AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION

This article presents a theoretical criticism of current approaches to the study of the evolution of communication. In particular two very c ommon preconceptions about the subject are analyzed: the role of natur al selection in the definition of the phenomenon of communication and the metaphor of communication as information exchange. An alternative characterization is presented in terms of autopoietic theory, which av oids the mentioned preconceptions. in support of this view, the evolut ion of coordinated activity is studied in a population of artificial a gents playing an interactional game. Dynamical modeling of this evolut ionary process based on game-theoretical considerations shows the exis tence of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the total lack of coordi nated activity which, however, may be unreachable due to the presence of a periodic attractor in a computational model of the same game, act ion coordination evolves even with individual costs against it, due to the presence of spatial structuring processes. A detailed explanation of this phenomenon, which does not require kin selection, is presente d in an extended game, recursive coordination evolves nontrivially whe n the participants share all the relevant information, demonstrating t hat the metaphor of information exchange can be misleading. It is show n that agents engaged in this sort of interaction are able to perform beyond their individual capabilities.