The book also provides descriptions of research experiments and related open software and hardware tools, allowing the reader to gain a practical knowledge of the topic.The book will be of interest to scientists and undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of cognition, artificial life, artificial intelligence and linguistics.

A Synthetic Approach to the Study of the Evolution of Communication and Language.- Theoretical Aspects of Communication and Language.- Artificial Organisms with Human Language.- Evolution of Language as One of the Major Evolutionary Transitions.- Strategic Aspects of Communication.- Theoretical Tools in Modeling Communication and Language Dynamics.- Emergence of Scale-Free Syntax Networks.- Evolution of Communication.- Evolving Communication in Embodied Agents: Theory, Methods, and Evaluation.- Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication.- Producer Biases and Kin Selection in the Evolution of Communication.- Evolution of Signaling in a Multi-Robot System: Categorization and Communication.- Evolution of Implicit and Explicit Communication in Mobile Robots.- Evolving Communication in Embodied Agents: Assessment and Open Challenges.- Evolution of Language.- Modeling The Formation of Language in Embodied Agents: Methods and Open Challenges.- Modeling the Formation of Language: Embodied Experiments.- Mathematical Modeling of Language Games.- Modeling the Formation of Language in Embodied Agents: Conclusions and Future Research.- Conclusion.- Embodied and Communicating Agents: Towards the Establishment of a Solid Theoretical and Methodological Framework.- Appendix: Software and Hardware Tools.- Evorobot*.- E-puck.- Babel.

From the reviews:“One of the most challenging problems in human cognition is the origin of language. … The editors of this book have brought together two communities of researchers to record the current state of the research agenda and report some recent advances. … This volume is a fascinating summary of the state of the art in a challenging area of research. It serves as a sobering reminder of how far we are from a consistent bottom-up explanation of the wonder of human language.” (H. Van Dyke Parunak, ACM Computing Reviews, December, 2010)