives an advantage to individuals, not just groups. Any adaptation that aids groups must first be useful enough to individuals to reach fixation(or near-fixation) in some groups.
I don’t think so, jockeying can only get you so far, and even then only in situations where physical reality doesn’t matter. If you’re in a group of ~50 people, and your rival brings home a rabbit, but you and your friend each bring back half a stag because of your superior coordination capabilities, the guy who brought back the rabbit can say all the clever things he wants, but it’s going to be clear to everyone who’s actually deserving of status. The two of you will gain a significant fitness advantage over the rest of the members of the tribe, and so you will outcompete them.
Fair point, but I note that the cooperative ability only increases fitness here because it boosts the individuals’ status, i.e. they are in a situation where status-jockeying and cooperative behavior are aligned. Of course it’s true that they _are_ often so aligned.
There are primates with proto-language, which I think let them communicate well enough to do these sorts of things. The question then becomes “why go from a four-grunt language to the full variety of human speech?”, and it seems like runaway dynamics make more sense here (in a way that rhymes with the Deutsch-style “humans developed causal reasoning as part of figuring out how to do ritual-style mimicry better” arguments).
why go from a four-grunt language to the full variety of human speech?
Bandwidth. 4 grunts let you communicate 2 bits of information per grunt n grunts let you communicate log(n) bits per grunt. In addition, without a code or compositional language, that’s the most information you can communicate. Even the simple agents in the OpenAI link were developing a binary code to communicate because 2 bits wasn’t enough:
The first problem we ran into was the agents’ tendency to create a single utterance and intersperse it with spaces to create meaning.
In my model, the marginal utility of extra bandwidth and a more expressive code is large and positive when cooperating. This goes on up to the information processing limits of the brain, at which point further bandwidth is probably less beneficial. I think we don’t talk as fast as Marshal Mathers simply because our brains can’t keep up. Evolution is just following the gradient.
The main reason I don’t think runaway dynamics are a major factor is simply because language is very grounded. Most of our language is dedicated to referencing reality. If language evolved because of a signalling spiral, especially an IQ signalling spiral, I’d expect language to look like a game, something like verbal chess. Sometimes it does look like that, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Social signalling seems to be mediated through other communication mechanisms, such as body-language and tone or things like vibing. In all cases, the actual content of the language is mostly irrelevant and doesn’t need to be the expressive, grounded, and compositional mechanism of language to fulfill it’s purpose.
Richard Wrangham begins The Goodness Paradox with the thought that 200 people will peacefully board an aircraft and sit peacefully for a 6-hour flight. 200 chimps would get into innumerable fights in the terminal. On the other hand, no chimps would conspire together to blow up the plane. Why the difference? His answer is “self-domestication”. Proto-humans with a lot of “reactive aggression” were killed or exiled by their group-mates. But doing so required feeling out your group-mates. How much did the asshole’s behavior bother him, him, and her? What did they think of …? What if … ? Language was helpful to putting together a conspiracy and then carrying out any plans. People who could do so were better able to survive because their groups could do more (more co-operators and fewer defectors).
In case some people are not convinced of this, Geoffrey Miller argued in How did language evolve? that language itself evolved to allow our ancestors to signal intelligence:
Do you agree that signalling intelligence is the main explanation for the evolution of language? To me, it seems like coalition-building is a more fundamental driving force(after all, being attracted to intelligence only makes sense if intelligence is already valuable in some contexts, and coalition politics seems like an especially important domain) Miller has also argued that sexual signalling is a main explanation of art and music, which Will Buckingham has a good critique of here.
I think signaling loyalty (which is very important for coalition-building) and other virtues is probably comparable in importance as a function of language to signaling intelligence, so Miller does seem to over-emphasize the latter as an explanation, and he does also seem to have a tendency to over-emphasize sexual selection.
I think this explanation misses something very important. Namely, language lets small groups of agents coordinate for their collective gain. The richer the language and the higher the bandwidth, the more effectively the agents can work together and the more complicated the tasks that they can solve. Agents that can work together will mop the floor with agents that can’t. It’s easy to construct tasks that can only be achieved by letting agents communicate with each other and I suspect the ancestral environment provided plenty of challenges that were easier to solve with communication. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large amount of the sophistication of our language comes from it’s ability to let us jockey for status or to deceive others to more effectively propagate our genes, but I don’t think we should discount that language vastly increases the power of agents that are willing to cooperate.
Ability to cooperate is important, but I think that status-jockeying is a more ‘fundamental’ advantage because it gives an advantage to individuals, not just groups. Any adaptation that aids groups must first be useful enough to individuals to reach fixation(or near-fixation) in some groups.
I don’t think so, jockeying can only get you so far, and even then only in situations where physical reality doesn’t matter. If you’re in a group of ~50 people, and your rival brings home a rabbit, but you and your friend each bring back half a stag because of your superior coordination capabilities, the guy who brought back the rabbit can say all the clever things he wants, but it’s going to be clear to everyone who’s actually deserving of status. The two of you will gain a significant fitness advantage over the rest of the members of the tribe, and so you will outcompete them.
Fair point, but I note that the cooperative ability only increases fitness here because it boosts the individuals’ status, i.e. they are in a situation where status-jockeying and cooperative behavior are aligned. Of course it’s true that they _are_ often so aligned.
There are primates with proto-language, which I think let them communicate well enough to do these sorts of things. The question then becomes “why go from a four-grunt language to the full variety of human speech?”, and it seems like runaway dynamics make more sense here (in a way that rhymes with the Deutsch-style “humans developed causal reasoning as part of figuring out how to do ritual-style mimicry better” arguments).
Bandwidth. 4 grunts let you communicate 2 bits of information per grunt n grunts let you communicate log(n) bits per grunt. In addition, without a code or compositional language, that’s the most information you can communicate. Even the simple agents in the OpenAI link were developing a binary code to communicate because 2 bits wasn’t enough:
In my model, the marginal utility of extra bandwidth and a more expressive code is large and positive when cooperating. This goes on up to the information processing limits of the brain, at which point further bandwidth is probably less beneficial. I think we don’t talk as fast as Marshal Mathers simply because our brains can’t keep up. Evolution is just following the gradient.
The main reason I don’t think runaway dynamics are a major factor is simply because language is very grounded. Most of our language is dedicated to referencing reality. If language evolved because of a signalling spiral, especially an IQ signalling spiral, I’d expect language to look like a game, something like verbal chess. Sometimes it does look like that, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Social signalling seems to be mediated through other communication mechanisms, such as body-language and tone or things like vibing. In all cases, the actual content of the language is mostly irrelevant and doesn’t need to be the expressive, grounded, and compositional mechanism of language to fulfill it’s purpose.
Richard Wrangham begins The Goodness Paradox with the thought that 200 people will peacefully board an aircraft and sit peacefully for a 6-hour flight. 200 chimps would get into innumerable fights in the terminal. On the other hand, no chimps would conspire together to blow up the plane. Why the difference? His answer is “self-domestication”. Proto-humans with a lot of “reactive aggression” were killed or exiled by their group-mates. But doing so required feeling out your group-mates. How much did the asshole’s behavior bother him, him, and her? What did they think of …? What if … ? Language was helpful to putting together a conspiracy and then carrying out any plans. People who could do so were better able to survive because their groups could do more (more co-operators and fewer defectors).