Emily

Hard to come by in normal language acquisition, though. So it probably doesn't quite work like that.

For free stuff, we just have a place in the staircase where people drop things that are still good but not needed by their previous owner (mostly books). This works with zero explicit coordination.

I'm kind of amazed/impressed that this works, based on my experience of communal spaces. Don't people ever leave junk that they can't be bothered to get rid of? Does anyone adopt responsibility for getting rid of items that have been there a long time and clearly no one wants?

Since most women managed to reproduce, we can assume a winner strategy is having a large number of daughters

But if everyone adopts this strategy, in a few generations women will by far outnumber men, and suddenly having sons is a brilliant strategy instead. You have to think about what strategies are stable in the population of strategies - as you begin to point towards with the comments about game theory. Yes, game theory has of course been used to look at this type of stuff. (I'm certainly not an expert so I won't get into details on how.)

If you haven't read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, it's a fun read and great for getting into this subject matter. How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker is also a nice readable/popular intro to evolutionary psychology and covers some of the topics you're thinking about here.

Sure, there are conversations where it doesn't matter and can actually make for a good exchange.

I like writing as a communication medium too. I'm a slow thinker, and I'm even slower when a person is looking at me and waiting for me to finish the thought (or the conversation is simply moving on without my thought), so the non-real-time nature of written communication helps.

Granted, we would not edit things like hair or eye color because it would feel like an unwelcome intrusion into other person's individuality even when the person does not exist yet. But we would edit out the potential problems.

One problem with this perspective is that not everyone is agreed on what is a "potential problem" and what falls into "[an]other person's individuality". Deafness springs to mind as an example, and in the other direction, what if ginger hair would increase the odds that your child got bullied?

Interesting. I get grapefruit (which I like better than strawberries) to be quite sour, but not bitter at all.

I definitely understand this perspective, although I think I have it the other way round to you in terms of what the default is (as well as to a lesser extent). That is, I pretty much like the taste of most foods, but a texture that I can't tolerate can easily put me off a food anyway. And if I find something actually disgusting, as opposed to just not what I prefer, it's nearly always a texture issue.