Replicated Typo 2.0 has reached 100,000 hits! The most popular search term that leads visitors here is ‘What makes humans unique?’ and part of the answer has to be our ability to transmit our culture. But as we’ve shown on this blog, culturally transmitted features can be highly correlated with each other. This fact is a source of both frustration and fascination, so I’ve roped together some of my favourite investigations of cultural correlations into a correlation super-chain. In addition, there’s a whole new spurious correlation at the end of the article!
So I thought I should begin my first post on here with a nice and gentle introductory sentence, but I realise that pointing out the increased use of computational phylogenetic tools on cultural and particularly linguistic data to the avid readers of this blog is probably a pretty pointless exercise.
There is of course a lot to say about parallels between biological and cultural evolution, and some of the work using computational tools has given us new insights into yet unanswered (and even hitherto unasked!) questions regarding language and language change. But today I’d like to share some thoughts on a particular “application” of phylogenetic tools, the methodology of which I find a bit odd, even though it is arguably the simplest evolutionary analogy of them all: using computational phylogenetics to reconstruct linguistic phylogenies.
PZ Myers points to a TED video of Philip Zimbardo (see below) that links the declining academic performance of men with arousal addiction: here, the transition from boys to men in our modern society is characterised by “digitally rewired” brains that are in search of constant arousal etc etc. Like Myers, I’m sceptical of these claims, but I think they are certainly worth investigating, just not in the fashion employed by Susan Greenfield (you know, she of pseudo-neuroscientific fame). What I would like to see answered is: Do all Internet-influenced societies see this general trend of declining academic performance in men?
Another research question we might want to test, or control for in our hypothetical study, is whether or not there is a correlation between the number of female teachers and male academic performance? I haven’t bothered to look into the literature on this, so maybe a study has already been done, but female teachers certainly appear to outnumber their male counterparts in many corners of the globe (especially in primary school education). In Wales, for instance, I was astonished to find that 74.7% of teachers are female. My point: there might be a more obvious underlying cause as to why women are outperforming men, other than the rise of the zombie-generation of internet-addicted gamers. Still, I’m going to go with the cop-out approach and claim there are numerous factors underpinning male achievement (or lack of) in academia and beyond. I just wanted to point out that, in any study purporting to provide answers about declining educational attainment, you first really need to look at who is doing the teaching.
A new paper in the journal ‘Emotion’ has presented research which has implications for the evolution of language, emotion and for theories of linguistic relativity.
A new paper in the journal ‘Emotion’ has presented research which has implications for the evolution of language, emotion and for theories of linguistic relativity. The paper, entitled ‘Categorical Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions Does Not Require Lexical Categories’, looks at whether our perception of other people’s emotions depend on the language we speak or if it is universal. The results come from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Evolutionary Anthropology.
Human’s facial expressions are perceived categorically and this has lead to hypotheses that this is caused by linguistic mechanisms.
The paper presents a study which compared German speakers to native speakers of Yucatec Maya, which is a language which has no labels which distinguish disgust from anger. This was backed up by a free naming task in which speakers of German, but not Yucatec Maya, made lexical distinctions between disgust and anger.
The study comprised of a match-to-sample task of facial expressions, and both speakers of German and Yucatec Maya perceived emotional facial expressions of disgust and anger, and other emotions, categorically. This effect was shown to be just as significant across the language groups, as well as across emotion continua (see figure 1.) regardless of lexical distinctions.
The results show that the perception of emotional signals is not the result of linguistic mechanisms which create different lexical labels but instead shows evidence that emotions are subject to their own biologically evolved mechanisms. Sorry Whorfians!
References
Sauter DA, Leguen O, & Haun DB (2011). Categorical perception of emotional facial expressions does not require lexical categories. Emotion (Washington, D.C.) PMID: 22004379
Learning new skills is a fascinating process that often involves a complex interplay between biological predispositions and cultural transmission. The evolution of language, in particular, has captivated scholars and researchers, leading to intriguing debates surrounding its origins and development. Recently, esteemed linguist Noam Chomsky delivered a thought-provoking lecture at UCL, where he discussed the poverty of the stimulus and critiqued iterated learning experiments. These experiments, which explore language evolution and artificial language learning, have sparked discussions about the role of human intelligence and the nature of evolutionary processes. As the field of communication evolution continues to evolve, new avenues such as government compliant LMS offer promising opportunities to enhance our understanding of how skills are acquired and disseminated.
Noam Chomsky gave a lecture on the poverty of the stimulus at UCL responding to topics such as language evolution and artificial language learning experiments. From about 89 minutes in he discusses iterated learning and language evolution, saying the conclusions derive from “serious illusions about evolution”:
Chomsky’s criticism of iterated learning experiments (see post here and here) is based on two points. First, the emergence of structure is more to do with the intelligence of the modern humans taking part in the experiment than a realistic language evolving scenario. He suggests that structure would not emerge in a series of computer programs without human intelligence. As as a colleague pointed out, however, the first iterated learning experiments used computational models of this kind. Secondly, he suggests that the view of evolution employed in the explanation of these systems is a pop-psychology, gradual hill-climbing one. In fact, Chomsky claims, evolution of traits such as language or eyes derive from single, frozen accidents. That is, evolution moves in leaps and bounds rather than small steps (Jim Hurford recently gave a lecture entitled ‘Reconciling linguistic jerks and biological creeps‘ on this topic). Why else would humans be the only species with language?
