Science News – Page 3 – Replicated Typo

Prairie Dog Communication

istockphoto.com A recent NPR radio show covered the research of the biosemiotician Con Slobodchikoff of the Univeristy of Arizone on prairie dog calls. The piece is very public-orientated, but still might be worth listening to.

We’ve all (I hope) heard of the vervet monkeys, which have different alarm calls for different predators, such as for leopard (Panthera pardus), martial eagle (Polemaetus bellicosus), and python (Python sebae). (Seyfarth et al. 1980) For each of these predators, an inherent and unlearned call is uttered by the first spectator, after which the vervet monkeys respond in a suitable manner – climb a tree, seek shelter, etc. It appears, however, that prairie dogs have a similar system, and that it is a bit more complicated.

Slobodchikoff conducted a study where three girls (probably underpaid, underprivaleged, and underappreciated (under)graduate students) walked through a prairie dog colony wearing shirts of the colors green, yellow, and blue. The call of the first prairie dog to notice them was recorded, after which the prairie dogs all fled into their burrows. The intern then walked through the entire colony, took a break for ten minutes, changed shirts, and did it again.

What is interesting is that the prairie dogs have significantly different calls (important, as they are pretty much exactly the same to human ears) for blue and yellow, but not for yellow and green. This is due to the dichromatic nature of praire dog eyesight (for a full study of the eyesight of retinal photoreceptors of subterranean rodents, consult Schleich et al. 2010). The distinction between blue and yellow is important, however, as there isn’t necessarily any reason that blue people are any more dangerous to praire dogs than yellow ones. “This in turn suggests that the prairie dogs are labeling the predators according to some cognitive category, rather than merely providing instructions on how to escape from a particular predator or responding to the urgency of a predator attack.” (Slobodchikoff 2009, pp. 438)

Another study was then done where two towers were built and a line was strung between them. When cut out shapes were slung down the line, the prairie dogs were able to distinguish a triangle from a circle, but not a circle from a square. So, the prairie dogs are not entirely perfect at encoding information. The conclusion still stands however that more information is encoded in the calls than is entirely relevant to a suitable reaction (unless one were to argue that evolutionary pressure existed on prairie dogs to distinguish blue predators from yellow ones.)

NPR labels this ‘prairiedogese’, which makes me shiver and reminds me of Punxatawney Pennsylvania, where Bill Murray was stuck on a vicious cycle in the movie Groundhog Day, forced every day to watch the mayor recite the translated proclamation of the Groundhog, which of course spoke in ‘groundhogese’. Luckily, however, there won’t be courses in this ‘language’.

References:

Schleich, C., Vielma, A., Glösmann, M., Palacios, A., & Peichl, L. (2010). Retinal photoreceptors of two subterranean tuco-tuco species (Rodentia, Ctenomys): Morphology, topography, and spectral sensitivity The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 518 (19), 4001-4015 DOI: 10.1002/cne.22440

Seyfarth, R., Cheney, D., & Marler, P. (1980). Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: evidence of predator classification and semantic communication Science, 210 (4471), 801-803 DOI: 10.1126/science.7433999

Slobodchikoff CN, Paseka A, & Verdolin JL (2009). Prairie dog alarm calls encode labels about predator colors. Animal cognition, 12 (3), 435-9 PMID: 19116730

Tool making and Language Evolution

There’s an often cited gap in tool making history in which humans did not advance from simple Oldowan tools (which date back to about 2.5 million years ago) until about 500,000 years ago when progress became much faster. There is much debate as to whether this gap in progress is the result of the cognitive abilities to make more innovative tools or if it was an issue of dexterity.

A recent article by Faisal et al. (2010) “The Manipulative Complexity of Lower Paleolithic Stone Toolmaking” has tried to address these problems by assessing the manipulative complexity of tool making tasks from the Oldowan tools to the more advanced hand axes from much later.

Lower Palaeolithic toolmaking — A stone ‘core’ (A) is struck with a hammerstone (B) in order to detach sharp stone ‘flakes’. In Oldowan toolmaking (C, top) the detached flakes (left in photo) are used as simple cutting tools and the core (right in photo) is waste. In Acheulean toolmaking (C, bottom), strategic flake detachments are used to shape the core into a desired form, such as a handaxe. Both forms of toolmaking are associated with activation of left ventral premotor cortex (PMv), Acheulean toolmaking activates additional regions in the right hemisphere, including the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) of the inferior parietal lobule, right PMv, and the right hemisphere homolog of anterior Broca's area: Brodmann area 45 (BA 45).

The following is taken from a press release from Eureka.org:

Researchers used computer modelling and tiny sensors embedded in gloves to assess the complex hand skills that early humans needed in order to make two types of tools during the Lower Palaeolithic period, which began around 2.5 million years ago. The cross-disciplinary team, involving researchers from Imperial College London, employed a craftsperson called a flintnapper to faithfully replicate ancient tool-making techniques.

The team say that comparing the manufacturing techniques used for both Stone Age tools provides evidence of how the human brain and human behaviour evolved during the Lower Palaeolithic period.

