Signals: Evolution, Learning and Information * By BRIAN SKYRMS
Simon M. Huttegger · Analysis · 2011
Suppose Max succeeds in communicating some information to Moritz by using signals. There seems to be no deep mystery behind their success as long as their preferences coincide (which they do, presumably). In this case, Max has nothing to hide from Moritz. All they need to have is a convention concerning the use of the signals. This basic setting, which was invented by David Lewis (1969), is the point of departure for Brian Skyrms’s latest book, Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information. Skyrms, however, goes much farther in investigating the structure and significance of signalling interactions. Finding a signalling convention appears to be a moral certainty in the case of Max and Moritz. Even if Max and Moritz do not possess human rationality and are instead very simple organisms, like bacteria, one would expect the successful use of signals to evolve. Until fairly recently most people would have subscribed to the view that in Lewis signalling games the emergence of signalling is indeed a moral certainty. Skyrms himself did so in his (1996), where he studied the special case of only two signals in terms of a basic dynamic evolutionary model. Dynamic evolutionary models can describe the evolution of signalling from arbitrary initial conditions. In the special case of two signals, the answer from basic evolutionary dynamics is essentially affirmative. Signalling almost always evolves.