>>13327061This is actually a very interesting question, and one that we are only starting to explore.
It's probably not always useful to think of it as an optimization process, but in general, it does appear that some form of constrained optimization generally plays a central role in evolution, communication, learning, social innovation, and many other processes.
There are some mathematical models of these kinds of ideas, but the work is still very immature. Its basically either very articificial agent based computational models, or some sort of game theoretic analysis.
The closest thing to what you are talking about would probably be Optimality Theoretic Linguistics (Paul Smolensky), game theoretic epistemology (Bryan Skyrms, Kevin Zollman, Simon Huttegger, etc), or evolutionary anthropology (Joseph Henrich, Boyd & Richerson, etc). All of them are very interesting areas of research. I think John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary have developed a lot of ideas that would be relevant in this domain but they were looking at animals in general, and not just specifically humans.
