adaptive – Replicated Typo

Language is not necessary for analogy

Analogy is a trait thought to be uniquely human and the origin is largely unknown. Recent studies have suggested that some language trained apes can find relations between relations, which is thought to be what is at the root of analogy. However, a new study in the journal Psychological Science has tested baboons using shapes with matching features. These baboons were able to match pairs which had matching features and pairs which had no matching features.

The study was run by Joël Fagot of the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (CNRS/Université de Provence) and Roger Thompson of the Franklin & Marshall College (United States).

It has been hypothesised in the past that finding relations between relations is an ability only accessible by language, but these new findings with baboons cast doubt on this assertion.

The experiments were carried out on 29 baboons. The baboons were first shown two shapes on a screen. The baboons then touched one of these shapes and two other pairs of shapes appeared on the screen. To be successful at the task the baboons had to touch the pair representing the same relation as the initial pair. So if the first pair matched in a feature the baboon had to choose the pair which also had a matching feature, and avoid the pair where there was no matching feature, in order to gain a reward. This shows the inherent abilities behind analogy.

6 baboons correctly performed the task after thousands of trials of training showing that it is definitely within the abilities of old world monkeys to resolve analogy problems.

The researchers also revisited the same baboons with the same task a year later and the monkeys were much quicker at acquiring the task showing that they remembered what to do.

These results show that language is not necessary for analogy and leaves questions as to what might make this ability adaptive.

Reference

Fagot J, & Thompson RK (2011). Generalized Relational Matching by Guinea Baboons (Papio papio) in Two-by-Two-Item Analogy Problems. Psychological science PMID: 21934135

The Return of the Phoneme Inventories

Right, I already referred to Atkinson’s paper in a previous post, and much of the work he’s presented is essentially part of a potential PhD project I’m hoping to do. Much of this stems back to last summer, where I mentioned how the phoneme inventory size correlates with certain demographic features, such as population size and population density. Using the the UPSID data I generated a generalised additive model to demonstrate how area and population size interact in determining the phoneme inventory size:

Interestingly, Atkinson seems to derive much of his thinking, at least in his choice of demographic variables, from work into the transmission of cultural artefacts (see here and here). For me, there are clear uses for these demographic models in testing hypotheses for linguistic transmission and change, as I see language as a cultural product. It appears Atkinson reached the same conclusion. Where we depart, however, is in our overall explanations of the data. My major problem with the claim is theoretical: he hasn’t ruled out other historical-evolutionary explanations for these patterns.

Before we get into the bulk of my criticism, I’ll provide a very brief overview of the paper.

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Recursion: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?

Hello Hello and Happy New Year,

So a new article appeared on the internet late last year by Coolidge, Overmann and Wynn (2010) (hereafter referred to as COW because it makes me smile). It’s a really short sweet little paper and you should read it as recursion is perhaps one of the hottest topics around language evolution. This generally stems from Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch’s (HCF, 2002) claim that it is the only feature of language unique to humans. I thought it would be useful to outline some of the issues surrounding it as put forward by the COW paper due to its high-profile, controversial and important position within current issues in language evolution.

History

Recursion was first talked about within the field of linguistics by Bar-Hillel in 1953. This was before Chomsky included the concept in his Generative Grammar in 1956.

It wasn’t until 2002 that HCF made the claim that recursion was the only feature of language which was included in the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN) and was therefore unique to humans.

Definition

The article outlines two definitions of recursion (within linguistics):

(1) embeddedness of phrases within other phrases, which entails keeping track of long-distance dependencies among phrases

(2) the speciﬁcation of the computed output string itself, including meta-recursion, where recursion is both the recipe for an utterance and the overarching process that creates and executes the recipe

I always worry when there is more than one definition for a thing because this often results in people talking past eachother or getting confused within their own arguments. These definition are also important to define before one starts making claims about whether recursion is present in species outside of humans or what people are talking about when referring to the evolution of recursion.

Evolutionary Scenarios

The paper also outlines two evolutionary scenarios for the adaptive value of recursion in human language.

(1) The gradualist position posits precursors, such as animal communication and protolanguages, and holds that the selective purpose of recursion was for communication.

(2) The saltationist position assumes no gradual development of recursion and posits that it evolved for reasons other than communication

The latter of these is the stand point taken by the HCF paper. Reasons for recursion evolving if one discounts communication could include the increase of working memory for other reasons or spacial navigation.

