Communication and Evolution

The influence of nature (i.e., inborn predispositions) and nurture (i.e., culturally learned tendencies) on human communication has long been debated, but naturalistic explanations of communication are becoming increasingly accepted as legitimate ways of theorizing about communication behaviors. This perspective acknowledges that people are biological beings, and are therefore subject to the same evolutionary processes as other biological organisms. Thus, the theory of evolution serves as a mechanism to explain many aspects of human communication. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific explanation to account for why organisms possess certain traits. Evolution proposes that biological organisms’ physical and behavioral characteristics change throughout successive generations to best suit the environment in which the organisms live. When applied to human communication, evolutionary explanations argue that ...

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