language evolution – Page 4

Watch Out, Dan Dennett, Your Mind’s Changing Up on You!

I want to look at two recent pieces by Daniel Dennett. One is a formal paper from 2009, The Cultural Evolution of Words and Other Thinking Tools (Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, Volume LXXIV, pp. 1-7, 2009). The other is an informal interview from January of 2013, The Normal Well-Tempered Mind. What interests me is how Dennett thinks about computation in these two pieces.

In the first piece Dennett seems to be using the standard-issue computational model/metaphor that he’s been using for decades, as have others. This is the notion of a so-called von Neumann machine with a single processor and a multi-layer top-down software architecture. In the second and more recent piece Dennett begins by asserting that, no, that’s not how the brain works, I was wrong. At the very end I suggest that the idea of the homuncular meme may have served Dennett as a bridge from the older to the more recent conception.

Words, Applets, and the Digital Computer

As everyone knows, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” as the cultural analogue to the biological gene, or alternatively, a virus. Dennett has been one of the most enthusiastic academic proponents of this idea. In his 2009 Cold Spring Harbor piece Dennett concentrates his attention on words as memes, perhaps the most important class of memes. Midway through the paper tells he us that “Words are not just like software viruses; they are software viruses, a fact that emerges quite uncontroversially once we adjust our understanding of computation and software.”

Those first two phrases, before the comma, assert a strong identification between words and software viruses. They are the same (kind of) thing. Then Dennett backs off. They are the same, providing of course, that “we adjust our understanding of computation and software.” Just how much adjusting is Dennett going to ask us to do?

This is made easier for our imaginations by the recent development of Java, the software language that can “run on any platform” and hence has moved to something like fixation in the ecology of the Internet. The intelligent composer of Java applets (small programs that are downloaded and run on individual computers attached to the Internet) does not need to know the hardware or operating system (Mac, PC, Linux, . . .) of the host computer because each computer downloads a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), designed to translate automatically between Java and the hardware, whatever it is.

The “platform” on which words “run” is, of course, the human brain, about which Dennett says nothing beyond asserting that it is there (a bit later). If you have some problems about the resemblance between brains and digital computers, Dennett is not going to say anything that will help you. What he does say, however, is interesting.

Notice that he refers to “the intelligent composer of Java applets.” That is, the programmer who writes those applets. Dennett knows, and will assert later on, that words are not “composed” in that way. They just happen in the normal course of language use in a community. In that respect, words are quite different from Java applets. Words ARE NOT explicitly designed; Java applets ARE. Those Java applets seem to have replaced computer viruses in Dennett’s exposition, for he never again refers to them, though they (viruses) figured emphatically in the topic sentence of this paragraph.

The JVM is “transparent” (users seldom if ever encounter it or even suspect its existence), automatically revised as needed, and (relatively) safe; it will not permit rogue software variants to commandeer your computer.

Computer viruses, depending on their purpose, may also be “transparent” to users, but, unlike Java applets, they may also commandeer your computer. And that’s not nice. Earlier Dennett had said:

Our paradigmatic memes, words, would seem to be mutualists par excellence, because language is so obviously useful, but we can bear in mind the possibility that some words may, for one reason or another, flourish despite their deleterious effects on this utility.

Perhaps that’s one reason Dennett abandoned his talk of computer viruses in favor of those generally helpful Java applets. Continue reading “Watch Out, Dan Dennett, Your Mind’s Changing Up on You!”

Language Evolution Coursera Proxy

There is not currently a coursera on Language Evolution, so as a vague substitute, I thought I’d do a run down of places on the internet you can find some pretty decent free lectures on the evolution of language by some pretty big names.