The flintnapper who participated in today’s study created two types tools including the razor-sharp flakes and hand-held axes. He wore a data glove with sensors enmeshed into its fabric to record hand and arm movements during the production of these tools.

After analysing this data, the researchers discovered that both flake and hand-held axe manufacturing techniques were equally complex, requiring the same kind of hand and arm dexterity. This enabled the scientists to rule out motor skills as the principal factor for holding up stone tool development.

The team deduced from their results that the axe-tool required a high level of brain processing.

This has implications for language evolution as brain scans from tool makers have shown significant overlap with areas involved in discourse-level language processing as well as complex hand gestures. The study finishes with the following:

…the anatomical overlap of Late Acheulean toolmaking and right hemisphere linguistic processing may reflect the flexible “mapping” of diverse overt behaviors onto shared functional substrates in the brain. This implies that: 1) selection acting on either language or toolmaking abilities could have indirectly favored elaboration of neural substrates important for the other, and 2) archaeological evidence of Paleolithic toolmaking can provide evidence for the presence of cognitive capacities also important to the modern human faculty for language.

Read the original article at PLoS ONE:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013718

Mapping Linguistic Phylogeny to Politics

In a recent article covered in NatureNews in Societes Evolve in Steps, Tom Currie of UCL, and others, like Russell Gray of Auckland, use quantitative analysis of the Polynesian language group to plot socioanthropological movement and power hierarchies in Polynesia. This is based off of previous work, available here, which I saw presented at the Language as an Evolutionary Systemconference last July. The article claims that the means of change for political complexity can be determined using linguistic evidence in Polynesia, along with various migration theories and archaeological evidence.

I have my doubts.

Note: Most of the content in this post is refuted wonderfully in the comment section by one of the original authors of the paper. I highly recommend reading the comments, if you’re going to read this at all – that’s where the real meat lies. I’m keeping this post up, finally, because it’s good to make mistakes and learn from them. -Richard

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I had posted this already on the Edinburgh Language Society blog. I’ve edited it a bit for this blog. I should also state that this is my inaugural post on Replicated Typo; thanks to Wintz’ invitation, I’ll be posting here every now and again. It’s good to be here. Thanks for reading – and thanks for pointing out errors, problems, corrections, and commenting, if you do. Research blogging is relatively new to me, and I relish this unexpected chance to hone my skills and learn from my mistakes. (Who am I, anyway?) But without further ado:

I have my doubts. The talk that was given by Russell Gray suggested that there were still various theories about the migratory patterns of the Polynesians – in particular, where they started from. What his work did was to use massive supercomputers to narrow down all of the possibilities, by using lexicons and charting their similarities. The most probable were then recorded, and their statistical probability indicated what was probably the course of action. This, however, is where the ability for guessing ends. Remember, this is massive quantificational statistics. If one has a 70% probability chance of one language being the root of another, that isn’t to say that that language is the root, much less that the organisation of one determines the organisation of another. But statistics are normally unassailable – I only bring up this disclaimer because there isn’t always clear mapping between language usage and migration.

Continue reading “Mapping Linguistic Phylogeny to Politics”

New Language and Genetics department

Next week, on the 1st October, there will be a new language and genetics department opening at the Max Planck Institute, the first research department in the world entirely devoted to understanding the relationship between language and genes!!!

This excites me so I wanted to share the news.

This statement is from Simon Fisher, who will head the new department about what they will be trying to achieve:

‘We aim to uncover the DNA variations which ultimately affect different facets of our communicative abilities, not only in children with language-related disorders but also in the general population, and even through to people with exceptional linguistic skills’, says L&G director Simon Fisher. ‘Our work attempts to bridge the gaps between genes, brains, speech and language, by integrating molecular findings with data from other levels of analysis, particularly cell biology and neuro-imaging. In addition, we hope to trace the evolutionary history and worldwide diversity of the key genes, which may shed new light on language origins.’

More signs of the growing and diversifying field of language evolution!

Here’s a link to the news on the MPI website: http://www.mpi.nl/news/new-mpi-department-language-genetics

Two new Greenhill Papers

Simon Greenhill has just announced two new papers on applying phylogenetic techniques to the study of culture. No doubt I’ll be blogging about these at some point in the future. Below are the abstracts:

Continue reading “Two new Greenhill Papers”

Guardian Science Blogs

Some smart moves by the Guardian. They’ve created their own mini science blog network, containing some top names and proven bloggers. There are currently five blogs: Punctuated Equilibrium, Political Science, The Lay Scientist, Life and Physics. The fifth blog, in case you were concerned about my ability to count, is going to rotate between various bloggers, the first of which being the brilliant Mo Costandi of Neurophilosophy. I would normally subscribe to each of these blogs individually, so it’s nice to see them all under one digital roof of science-blogging goodness.

Btw, here’s the RSS feed for all the blogs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/scienceblogs/roundup/rss.

