Evolution of Language

People go on about the "evolution" of language all the time, but in woolly terms.  No more!  Some Edinburgh boffins have done an experiment where they start with gibberish and end up with a structured language with grammar and everyfink. 

Kirby and his team showed people a collection of pictures paired with gibberish words, and later tested which pairs they could recall. Whether or not the recollections were accurate, they were recorded and used as the basis of the next group's language training. As the process was repeated, patterns emerged: a certain word might be used, for example, to describe anything that moved horizontally, and another to indicate objects that bounced...

"Over many generations, the grammar goes from ad-hoc and inexpressive into a language that's cleanly structured and expressive," he said. "But what's evolving here isn't the agents" -- the speakers -- "but the language itself. It has its own evolutionary imperative. It wants to be passed on, and finds ways of doing that. We're its hosts."

(Wired article here, refutation of more obvious objections here, paper not yet online)