For information to be shared between multiple receivers, all of the receivers need to understand the way in which its content is represented: they need to play a cooperative game in which they all obey the same linguistic rules. This is why the biological advantages of enhanced communication are so dependent on the cooperative tendencies of the communicating species. Given the preadaptations of our ancestors, it turned out that enhanced communication brought sufficient adaptive advantages to support the cultural evolution of communication systems with the complexity and scope of natural language. Natural language has a considerable capacity for representation as well as for communication, but unsurprisingly, it is best suited to the task for which it evolved: the immediate expression of our thoughts to other people via audible signals. For this reason, it has the representational disadvantages of transience, dependency on human memory, and semantic restriction to the cognitive structures that the human brain can support without external scaffolding. In contrast, the structure and media of artefactual languages offer a variety of representational advantages to the cultural information that they carry, just as DNA's double-stranded structure has greater stability than single-stranded RNA, and its complementary structure makes it particularly suitable for accurate replication and dispersal.

Longevity and Fecundity

The most obvious representational advantage that artefacts have over speech is their persistence: they increase information's longevity. Any representation lasts only as long as the medium in which it is realized.