1) The first are the videos of the plenaries from last year’s EvoLang conference in Kyoto. http://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/international-conference-en/31/video-en

I’m posting the direct links to all the videos because the above link keeps breaking:

1	Massimo, Piattelli-Palmarini Three Models (and a Half) for the Description of Language Evolution	Video
2	Minoru Asada Towards Language Acquisition by Cognitive Developmental Robotics	Video
3	Cedric Boeckx Homo Combinans	Video
4	Simon Kirby Why Language Has Structure: New Evidence from Studying Cultural Evolution in the Lab and What It Means for Biological Evolution	Video
5	Jenny Saffran Out of the Brains of Babes: Domain-general Learning Mechanisms and Domain-specific Systems	Video
6	Simon Fisher Molecular Windows into Speech and Language	Video
7	Russell Gray The Evolution of Language Without Miracles	Video
8	Rafael Núñez The Irreducible Semantic Communicative Drive	Video
9	Tetsuro Matsuzawa Outgroup: The Study of Chimpanzees to Know the Human Mind	Video
10	Tom Griffiths Neutral Models for Language Evolution。	Video
11	Terrence Deacon Neither Nature nor Nurture: Coevolution, Devolution, and Universality of Language	Video

The videos for the biolinguistics workshop can be found here: http://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/international-conference-en/30/video-en

2) On the CARTA website you can find videos of speakers such as Terence Deacon talking about Symbolic Communication: Why is Human Thought so Flexible? as well as V.S. Ramachandran, Colin Renfrew and Patricia Churchland.

3) The videos from 2011’s ProtoLang can be viewed here: http://www.protolang.umk.pl/videos_and_links

There’s a link to the videos from 2009’s protolang at the bottom of that too, but they all seem to be broken. But you can actually still find them by searching for the author’s name on http://tv.umk.pl/

For example, searching Bart de Boer, you can find: http://tv.umk.pl/#movie=521

4) YouTube.

Highlights include Simon Kirby’s inaugural lecture at Edinburgh University, Kenny Smith at the University of Southampton earlier this year, more Terence Deacon, Luc Steels on robots and loads of other stuff, I am sure you are capable or googling the names of some language evolution folk.

Also, you can watch bbc horizon’s why do we talk featuring Techumseh Fitch, Simon Kirby and others here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75XxjJYuV7I&list=PL9DD35E568234CA7F

And by request in the comments: Peter Richerson – How Possibly Language Evolved http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxJMtZUaeZU

If anyone else has some good video resources please add them in the comments!

More on Dennett on Memes

Still thinking about Dan Dennett’s conception of memetics. He’s got an article in the Encyclopedia of Evolution (Oxford 2005), “New Replicators, The” that’s worth looking at.

Some bits. From the beginning:

…evolution will occur whenever and wherever three conditions are met: replication, variation (mutation), and differential fitness (competition).

In Darwin’s own terms, if there is “descent [i.e., replication] with modification [variation]” and “a severe struggle for life” [competition], better-equipped descendants will prosper at the expense of their competitors. We know that a single material substrate, DNA (with its surrounding systems of gene expression and development), secures the first two conditions for life on earth; the third condition is secured by the finitude of the planet as well as more directly by uncounted environmental challenges.

The first question, then, is whether or not these conditions are met by human culture. Dennett thinks they are and so do I.

From the end, however:

Do any of these candidates for Darwinian replicator actually fulfill the three requirements in ways that permit evolutionary theory to explain phenomena not already explicable by the methods and theories of the traditional social sciences? Or does this Darwinian perspective provide only a relatively trivial unification?

We do not yet know. But are the prospects for non-triviality good enough to warrant considerable investment of conceptual time and energy? And so

We should also remind ourselves that, just as population genetics is no substitute for ecology—which investigates the complex interactions between phenotypes and environments that ultimate yield the fitness differences presupposed by genetics—no one should anticipate that a new science of memetics would overturn or replace all the existing models and explanations of cultural phenomena developed by the social sciences. It might, however, recast them in significant ways and provoke new inquiries in much the way genetics has inspired a flood of investigations in ecology. Continue reading “More on Dennett on Memes”

Dan Dennett on Words in Cultural Evolution

I’ve been reading around in Dan Dennett’s papers and found this one, The Cultural Evolution of Words and Other Thinking Tools (Cold Spring Harbor Symp Quant Biol, Vol. LXXIV, August, 2009). To be sure, I disagree with his use of the meme concept. To be sure, his use is pretty standard and Dennett, in the standard way, claims more for it than can be justified by the current state of our knowledge and theorizing, but this paper is excellent despite that problem.

