This press release from EurekAlert describes some research into how communication strategies evolve among social creatures. This is a difficult area to study by observing the creatures themselves, but a group of researchers looked at the behavior of virtual robots with virtual genomes that evolved over time due to recombination and mutation. They ran multiple generations of these robots under different conditions in an environment that included food sources and poison sources and was set up to more or less realistically present the same evolutionary pressures—costs and benefits for signalling the location of food, for example—as the real world does for real live social organisms. The conditions that the researchers varied included whether selection was stronger at the group or the individual level, and whether the colonies of robots were genetically similar or not. After running the simulations, they used the genomes from the simulations in real robots, and the real ones behaved as the virtual ones had.
The press release noted that the circumstances that favored rapid evolution of communication are those in which group-level selection was stronger and those in which the robots in a group were genetically similar. Another finding that really struck me is that once a communication strategy was in place, it tended to limit any possibilities for enhancing communication; the cost of disrupting signalling to change things, even for the better, was steep enough that even a sub-optimal system was fairly stable. To quote from the full paper in Current Biology (by Dario Floreano, Sara Mitri, Stéphane Magnenat, and Laurent Keller):
“Importantly, our results show that once a given system of communication has evolved, it may constrain the evolution of more efficient communication systems because it would require going through a stage where communication between signalers and receivers is perturbed. This finding supports the idea of the possible arbitrariness and imperfection of communication systems, which can be maintained despite their suboptimal nature. Similar observations have been made about evolved biological systems, which are formed by the randomness of the evolutionary selection process, leading, for example, to different dialects in the language of the honey-bee dance.”
Contingency and imperfection…the stuff of life.