Geoffrey Pullum counters this last point by asking why would an innately specified UG emerge so rapidly, but then freeze for tens of thousands of years, when (borrowing Phillip Lieberman’s point) traits such as lactose tolerance have emerged in the human genome within two thousand years. Chomsky gives some examples of traits that have developed rapidly, but then only changed marginally.
I don’t think that proponents of iterated learning paradigms would have a problem with a sudden emergence of a capacity for advanced linguistic communication. Although there is a continuity between human and non-human communication systems, we have some tricks that other animals don’t (see Michael’s post here). However, the evolution of the structure of language after these mutations could owe a huge amount to processes of cultural transmission. The universals we see in the world’s languages, then would be an amplification of weak biological biases.
However, Chomsky seems disillusioned with the whole field of what he calls ‘the evolution of communication’. At least we didn’t get it as bad as exemplar theory, which he dismisses as “so outlandish it’s not worth thinking about”.
[Edit: I originally attributed Mark Liberman instead of Phillip Lieberman. Now I’ve made this error in both directions!]
We are organising a special themed session on language evolution at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, which is held in Durham, UK, 25th-28th March 2012 (http://www.dur.ac.uk/jeremy.kendal/EHBEA2012/Welcome.html). EHBEA is an excellent venue for interdisciplinary work on the cultural and biological evolution of human behaviour, including language. Given that EHBEA is running shortly after EVOLANG next year, we are happy for research that is targeted at EVOLANG to also be submitted here, although note that the audience for each is likely to be different.
If you would like to submit an abstract for consideration as part of this themed session, please follow the submission instructions on the EHBEA website, marking your abstract as for consideration in the language evolution special session, organised by Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith. Abstracts will be independently reviewed by the usual EHBEA reviewers, so bear that in mind when preparing your submission. The themed session will only run if sufficient abstracts are accepted – of course, papers on language evolution could be presented independently as standard EHBEA talks.
The deadline for submissions is November 25th.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED!
Last week we had a lecture from Anvita Abbi on rare linguistic structures in Great Andamanese – a language spoken in the Andaman Islands. The indigenous populations of the Andaman Islands lived in isolation for tens of thousands of years until the 19th Century, but still exhibit some common features of south-east Asian languages such as retroflex consonants. This could be evidence for the migration route of humans from India to Australia. Indeed, recent genetic research has shown that the Andamanese are descendants of the first human migration from Africa in the Palaeolithic, though Abbi suggested that the linguistic evidence is also a strong marker of human migration and an “important repository of our shared human history and civilization”.
Although the similarities are fascinating for studies of cultural evolution, the rarity of some structures in Great Andamanese are even more intriguing.
The BBC are at it again and by ‘at it’ I mean talking about language evolution!
Hello! The BBC are at it again and by ‘at it’ I mean talking about language evolution!
The latest episode of ‘Origins of Us’, which is a series about human evolution from an anthropological/archaeological angle, is on brains. The program is presented by Alice Roberts and she doesn’t do a bad job of discussing the issues relating to the lack of direct fossil evidence for language. She discusses the anatomy used in speech which is something which Stephen Fry did not do in his program on the origins of language. We also get an excellent rendition of the cardinal vowels from Dr. Roberts! She also discusses the role of language in symbolic thought and there is a wee bit at the end on cultural evolution.
The part of the program on language starts about 25 minutes in, but I’d suggest watching the whole thing as all aspects of the evolution of the brain are relevant to language evolution, and also, it’s bloody interesting.
After passing my final exams I feel that I can relax a bit and have the time to read a book again. So instead of reading a book that I need to read purely for ‘academic reasons’, I thought I’d pick one I’d thoroughly enjoy: James Hurford’s “The Origins of Grammar“, which clocks in at a whopping 808 pages.
I’m still reading the first chapter (which you can read for free here) but I thought I’d share some of his analyses of “Animal Syntax.”
Hurford’s general conclusion is that despite what you sometimes read in the popular press,
“No non-human has any semantically compositional syntax, where the form of the syntactic combination determines how the meanings of the parts combine to make the meaning of the whole.”
The crucial notion here is that of compositionality. Hurford argues that we can find animal calls and songs that are combinatorial, that is songs and calls in which elements are put together according to some kind of rule or pattern. But what we do not find, he argues, are the kinds of putting things together where the elements put together each have a specified meaning and the whole song, call or communicative assembly “means something which is a reflection of the meanings of the parts.”
(Link)
To illustrate this, Hurford cites the call system of putty-nosed monkeys (Arnold and Zuberbühler 2006). These monkeys have only two different call signals in their repertoire, a ‘pyow’-sound that ‘means’, roughly, ‘LEOPARD’; and a ‘hack’ sound that ‘means’, roughly, ‘EAGLE’.
EVOLUTION:THIS VIEW OF LIFE is a new online general interest magazine in which all of the content is from an evolutionary perspective. It includes content aggregated from the internet and new content generated by a team of editors, all professional evolutionists, representing eleven subject areas. The editors work for free, in the same spirit as editors of academic journals. Their expertise enables EVOLUTION:THIS VIEW OF LIFE to feature evolutionary science in action, as stimulating for the professional as for the general public.
To help launch the magazine, we are trying to raise $5000 through Kickstarter, which will be used to support the central office and purchase equipment for video and audio recording. Contribute $50 or more and get a cool t-shirt with this logo designed by illustrator Kevin Cannon. Pledge $80 or more and we’ll record a videocast with you, so that you can share what evolution means to your view of life.
