Tag: edinburgh

The Rap Guide to Human Nature

Last year at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival me and several of my friends saw this brilliant show called the Rap Guide To Evolution (which I briefly blogged about here). Well this year the same rapper, one Baba Brinkman, was back with a new show: the Rap Guide to Human Nature. Unlike most rap attempts at explaining science, it doesn’t sound like a bad Beastie Boys and Sugarhill Gang pastiche of awkward cadence and simple rhyming. Also, it includes some brilliant interludes from various scientists and researchers, including Olivia Judson and David Sloan Wilson. Here is a video of him performing at Binghampton University (I suppose his audience isn’t straight outta compton):

Language evolution in the laboratory

When talking about language evolution there’s always a resistance from people exclaiming;  ‘but how do we know?’, ‘surely all of this is conjecture!’ and, because of this, ‘what’s the point?’

Thomas Scott-Phillips and Simon Kirby have written a new article (in press) in ‘Trends in Cognitive Science’ which addresses some of the techniques currently used to address language evolution using experiments in the laboratory.

The Problem of language evolution

The problem of language evolution is one which encompasses not only the need to explain biologically how language came about but also how language came to be how it is today through processes of cultural evolution. Because of this potential ambiguity arises when using the term ‘language evolution’. To sort this ambiguity the authors put forward the following:

Language evolution researchers are interested in the processes that led to a qualitative change from a non-linguistic state to a linguistic one. In other words, language evolution is concerned with the emergence of language

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