NATURAL AND ARTEFACTUAL LANGUAGES: A MECHANISM FOR CULTURAL EVOLUTION

Natural language provides a mechanism for cultural evolution by ensuring the persistent heredity of variations in both cultural information and information about its own construction. In the process, it not only facilitates but also limits our thinking to the ways its vocabulary and structures make possible. But the human capacity for metarepresentation frees cultural information from the restrictions of any one medium or language, and has also propelled the evolution of artefactual languages, which provide evolutionary mechanisms for specialist areas of culture. And cooperation between diverse cultural specialists can stimulate further, innovative competition between the cultural information that they share.