Simulating the real origins of communication (2014)
Journal Article
Blythe, R., & Scott-Phillips, T. (2014). Simulating the real origins of communication. PLoS ONE, 9(11), Article e113636. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113636

How communication systems emerge is a topic of relevance to several academic disciplines. Numerous existing models, both mathematical and computational, study this emergence. However, with few exceptions, these models all build some form of communica... Read More about Simulating the real origins of communication.

How Darwinian is cultural evolution? (2014)
Journal Article
Claidière, N., Scott-Phillips, T., & Sperber, D. (2014). How Darwinian is cultural evolution?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1642), Article 20130368. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0368

Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectiona... Read More about How Darwinian is cultural evolution?.

The niche construction perspective: A critical appraisal (2014)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T., Laland, K., Shuker, D., Dickins, T., & West, S. (2014). The niche construction perspective: A critical appraisal. Evolution: International Journal of Organic Evolution, 68(5), 1231-1243. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12332

Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary... Read More about The niche construction perspective: A critical appraisal.

Combinatorial communication in bacteria: Implications for the origins of linguistic generativity (2014)
Journal Article
Scott-Phillips, T., Gurney, J., Ivens, A., Diggle, S., & Popat, R. (2014). Combinatorial communication in bacteria: Implications for the origins of linguistic generativity. PLoS ONE, 9(4), Article e95929. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0095929

Combinatorial communication, in which two signals are used together to achieve an effect that is different to the sum of the effects of the component parts, is apparently rare in nature: it is ubiquitous in human language, appears to exist in a simpl... Read More about Combinatorial communication in bacteria: Implications for the origins of linguistic generativity.