Massive Science Blogging Aggregator

If you are quite keen on keeping up with the ever-changing science blog ecosystem, then a must visit website is the newly created ScienceBlogging.org:

Created by Anton Zuiker (MisterSugar), Bora Zivkovic (A Blog Around The Clock) and Dave Munger (Word Munger), the site aggregates all the major science group blogs, blogging networks, aggregators and services. Great stuff. They also have a blog.

Marc Hauser investigated for scientific misconduct

The Boston Globe reported today that Marc Hauser is on leave due to scientific misconduct . The Great Beyond summarises the article as follows:

The trouble centers on a 2002 paper published in the journal Cognition (subscription required). Hauser was the first author on the paper, which found that cotton-top tamarins are able to learn patterns – previously thought to be an important step in language acquisition. The paper has been retracted, for reasons which are reportedly unclear even to the journal’s editor, Gerry Altmann.

Two other papers, a 2007 article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and a 2007 Science paper, were also flagged for investigation. A correction has been published on the first, and Science is now looking into concerns about the second. And the Globe article highlights other controversies, including a 2001 paper in the American Journal of Primatology, which has not been retracted although Hauser himself later said he was unable to replicate the results. Findings in a 1995 PNAS paper were also questioned by an outside researcher, Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed the original data and said he found “not a thread of compelling evidence” to support the paper’s conclusions.

Hauser has taken a year-long leave from the university.

Continue reading “Marc Hauser investigated for scientific misconduct”

Physicists get linguist envy?

So I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago on my Hungarian friend’s blog in which I wrote about, amongst other things, why some linguists have physics envy, but I just read a new scientist article in which it seems physicists can have linguistics envy too!

Murray Gell-Mann, a nobel prize winning physicist (who discovered quarks), has taken it upon himself to try to work out the origins of human language:

Another pet project is an attempt to trace the majority of human languages back to a common root. Since the 19th century, linguists have been comparing languages to infer their common ancestry, but in most cases, Gell-Mann says, this kind of analysis loses the trail 6000 or 7000 years back. He says most linguists insist it is impossible to follow the trail any further into the past and – this is what truly rankles with him – “absurdly, they don’t even want to try”.

Gell-Mann heads SFI’s Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) programme. The EHL linguists say they can go even further back by classifying language families into superfamilies and even into a super-superfamily. “What we’ve found,” Gell-Mann explains, “is tentative evidence for a situation in which a huge fraction of all human languages are descended from one spoken 20,000 years ago, towards the end of the last ice age.” The team does not claim to account for all languages, though, and remains agnostic about whether they can eventually do so. “All of this just comes from following the data,” he says.

I love that attempting to trace the majority of human languages back to a common root can be described as a ‘pet project’.

If anyone’s interested here’s a paper he wrote on the subject:

Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros, George Starostin. Distant Language Relationship: The Current Perspective.

What we're not talking about

Without trying to sound too sensationalist: ScienceBlogs is seeing a mass exodus of writers. The main reason revolves around Seed Media, the parent company of ScienceBlogs, selling blog space to advertisers. As MarkCC, of Good Math, Bad Math, notes:

Seed has, in its corporate wisdom, decided to let Pepsico buy its way into a blog on ScienceBlogs. Pepsi writes SMG a nice check, and suddenly their content gets mixed in to the ScienceBlog RSS feeds, the ScienceBlog feed to Google News, etc., exactly the way that my blog posts do.

This is not acceptable.

For now, I’m suspending my blog for a few days. If Seed decides to back out of this spectacular stupidity, then I’ll start posting here again. If not, then I’ll go looking for a new home for GM/BM. The money that I’ve made from the ads that Seed has sold has been nice – but it’s not worth my integrity.

If Blogs here are for sale, then I’m gone.

The blog in question is Food Frontiers. What’s it all about? Well, as the opening article itself states:

On behalf of the team here at ScienceBlogs, I’d like to welcome you to Food Frontiers, a new project presented by PepsiCo.

As part of this partnership, we’ll hear from a wide range of experts on how the company is developing products rooted in rigorous, science-based nutrition standards to offer consumers more wholesome and enjoyable foods and beverages. The focus will be on innovations in science, nutrition and health policy. In addition to learning more about the transformation of PepsiCo’s product portfolio, we’ll be seeing some of the innovative ways it is planning to reduce its use of energy, water and packaging.

Is it just me, or does that paragraph leave a sickly taste in your mouth? Maybe I’m just a synaesthete for blatantly corporate PR gimmicks. There are, of course, many arguments to be had about the role of advertising on blogs — it needs to generate money, after all. Still, whether you care or not about the ethics of the situation, I think ScienceBlogs made a very bad move not to consult their writers before going ahead with this.

N.B. If you’re worried about who has left and, more importantly, where they’ve gone, then Skulls in the Stars is keeping track of the situation: The Sciencebloggosphere is a changing. Of the blogs I regularly read, only one of them has made the move: Neuron Culture. The other blog I read, Laelaps, is still undecided as to where he’s going to take up permanent residence. You can, however, follow his twitter feed: http://twitter.com/laelaps.