I grew up in Dunbar, a seaside town 30 miles outside of Edinburgh, Scotland. I did my undergraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh from 1994-1998 then spent one year doing my MSc in the University's Centre for Cognitive Science. Late in 1999 I returned to the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics to do my PhD with Jim Hurford and Simon Kirby. I am interested in the interactions between natural selection and cultural selection in the evolution of communication - how do individual learner biases influence the cultural development of a population's communication system and how does differential genetic transmission of these learning biases influence the process of cultural evolution?

Home page: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~kenny