Providing information can be a stable non-cooperative evolutionary strategy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that providing information can be an evolutionarily stable strategy, with communication serving as a signal of an individual's ability to acquire novel information, despite no material benefits to recipients.

Contribution

It introduces the concept that communication can be a stable non-cooperative strategy used to advertise information-gathering ability, explaining language's evolutionary persistence.

Findings

Communication strategies are stable and coexist as competitive and uniform types.

Providing information can be an evolutionarily stable strategy despite costs.

Communication acts as a signal of information acquisition ability.

Abstract

Human language is still an embarrassment for evolutionary theory, as the speaker's benefit remains unclear. The willingness to communicate information is shown here to be an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), even if acquiring original information from the environment involves significant cost and communicating it provides no material benefit to addressees. In this study, communication is used to advertise the emitter's ability to obtain novel information. We found that communication strategies can take two forms, competitive and uniform, that these two strategies are stable and that they necessarily coexist.