As the title indicates, Dennett focuses his attention on words and does so in a way that usefully brings their mystery, if you will, though mystery is rather low on Dennett’s intellectual agenda.

What then are words? Do they even exist? This might seem to be a fatuous philosophical question, composed as it is of the very items it asks about, but it is, in fact, exactly as serious and contentious as the claim that genes do or do not really exist. Yes, of course, there are sequences of nucleotides on DNA molecules, but does the concept of a gene actually succeed (in any of its rival formulations) in finding a perspicuous rendering of the important patterns amidst all that molecular complexity? If so, there are genes; if not, then genes will in due course get thrown on the trash heap of science along with phlogiston and the ether, no matter how robust and obviously existing they seem to us today.

For what it’s worth, I have it on good authority that there are languages which lack a word corresponding to our concept of word, though they generally have a word roughly corresponding to our concept of utterance (you can find this observation in, e.g., Alfred Lord, The Singer of Tales). That doesn’t bear directly on the point Dennett is making in those words as lacking a word for this is that really existing phenomenon is common enough, but it does indicate that words do have a rather diffuse or abstract character that makes it difficult to understand what they are and how they operate.

A bit later Dennett continues:

A promise or a libel or a poem is identified by the words that compose it, not by the trails of ink or bursts of sound that secure the occurrence of those words. Words themselves have physical “tokens” (composed of uttered or heard phonemes, seen in trails of ink or glass tubes of excited neon or grooves carved in marble), and so do genes, but these tokens are a relatively superficial part or aspect of these remarkable information structures, capable of being replicated, combined into elaborate semantic complexes known as sentences, and capable in turn of provoking cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses of tremendous power and subtly.

I particularly like his phrase in that first sentence, “the trails of ink or bursts of sound that secure the occurrence of those words.” That secure the occurence, that’s nice. “Anchor” might also work, that anchor the occurence of those words in an utterance or a written text, as though the ink or sound were a tether holding the airy nothings of meaning and syntax to the ground. Continue reading “Dan Dennett on Words in Cultural Evolution”

“Music and the Origins of Language. International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity”.

Find call for Participation below.

“Music and the Origins of Language. International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity”.

15 – 20 September 2013, Cortona, Italy
http://ai.vub.ac.be/events/cortona-2013

The Evolutionary Linguistics Association (ELA) is proud to announce its second summer school in Cortona on Music and the Origins of Language. The school is intended for postdocs, lecturers and predocs with a background in computer science and a strong interest in music and the origins of language.

The summer school will be held in Cortona, Italy from Sunday 15 September to Friday 20 September 2013. Lectures, activities and meals are all collocated in Hotel Oasi and the Palazzone di Cortona. Participants will all stay at Hotel Oasi.

The summer school has a wide-ranging program of background lectures introducing concepts from biology, anthropology, psychology, music theory and linguistics that are helpful to understand the nature of creativity, the role and intimate relations between language and music, and the mechanisms underlying cultural evolution. It further contains technical lectures on the fundamental computational components required for language processing as well as technical ateliers to learn how to set up evolutionary linguistics experiments. Participants have the opportunity to present their latest research in a poster session. Embedded in the school is an ERC workshop of the Flow Machines project on musical style and composition. The school also features artistic ateliers in which participants create new creative works and engage in performance.

Interested researchers can apply by following the registration information that is available on the website. There are a limited number of scholarships available that cover participation and accommodation fees.

It receives support from FP7 PRAISE and INSIGHT projects, the euCognition Network of Excellence and the ESF project DRUST.

For information and queries, please visit the website http://ai.vub.ac.be/events/cortona-2013/ or email cortona2013@ai.vub.ac.be.

The New Pluralistic Approach

There has been a lot of talk round these parts recently of the merits of pluralistic approaches to problems in language evolution, and condemning the assignment of too much explanatory power to statistical correlations away from other forms of evidence, such as cultural learning experiments. Sean and James recently published a paper about this here which includes some commentary on Hay & Bauer (2007), who find that speaker population size and phoneme inventory size correlate (the more speakers a language has, the bigger its phoneme inventory is). James has blogged about this extensively here. More recently Moran, McCloy & Wright presented a critical analysis of Hay & Bauer’s (2007) findings here along with a statistical analysis of their own which uses more languages than Hay & Bauer (2007), and finds little to no correlation between speaker population and various measures of the phonological system, I hope James will do a blog about this as the resident expert.

