Only where meanings don’t matter is ‘syntactical’ complexity free to evolve.#
Zahavi’s… move was to divide ‘natural selection’ into two distinct categories. First, ‘utilitarian selection’ – selection for ever greater efficiency in, say, locomotion, circulation or vision. The other category is what Zahavi terms ‘signal selection’, whose logic is the reverse. Signal selection (which includes sexual selection) is selection for ‘wastefulness’.#
As soon as a signal is under voluntary control, it can be produced both honestly and for the purposes of deceit. Thus, it is no longer reliably honest like a reflex, limbic signal is. It follows that there is no possibility of creating voluntary strings of semantic tokens (that is, meaningful language) without sacrificing the guarantee of honesty.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)
The reliability required in signaling militates against efficiency. Handicaps increase the reliability of signals not despite the fact that they make an animal less efficient, but because they do. Any improvement in a signal must be accompanied by a cost to the signaler – that is, must make the signal’s bearer less well-adapted to its environment.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)
In signals, cost is of the very essence; it is necessary to the existence of the signal. If there is no cost, nothing prevents cheaters from using a signal to their benefit and to the detriment of the receivers, and that signal will lose its value as a signal.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)
The number of output discriminations of a system (i.e., its behavioral repertoire) is limited by the variety of information inherent in its input.#Quoted in Ronald Heiner, “The Origin of Predictable Behavior” (1983)