The attraction of computer modelling is obvious. More and more cheaply, models can be built to simulate just about anything, from the physics of elementary particles to the art of music composition, from nuclear chemistry to the functioning of national economies, from evolution to the world of Shakespeare.

Simulations are lightning quick in comparison to many physical, biological and social experimentation methods. A complicated simulation might take as little as a few minutes on today's machines. Simulations never suffer from dirty test tubes or interviewer bias and can be performed at any time of the day or night, rain or shine.

Another hugely attractive aspect for ecologists, nuclear researchers and social scientists alike is the freedom to run experiments unthinkable in the real world. A meteorologist can't test the effects on the upper atmosphere of letting off 100-megaton nuclear bombs, and a cognitive scientist can't deprive a child of all human contact to test hypotheses of intellectual development - all of this and more, however, is but an "Enter" away in the artificial realities of the computer.

The key question I look at in this essay is - given there is a world of promise, what has been delivered to EOL researchers?

The EOL discussion is a perfect candidate for simulation experiments and for well over a decade now research in the development of communication systems, or various aspects of them, has flourished (see below for references). Because language developed in the distant past (all agree more than 60,000 years ago) there is no way to directly gather evidence, at least for its development in our own species. Now also (at least in the West) all experiments with human beings need to go through an often lengthy approval process with ethics committees, and issues of privacy and representative sampling (i.e., the first-year psychology student problem) often detract from results. However, language (it is thought by most) is unique to Homo Sapiens and so experimentation with other species is often dismissed as totally irrelevant (see Wallman, 1992 or Taylor, 1997). On top of this, research with other species can be horrendously expensive and take years to get results from (as with the work of Rumbaugh and Savage-Rumbaugh, see Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin, 1994). This often makes such research impracticable.