Pinker and Jackendoff (2005) argue that since recursion only exists in language to express recursive thoughts it must have pre-existed language.

COW (2010) points out that this is all very well but the question remains of what are recursive thoughts and why are they adaptive? These recursive acts may exist for the purposes of diplomatic speech, perlocutionary acts or for prospective memory and cognition (these are discussed at greater length in COW). These assume that the adaptive force was a social one which before Pinker and Jackendoff was not considered because recursion is often understood away from the social context of speech acts in the realm of mathematics.

Unique to Humans?

An often cited example debunking recursion’s importance to human language is the Piraha tribe who apparently do not have it (Everett 2005). The data from Everett is anecdotal, from one source and sketchy. Even if one was to accept the claims of lack of recursion they can be attributed to other factors such as cultural constraints or (although I think this is going a bit far, but then Bickerton always does go a bit too far) claiming the Piraha tribe have an underlying neurophysiological deﬁciency such as a limited working memory capacity or an extreme case of acquisitional delay.

COW then covers several animal studies which claim that recursion is present in animals including starlings and various monkeys. These are subject to the claim that the ability to acquire a phrase structure grammar means the presence of recursive ability (which is bollocks). These studies also fall short when one considers that starling’s songs are used to communicate emotional states, not recursive thoughts.

References

Bar-Hillel Y. (1953) On recursive definitions in empirical science. Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Philosophy, Brussels. 1953, 5:160–165.

Coolidge, F., Overmann, K., & Wynn, T. (2010). Recursion: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science DOI: 10.1002/wcs.131

Hauser MD, Chomsky, N, Fitch (2002) The faculty of language: what is it, who has it and how did it evolve? Science, 298:1569-1579

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/downloads/HCF2002.pdf

Some Links #19: The Reality of a Universal Language Faculty?

I noticed it’s almost been a month since I last posted some links. What this means is that many of the links I planned on posting are terribly out of date and these last few days I haven’t really had the time to keep abreast of the latest developments in the blogosphere (new course + presentation at Edinburgh + current cold = a lethargic Wintz). I’m hoping next week will be a bit nicer to me.

The reality of a universal language faculty? Melodye offers up a thorough post on the whole Universal Grammar hypothesis, mostly drawing from the BBS issue dedicated Evans & Levinson (2009)’s paper on the myth of language universals, and why it is a weak position to take. Key paragraph:

When we get to language, then, it need not be surprising that many human languages have evolved similar means of efficiently communicating information. From an evolutionary perspective, this would simply suggest that various languages have, over time, ‘converged’ on many of the same solutions. This is made even more plausible by the fact that every competent human speaker, regardless of language spoken, shares roughly the same physical and cognitive machinery, which dictates a shared set of drives, instincts, and sensory faculties, and a certain range of temperaments, response-patterns, learning facilities and so on. In large part, we also share fairly similar environments — indeed, the languages that linguists have found hardest to document are typically those of societies at the farthest remove from our own (take the Piraha as a case in point).

My own position on the matter is fairly straightforward enough: I don’t think the UG perspective is useful. One attempt by Pinker and Bloom (1990) argued that this language module, in all its apparent complexity, could not have arisen by any other means than via natural selection – as did the eye and many other complex biological systems. Whilst I agree with the sentiment that natural selection, and more broadly, evolution, is a vital tool in discerning the origins of language, I think Pinker & Bloom initially overlooked the significance of cultural evolutionary and developmental processes. If anything, I think the debate surrounding UG has held back the field in some instances, even if some of the more intellectually vibrant research emerged as a product of arguing against its existence. This is not to say I don’t think our capacity for language has been honed via natural selection. It was probably a very powerful pressure in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of our cognitive capacities. What you won’t find, however, is a strongly constrained language acquisition device dedicated to the processing of arbitrary, domain-specific linguistic properties, such as X-bar theory and case marking.

Babel’s Dawn Turns Four. In the two and half years I’ve been reading Babel’s Dawn it has served as a port for informative articles, some fascinating ideas and, lest we forget, some great writing on the evolution of language. Edmund Blair Bolles highlights the blog’s fourth anniversary by referring to another, very important, birthday:

This blog’s fourth anniversary has rolled around. More notably, the 20^th anniversary of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom‘s famous paper, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” seems to be upon us. Like it or quarrel with it, Pinker-Bloom broke the dam that had barricaded serious inquiry since 1866 when the Paris Linguistic Society banned all papers on language’s beginnings. The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology is marking the Pinker-Bloom anniversary by devoting its December issue to the evolution of language. The introductory editorial, by Thomas Scott-Phillips, summarizes language origins in terms of interest to the evolutionary psychologist, making the editorial a handy guide to the differences between evolutionary psychology and evolutionary linguistics.

