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Someone has written a sci-fi space opera about a serial killer that targets researchers of cultural evolution which is also a satire on the state of academic funding systems.

That’s quite an action-packed sentence.

Persister: Space Funding Crisis I by Casey Hattrey is a short novel set in the 45th century about a cultural evolution researcher named Arianne. By this point, the decision process for academic funding takes so long that the only sensible option is to cryogenetically freeze yourself while you wait for the decision to come in. The cost of this, and the fierce competition for funding in a pan-galactic community, has made the Central Academic Funding Council Administration the most powerful force in the galaxy. Now, Arianne has been woken from chryo-sleep, not to be given a grant, but to investigate a series of gruesome murders. Someone has been killing the top researchers in the field of cultural evolution.

Continue reading “Persister: A sci-fi novel about cultural evolution and academic funding”

CARTA (Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny) are webcasting their free symposium on “How Language Evolves” on Friday, February 20^th (1:00 – 5:30 pm PST), co-chaired by Roger Levy (UC San Diego) and David Perlmutter (UC San Diego).

 

The symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence:

1) ways languages get new structure not present in the language of the previous generation(s) of speakers or signers;

2) what contrasts between new and mature languages reveal about how language evolves;

3) neuroscientific investigations of functional specialization for language in the human brain and its dependence on the linguistic input the language learner gets during cognitive development.

You can access the live webcast here:

http://carta.anthropogeny.org/events/how-language-evolves

Does the weather effect the languages we speak?

This week, Caleb Everett, Damian Blasi and I have a paper out in PNAS (also available here) on the effects of humidity on the production and perception of lexical tone, and the subsequent predictions about the distribution of tone across the world.

The basic principle behind studies of cultural evolution is that a selective pressure on communication can transform the structures of a language over time.  What we explore is whether speaking in dry environments exerts a pressure to avoid using sounds that are more difficult to produce or comprehend, leading to those sounds being selected against.

Edit: See also this FAQ page

Continue reading “Tone and humidity”

It’s time I get back to my attempt to lay out a map of approaches to cultural evolution in a limited number of posts, say a half dozen or even less (in my first post I said three). This is the first of two or three posts in which I look at ideas of the microscale entities and processes. In this post I’ll take a close look at Dawkins’ concept of the meme as he laid it out in The Selfish Gene. In my next post or two I’ll lay out other positions while developing mine in the process.

Dawkins Defines the Meme

I’m going to take a close look at two paragraphs from the 30th Anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene (Oxford 2006). First I’ll quote the paragraphs without interruption and commentary. Then I’ll repeat them, this time inserting my own comments after passages from Dawkins.

The book, of course, is not primarily about culture. It is about biology and argues a gene-centric view of evolution. In the process Dawkins abstracts from the biology and extracts two roles, that of replicator and that of vehicle. Genes play the replicator role and phenotypes play vehicle role. From a gene-centric point of view, the function of phenotypes is to carry genes from one generation to the next.

Have set this out in ten chapters, Dawkins then turns to culture in the eleventh chapter, where he introduces the meme in the replicator role in cultural evolution. The paragraphs we’re examining are on pages 192-193:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter:’… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking—the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’

Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation’. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that ‘survival value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

Dawkins says more about memes (the chapter runs from 189 to 201), but I’ll confine my commentary to those two chapters. Before I do that, however, I’d like to quote two short paragraphs from the end of the chapter (pp. 199-200):

However speculative my development of the theory of memes may be, there is one serious point which I would like to emphasize once again. This is that when we look at the evolution of cultural traits and at their survival value, we must be clear whose survival we are talking about. Biologists, as we have seen, are accustomed to looking for advantages at the gene level (or the individual, the group, or the species level according to taste). What we have not previously considered is that a cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself.

We do not have to look for conventional biological survival values of traits like religion, music, and ritual dancing, though these may also be present. Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over. We do not even have to posit a genetic advantage in imitation, though that would certainly help. All that is necessary is that the brain should be capable of imitation: memes will then evolve that exploit the capability to the full.

That I believe is the core of Dawkins’ contribution, that the entity that directly benefits from cultural evolution is some cultural entity, not any individual human being, though the cultural entity is necessarily dependent on individual humans for its existence. Continue reading “Issues in Cultural Evolution 2.1: Micro Evolution, Dawkins and Memes”

This will certainly be of interest to rep typo readers. Info below:

We are pleased to announce that the Tokyo Lectures in Language Evolution will be held from the 2nd – 5th of April 2015 at the Komaba II Campus of the University of Tokyo. The event will bring together researchers from around the world to give an intensive series of courses and lectures introducing modern approaches to research on the origins and evolution of language.

Invited Speakers:

• Cedric Boeckx (ICREA/Universitat de Barcelona)
• Bart de Boer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
• Tecumseh Fitch (The University of Vienna)
• Jim Hurford (The University of Edinburgh)
• Simon Kirby (The University of Edinburgh)
• Koji Fujita (Kyoto University)
• Takashi Hashimoto (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
• Yoshiki Nishimura (The University of Tokyo)
• Kazuo Okanoya (The University of Tokyo)
• Hirokazu Takahashi (The University of Tokyo)
• Akiko Uchida (Waseda University)

Registration Fees:

• Faculty:        20,000JPY
• Students:     Free

Please note, there are limited seats available so please register here to ensure your place.

Poster Session:

The event will host a poster session for participants to present their own work. Submission instructions are available here.

