Steels Luc, Szathmáry Eörs
ICREA, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain.
Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Pullach, Munich, Germany, Germany; Evolutionary Systems Research Group, MTA Ecological Research Centre, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Tihany, Hungary.
Biosystems. 2018 Feb;164:128-137. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2017.11.003. Epub 2017 Nov 7.
The well-established framework of evolutionary dynamics can be applied to the fascinating open problems how human brains are able to acquire and adapt language and how languages change in a population. Schemas for handling grammatical constructions are the replicating unit. They emerge and multiply with variation in the brains of individuals and undergo selection based on their contribution to needed expressive power, communicative success and the reduction of cognitive effort. Adopting this perspective has two major benefits. (i) It makes a bridge to neurobiological models of the brain that have also adopted an evolutionary dynamics point of view, thus opening a new horizon for studying how human brains achieve the remarkably complex competence for language. And (ii) it suggests a new foundation for studying cultural language change as an evolutionary dynamics process. The paper sketches this novel perspective, provides references to empirical data and computational experiments, and points to open problems.
人类大脑如何习得和适应语言，以及语言在群体中如何变化。处理语法结构的模式是复制单元。它们在个体大脑中随着变异而出现和增殖，并根据其对所需表达能力、交际成功以及认知努力减少的贡献而接受选择。采用这种观点有两个主要好处。（i）它为同样采用进化动力学观点的大脑神经生物学模型架起了一座桥梁，从而为研究人类大脑如何实现极其复杂的语言能力开辟了新视野。（ii）它为将文化语言变化作为进化动力学过程进行研究提供了新的基础。本文概述了这一新颖观点，提供了实证数据和计算实验的参考文献，并指出了开放性问题。
