Kirby, Simon. “Transitions: The evolution of linguistic replicators.” In The language phenomenon , pp. 121-138. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.
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Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995) propose a series of major transitions in the evolutionary history of life. Their work provides a rich framework for thinking about replication. They identified the importance of language in this light, but language is a new system of replication in more than one sense: it is both an enabler of cultural replicators with unlimited heredity, and also a new kind of evolutionary system itself. Iterated learning is the process of linguistic transmission, and it drives both language change and the transitions to qualitatively new kinds of linguistic system. By seeing language as an evolutionary system, the biggest payoff we get may be the ability to take biologists’ insights into the evolution of life and apply them to the evolution of language.