As I’ve just mentioned, doing further statistical analysis is one good way of disputing or confirming the results of large scale statistical studies. But turning to experimental evidence is also a good way to back up the findings of statistical results and to tease out patterns of causation. I discuss this briefly here.

Recently, I was reading Selten & Warglien (2007) (mentioned by James here and covered by John Hawks here), which is a study which looks at how simple languages emerge within a coordination task with no initial shared language. The experiment uses pairwise interactions in which participants had to refer to figures which could be distinguished using features on three levels of outer shape, inner shape and colour (see picture). Participants were given a code which had a limited number of letters which they were to use to communicate with one another. However, the use of letters within this code had a cost within the language game the participants were playing, so the less letters they used the higher their score. Also, the more communicatively successful they were, the higher their score.

The study was primarily interested in what enhanced the emergence of structure in this code via the communication game. They looked at the effects of 2 variables, the number of letters available and variability in the set of figures. I am only going to discuss the effects of the first variable here. Selten & Warglien (2007) start off with an experiment where only two (and then three) letters were available which showed very little convergence to a common code. A common code is defined as being a code where the signals for all figures agree between the two participants. However, when given a larger inventory of letters to play with, participants were much more successful at creating a common code. This is not surprising as more symbols permit a higher degree of cost efficiency within the language game as you can use more distinct, shorter expressions. Selten & Warglien (2007) also make the point that the human capability to produce a large variety of phonetic signals seems to be at the root of the emergence of most linguistic structure, because if you only have a small inventory of individual units, you have to rely more on positional structure. Positional systems are systems like the Arabic number notation which are more likely invented rapidly rather than the product of slow emergence via cultural evolution, but can be easily used once they have emerged.

This is all very interesting in its own right, but the reason I brought it up in this post is that Selten & Warglien (2007) have shown that you can experimentally explore the effects of the size of inventory on an artificial language in a laboratory setting. I know that the natural direction of causation is to assume that demographic structure (e.g. the size of a population) affects the linguistic structure (e.g. the size of the phoneme inventory), but it might be possible to see whether a common code can be more easily reached within a small language community using only a small number of phonemes, than with a larger speaker community. I’m also not sure how one might create an experimental proxy for size of population in an experiment such as this (perhaps repeated interaction between the same participants compared with interaction within changing pairs). It might also be possible to look at the effects that the size of inventory can have on other linguistic features that have been hypothesised to correlate with population size, e.g. how regular the compositional structure of an emerging language is given difference inventory sizes.

References

Hay, J., & Bauer, L. (2007). Phoneme inventory size and population size Language, 83 (2), 388-400 DOI: 10.1353/lan.2007.0071

Roberts, S. & Winters, J. (2012). Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach. Psychology of Language and Communication, 16(2), pp. 79-183. Retrieved 12 Feb. 2013, from doi:10.2478/v10057-012-0008-6

Selten, R., & Warglien, M. (2007). The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (18), 7361-7366 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0702077104

10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, 14th – 17th April 2014, Vienna: Call for Papers

The 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language will take place in the beautiful capital of Austria, Vienna, from April 14th to April 17th 2014.

The plenary speakers are:

“Plenary Speakers

The Call for Papers can be found here (Deadline for paper & poster submission is September 1, deadline for workshop proposals April , 2013).

To quote from the website:

“The Evolang conference series provides the major meeting for researchers worldwide in the origins and evolution of language. The Evolang conferences are interdisciplinary, with contributions from disciplines including, but not limited to: anthropology, archeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, genetics, linguistics, modeling, paleontology, physiology, primatology, and psychology. Typically, about 300 delegates attend, with representatives from all these disciplines. Additional information on Evolang can be found here.”