Key Points:

Dates:                         2-5 April 2015

Poster Call Deadline:  4 March 2015

Location:                     Tokyo, Japan

Any enquiries regarding the event should be directed to darwin@langev.tokyo.

We hope to see you in Tokyo!

This week I discovered that an analysis using Causal Graphs that James and I did in 2013 has been backed up by more recent data.  This demonstrates the power of Causal Graph analysis, which we’ll be discussing in our workshop on Causality in the Language Sciences (submission deadline extended!)

A recent paper demonstrates a correlation between various genetic factors and life history strategies (Minkov & Bond, 2015).  Minkov & Bond find that the prevalence of three gene polymorphisms (5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter gene, the androgen receptor gene AR and the dopamine receptor gene DRD4) correlate with measures of how willing people are to take risks, such as long-term/short-term orientation.

We’re written before about 5-HTTLPR (here and here), which was previously associated with individualism/collectivism.  However, the paper above, and a previous one in 2014 by Minkov, Blagoev & Bond, find that the correlation is stronger for long-term/short-term orientation.

What’s interesting for us is that James and I predicted this in our 2013 paper on spurious correlations (the one with acacia trees and traffic accidents).  Here’s figure 4 from our paper, which was generated using a causal graph algoritm (explained in more detail in this post):

The relevant part is here, which predicts that 5-HTTLPR prevalence is causally related to Long-term/short-term orientation, but is causally independent from collectivism:

We suggested that the relationship between 5-HTTLPR and collectivism is mediated by the probability of migrating into harsher climates (a kind of risk-taking), and produced a computational model to demonstrate the principle (we also did some analyses which showed that measures of climate are correlated with 5-HTTLPR, but we haven’t reported these).

The more recent papers above also suggest that the genetic traits are linked with long-term/short-term orientation, but did so my greatly expanding the sample of genetic prevalence.  So how did we get our result?  In our analysis, we averaged 5-HTTLPR prevalence across countries, which is not realistic.  This makes me worried that the correlations are being inflated by non-independence of the samples.

The authors are confident of the robustness of the correlation:

“If all these associations were spurious, their association would be miraculous, especially at the national-regional level. If there is no real association between the LHSGF and the reported measures of LHS and TO, what then explains the extremely high correlations?”

However, as our paper argues, spurious correlations are more likely when datapoints are linked through historical descent or borrowing (Galton’s problem).  In the case of this paper, genetic traits are obviously historically related, and it’s likely that cultural values and life history strategies are also culturally transmitted.

I tried testing whether the correlation is robust to historical or contact relationships.  I used geographic proximity as a proxy for how closely related different cultures are.  For each country, I found the geographic coordinates of the capital city.  The graphs below demonstrate that there’s at least some geographic clustering (and a hit of a founder effect for the genetic data, as predicted by our migration model):

I then calculated the distance between each pair of countries in geographic terms (great circle distance), the National life history strategy genetic factor index and the genetic factors.  (for the genetic factors, I did a principal components analysis, as in Mikov & Bond, and used the first component, which had an eigen value of 2.62 and explained  65.5% of the variance, compared to Mikov & Bond’s 2.04, and 68%).

This gives us three distance matrices:  distance in miles, distance in life history strategy and distance in genetic traits.  I then used a Mantel test to compare these.

Genetic and life history measures are correlated (r = 0.88, p < 0.0001), as in the paper above (in the regression, r = 0.78-0.84).  Both the genetic and life history measures were correlated with geographic distance (r = 0.36, p < 0.0001; r = 0.27, p = 0.0003), which suggests that they are not independent (i.e. a country is likely to be more similar to its neighbour than a distant culture).

However, there is still a significant correlation between genetic and life history measures when controlling for geographic distance (r = 0.87, p = 0.0001).  In fact, the correlation is barely affected at all when partialling out the geographic distance.

So, it appears that the correlation is somewhat robust to controlling for non-independence.  But will it play out in the long-term?

Source data and analysis script: MikovBond_Mantel

Edit: Michael Minkov has been in touch, and argues that psychological phenomena, such as happiness, values, attitudes etc. can’t be borrowed across cultures.  They depend on particular economic conditions, which also can’t be borrowed in the same way that a word or an artefact can be borrowed.

Edit2: Above, I used raw distance, but log distance is probably a better measure.  Both genetic index and life history index are more strongly correlated with log geographic distance (r = 0.42, p < 0.0001; r = 0.35, p < 0.0001).  However, there’s not much difference in the correlation between genetic and life history measures when controlling for log geographic distance (r = 0.86, p < 0.0001).

Recently, Noam Chomsky spoke at the at theRoyal Dutch Academy of Sciences Colloquium on ‘The Biology of Language’ in  Amsterdam.

The whole thing has been posted on YouTube, so I made a playlist.

Enjoy!

Natural causes of language by Nick Enfield discusses theories behind cultural transmission of language.  From the blurb:

What causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated. But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has been diffused and kept in circulation through social interaction in the history of a community. This book makes the case that a proper understanding of the ontology of language systems has to be grounded in the causal mechanisms by which linguistic items are socially transmitted, in communicative contexts.

I like the argument that a particular ‘language’ (like English or Welsh) is not a real entity, but a “convenient fiction” – something I also argued in my thesis.

It’s a special book in two senses.  First, it comes from the new Language Sciences Press: an open access publisher where publishing costs nothing to the author and reading costs nothing to the reader.   Hopefully we’ll see this being used to good effect.

Secondly, it comes with a video introduction from the author!