Hopefully I’ll have a post on Pinker and Bloom’s original paper, and how the field has developed over these last twenty years, at some point in the next couple of weeks. I think it’s historical importance will, to echo Bolles, be its value in opening up the field: with the questions of language origins and evolution turning into something worthy of serious intellectual investigation.

Other Links

Hypnosis reaches the parts brain scans and neurosurgery cannot.

Are Humans Still Evolving? (Part Two is here).

The Limits of Science.

On Language — Learning Language in Chunks.

Farmers, foragers, and us.

Tweet This.

On Music and The Brain.

Why I spoofed science journalism, and how to fix in.

The adaptive space of complexity.

Theory of Mind and Language Evolution; What can psychopathology tell us?

Theory of Mind is the ability to infer other persons’ mental states and emotions. It is thought to have evolved as part of the human’s social brain and probably emerged as an adaptive response to increasingly complex primate social interaction.

Brüne and Brüne-Cohrs (2006) explore the ‘evolutionary cost’ of language evolution:

This sophisticated ‘metacognitive’ ability comes at an evolutionary cost, reflected in a broad spectrum of psychopathological conditions. Extensive research into autistic spectrum disorders has revealed that theory of mind may be selectively impaired, leaving other cognitive faculties intact. Recent studies have shown that observed deficits in theory of mind task performance are part of a broad range of symptoms in schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, some forms of dementia, ‘psychopathy’ and in other psychiatric disorders.

Now it’s fairly uncontroversial to assert that without the ability of theory of mind humans would have never evolved language (Sperber and Wilson, 2002). This is due to the fact that if one can’t attribute another to have a ‘mind’ like ones own, or assume that other minds hold different information to ones own then one would see little point in trying to share information. (I’m sorry for the amount of ‘ones’ in that sentence).

Sooo, it does not seem presumptuous to assume that people interested in the evolution of language should be interested in theory of mind, in fact for many years evolutionary linguists, psychologists and biologists have been looking into this, but mostly through observing the behaviour of animals, and especially primates to see if they display theory of mind capabilities. A good summary of this work can be found here, and a lot of relevant studies can be found on this blog in the What makes humans unique? posts by Michael. I’m not going to look at the animal data in this post, but instead what the deficiencies in some human conditions can tell us about the evolution of theory of mind. That is, what can autism, schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, dementia, ‘psychopathy’ and other psychiatric disorders tell us?

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Evolution of Colour Terms: Part 1

In a series of posts, I’ll review the current state of the field of the Evolution of Colour Categories. It has been argued that universals in colour naming across cultures can be traced back to constraints from many domains including genetic, perceptual and environmental. I’ll review these arguments and show that if our perception is affected by our language, then many conflicts can be resolved. Furthermore, it undermines the Universalist assumption that universal patterns in colour terms are evidence for innate constraints.

Part 1: Domains of Constraint

Genetic Constraints

Environmental Constraints

Perceptual Constraints

Learning Constraints

Cultural Constraints

Categorisation Constraints

Part 2: Universal patterns are not evidence for innate constraints

Perceptual Warping

Embodied Relationships

Niche Construction

Universal Patterns are not Evidence for Innate Constraints

For the full dissertation and for references, go here.

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Language Evolution and Language Acquisition

The way children learn language sets the adaptive landscape on which languages evolve. This is acknowledged by many, but there are few connections between models of language acquisition and models of language Evolution (some exceptions include Yang (2002), Yu & Smith (2007) and Chater & Christiansen (2009)).

However, the chasm between the two fields may be getting smaller, as theories are defined as models which are both more interpretable to the more technically-minded Language Evolutionists and extendible into populations and generations.

Also, strangely, models of word learning have been getting simpler over time. This may reflect a move from attributing language acquisition to specific mechanisms towards a more general cognitive explanation. I review some older models here, and a recent publication by Fazly et al.

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How and Why did Madness Evolve??

I’m reading a book at the minute called ‘The descent of madness: Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis and the Social Brain’ by Jonathan Burns. I thought I’d summarise some of the theories in the book as to how schizophrenia came about, for the principle reason that it’s very bloody interesting.

