Providing information can be a stable non-cooperative evolutionary strategy

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.