From Social Conformity to Canalized Knowedge - A computational study of evolution of linguistic knowledge
山内肇

Abstract:
It has been argued that developmental process of linguistic
ability is non-trivially canalized (i.e., the possible search
space in the developmental process is biased to a certain
extent). For example, through his entire research life,
Chomsky (2002) has claimed that humans share the same
seed of linguistic knowledge in their genes, hence every
child can develop her language with allegedly insufficient
inputs. However, from an evolutionary perspective, it
remains a mystery that how such canalized knowledge was
induced. According to Chomsky linguistic knowledge was
independently created from communicative acts; it was
somehow "popped-up" sometime in the evolutionary history
of human being. However, as Waddington (1975) succinctly
discussed in his essay, it is more natural to assume that such
canalized knowledge was gradually built from social
conformity created through spontaneous communicative acts.
In other words, linguistic knowledge is a set of norms of
communication which are a reflection of linguistic
conformity spontaneously created through a tremendous
amount of communications.
For this view to be feasible, apparently it requires a
mechanism that supports somewhat Lamarckian flow of
information; communicative conformity created in a
population is somehow reflected in canalized knowledge in
later generations. In this presentation, we show that the
theory of Niche Construction (Laland et al, 2001,
Odling-Smee et al., 2003) can be used for this purpose, and
examined with computer models. In particular, we will
present the following three important aspects derived from
this type of evolution. First, "learning" is the key process of
this type of evolution. Secondly, the canalization process can
take place in a cyclic manner so that more and more
communicative conventions can be reflected in canalized
knowledge. Finally, if learning is somehow biased, such a
tendency can be faithfully reflected in the canalized
knowledge through the social conformity.