How do languages evolve? w/ Prof. Simon Kirby

Humans are an extraordinary successful species. But is our success due to our ability to share knowledge and information with each other? Is language the key to our evolutionary success, given we share 99% of the same DNA as our closest primate relatives?

Simon Kirby is a Professor of Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh and the Founder of the Centre for Language Evolution there which takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying language emergence & evolution.

Simon has pioneered a new approach to understanding cultural evolution of behaviours such as language called Iterated Learning. He uses techniques as diverse as mathematical modelling, computational simulation, and psychological experiments to understand how language evolves and how complex interactions between individual learning, cultural transmission and biological evolution in human populations have led to language evolution even to the present day.

In his Garden Talk, Simon will explain why humans are the only species to evolve language and some of the theories about when and how this ability to acquire and use language occurred in human history. He will also share insights from observing the birth and development new sign languages and how this matching his experiments of creating languages in a lab to answer the question: how do languages evolve?