More information can be found on the website

Berwick, Friederici, Chomsky, Bolhuis (2013): Evolution, brain, and the nature of language

UPDATE: This paper is now a Trends in Cognitive Sciences Free Featured Article and is available for free here

Noam Chomsky, who infamously stated that the field of language evolution research is “a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense” (see, e.g. here), has a new paper on the topic in press (together with linguist Robert Berwick and neuroscientists Angela Friederici and Johan Bolhuis) called Evolution, brain, and the nature of language (here, unfortunately it’s behind a paywall).

Here’s the abstract:

Language serves as a cornerstone for human cognition, yet much about its evolution remains puzzling. Recent research on this question parallels Darwin’s attempt to explain both the unity of all species and their diversity. What has emerged from this research is that the unified nature of human language arises from a shared, species-specific computational ability. This ability has identifiable correlates in the brain and has remained fixed since the origin of language approximately 100 thousand years ago. Although songbirds share with humans a vocal imitation learning ability, with a similar underlying neural organization, language is uniquely human.

Also interesting is their figure on the Desing of the language system:

“The basic design of language. There are three components: syntactic rules and representations, which, together with lexical items, constitute the basis of the language system, and two interfaces through which mental expressions are connected to the external world (external sensory-motor interface) and to the internal mental world (internal conceptual-intentional interface).”

This still looks very much like the model advocated in for example, the influential and controversial Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002 Science paper (see e.g. here) and from a brief look through the review. The paper also reiterates the view that language is primary an instrument aiding internal thought, and its use for communication is a later by-product (a view that has been thouroughly criticized, by for example Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff, e.g. here):

“communication, an element of externalization, is an ancillary aspect of language, not its key function, as maintained by what is perhaps a majority of scholars (cf. [Jim Hurford, Michael Tomasello], among many others). Rather, language serves primarily as an internal ‘instrument of thought’”

The origin of language in gesture–speech unity

In honor of a new book entitled “How Language Began” by David McNeil, the author has been blogging about the origin of language in gesture–speech unity over at the Cambridge Extra/Linguist List part of the CUP site. These blog posts are lengthy, thought provoking and include very thorough reading lists for the interested.

Part 1: Language and Imagery

Part 2: Gesture-first

Part 3: Mead’s Loop (1)

Part 4: Mead’s Loop (2). Wider consequences.

I’m not sure if there’s any more coming, but I wish more authors and professors would take the time to have a good old blog on open access platforms about their work.

Degeneracy emerges as a design feature in response to ambiguity pressures

Two weeks ago my supervisor, Simon Kirby, gave a talk on some of the work that’s been going on in the LEC. Much of his talk focused on one of the key areas in language evolution research: the emergence of the basic design features that underpin language as a system of communication. He gave several examples of these design features, mostly drawn from the eminent linguist, Charles Hockett, before moving on to one of the main areas of focus over the past few years: compositionality (the ability for complex expressions to derive their meaning from the combined meaning of their parts; see Michael’s post and Sean’s post for some good previous coverage). Simon’s argument is that compositionality, as well as some other design features of language, emerge from two competing constraints: a pressure to be useful (expressivity) and a pressure to be learned (compressibility).

The general gist of the talk was that by varying the relative pressures of these two constraints we can evolve very different systems of communication. To get something approaching language we thus need to reach a balance between learning and use. First, naïve learning is required because it forces language to adapt to the learning bottleneck imposed by the maturational constraints on child learning. Still, even with this inter-generational learning pressure, language isn’t merely a passive task of remembering and reproducing a set of forms and meanings. Instead, we need to also account for usage dynamics: here, the system must display a capacity to be expressive, in so much that there is an ability for signals to differentiate between meanings within a language.

From Kirby, Cornish & Smith’s (2008) work we know that a language heavily biased towards maximally expressivity is very much like the initial generation of their experiments: there is an idiosyncratic set of one-form to one-meaning pairs without any systematic structure. It’s expressive because every possible meaning in the space has a label. By contrast, a stronger bias towards learnability results in highly compressible languages: that is, we see highly underspecified systems of communication, with the most extreme example being one-form to all-meanings. The result of balancing these two forces over Iterated Learning (henceforth, IL) is the emergence of compositionality: a learnable, yet highly structured communication system that is the result of a pressure to generalise over a set of novel stimuli.

Continue reading “Degeneracy emerges as a design feature in response to ambiguity pressures”