Some evolutionary thinkers have posited that schizophrenia is a recent disorder which is a modern response to the stresses of the industrial and technological age. Burns argues against this and claims that there is evidence of schizophrenia from early human history.

So, how and why did schizophrenia evolve when it has such a maladaptive nature? It’s certainly not being selected out because the phenotype still persists with a similar rate of incidence across the human race.

The Adaptionist Programme has a solution for this problem of mental disorders in that it views them as behavioural traits which evolved due to an advantage for the the individual in the ‘ancestral environment’, however, now, in a world which has changed and become psychologically stressful, a mismatch is created between the evolved trait and the modern environment.

The persistence of the phenotype can also be explained by taking into account the fact that psychotic illness has a continuum on which schizophrenia is a severe end of the spectrum, because of this other phenotypes on the genetic spectrum could harbour particularly adaptive traits. Genetically related but unaffected individuals who share some of the milder features of the illness may possess some kind of evolutionary advantage and hence the phenotype would linger.

The hypotheses above are plausible by Jonathan Burns claims he has a better solution:

Our hominid ancestors evolved a sophisticated neural network supporting social cognition and adaptive interpersonal behaviour (in other words the social brain). This has been identified, using functional imaging, to be comprised in the fronto-temporal and fronto-parietal cortical networks. Psychosis (and schizophrenia in particular) are characterised by functional and structural deficits in these areas and hence the term ‘social brain disorders’ are fitting.

Schizophrenics display abnormalities in a wide range of social cognition tasks such as emotion recognition, theory of mind and affective responsiveness and as a result individuals with schizophrenia find themselves disadvantaged in the social arena and vulnerable to the stresses of their complex social environments.

So, since there is such evidence to support that the areas which comprise our ‘social brains’ are the same regions which contribute to the disorder of schizophrenia when functional and structural deficits are present it becomes clear that schizophrenia exists as a consequence to the complex social brain.

This is a desirable hypothesis due to the fact that it does not rely on a Cartesian model of an isolated ethereal mind separated from body and environment, and instead concentrates on a physically and socially integrated construct of mind, embodied in the living world.

Interesting.

I’d just like to add a small disclaimer which says that I’m not an expert in schizophrenia or pretty much anything I’m writing about here (I haven’t even finished the book) so sorry if I’ve got anything hideously wrong. Please tell me. I’ll revisit this with extra thoughts on the subject once I have finished the book.

In other news and on the subject of evolutionary psychology here’s a really fun and ridiculously geeky thing I found:

Evolutionary Psychology Bingo!

The Media Noose: Copycat Suicides and Social Learning

I always remember 2008 as the year when the entire UK media descended upon the former mining town of Bridgend. The reason: over the course of two years, 24 young people, most of whom were between the ages of 13 and 17, decided to commit suicide. At the time I was working in Bridgend, so I’m able to appreciate the claims of local MP, Madeleine Moon, that media influence had become part of problem. After all, most editors will tell you: the aim is to sell newspapers. And when this rule is rigorously applied, it should not come as a surprise at the depths some journalists will sink to recycle a news story. Even at a local-level, where you’d think some civic responsibility might exist, journalists clambered over themselves to find a new angle, generating ridiculous claims such as: electromagnetic waves from mobile phones caused the suicides.

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Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania

Here is a far-reaching and crucially relevant question for those of us seeking to understand the evolution of culture: Is there any relationship between population size and tool kit diversity or complexity? This question is important because, if met with an affirmative answer, then the emergence of modern human culture may be explained by changes in population size, rather than a species-wide cognitive explosion. Some attempts at an answer have led to models which make certain predictions about what we expect to see when populations vary. For instance, Shennan (2001) argues that in smaller populations, the number of people adopting a particular cultural variant is more likely to be affected by sampling variation. So in larger populations, learners potentially have access to a greater number of experts, which means adaptive variants are less likely to be lost by chance (Henrich, 2004).

Models aside, and existing empirical evidence is limited with the results being mixed. I previously mentioned the gradual loss of complexity in Tasmanian tool kits after the population was isolated from mainland Australia. Elsewhere, Golden (2006) highlighted the case of isolated Polar Inuit, who lost kayaks, the bow and arrow and other technologies when their knowledgeable experts were wiped out during a plague.Yet two systematic studies (Collard et al., 2005; Read, 2008) of the Inuit case found no evidence for population size being a predictor of technological complexity.

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