The Origins of Language -- Darwin\'s Unsolved Mystery

Despite the enormous success of Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain the adaptation and origins of biological species, there is one gap which remains largely unsolved. It is the question of the origins and evolution of language, something regarded by many as the capacity that makes us humans unique. Over the past decade we have developed an experimental methodology for tackling this question based on computational and robotic models of populations of agents which self-organise a symbolic communication system by playing situated language games. I will show various examples of this methodology in action and explain the theory of `language evolution by linguistic selection' which has come out of it.

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