Culture, its evolution and anything inbetween
Didn’t I say that alcohol affects language evolution?
The video is actually a pretty good summary of many of the main issues surrounding cultural evolution and self domestication. Surprisingly, Bacardi have actually done some research on this:
I cannot wait to make a Bacardi-WALS data cocktail.
Natalia Cecire has a good post on academic blogging over at Arcade. Tne ensuing discussion is excellent.
Here’s what I posted to the discussion:
Excellent post, Natalia, and excellent discussion all.
I come at this subject from a different angle. I was trained as an academic, held an academic post, then failed to get tenure. Since then I’ve done this and that, while maintaining an active intellectual life. The advent of the web was a godsend to me, for it opened up new lines communication. Now I could easily find out about things and stuff and contact any scholar with an email address. I was once again in the mix, though a somewhat different mix, to be sure.
It’s within that context that I see my blogging. I do most of my blogging at my own blog, New Savanna, which is a mixture of various things. I could easily break it into 3 or 4 more tightly focused blogs, but why do that? (Perhaps readers would be less confused.) I post photos, personal essays (not so many of those), and material on a wide variety of topics at varying levels of sophistication and intellectual development.
I’m particularly fond of the work I’ve been doing on cartoons, most of which is analytic and descriptive. I regard that as being as important as anything I’m doing, but I don’t see how I could do that work in a formal academic venue. As far as I know, there’s no place to publish largely analytic descriptive work on cartoons. So I blog it. Most recently, a series of four posts on Porky in Wackland and eight on The Greatest Man in Siam. While some of those posts get just a tad heavy here and there, for the most part they’re pretty straightforward and accessible. Anyone who’s interested in that material can read those posts. And there’s a substantial community of folks interested in animation that isn’t being served by academia.
So, I’m a public intellectual without the reputation that seems to be part of the implicit understanding of the term. Continue reading “Academic Blogging”
A new book is to be published on May the 24th. By John F. Hoffecker the book is entitled “Landscape of the Mind: Human Evolution and the Archaeology of Thought” – it aims to look at the emergence of human thought and language through archaeological evidence
Archeologists often struggle to find fossil evidence pertaining to the evolution of the brain. Thoughts are a hard thing to fossilize. However, John Hoffecker claims that this is not the case and fossils and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind are abundant.
Hoffecker has developed a concept which he calls the “super-brain” which he hypothesises emerged in Africa some 75,000 years ago. He claims that human’s ability to share thoughts between individuals is analogous to the abilities of honey bees who are able to communicate the location of food both in terms of distance and direction. They do this using a waggle-dance. Humans are able to share thoughts between brains using communicative methods, the most obvious of these being language.
Fossil evidence for the emergence of speech is thin on the ground and, where it does exist, is quite controversial. However, symbols emerging in the archaeological record coincides with an increase in evidence of creativity being displayed in many artifacts from the same time. Creative, artistic designs scratched on mineral pigment show up in Africa about 75,000 years ago and are thought to be evidence for symbolism and language
Hoffecker also hypothesises that his concept of the super-brain is likely to be connected to things like bipedalism and tool making. He claims that it was tool making which helped early humans first develop the ability to represent complex thoughts to others.
He claims that tools were a consequence of bipedalism as this freed up the hands to make and use tools. Hoffecker pin points his “super-brain” as beginning to emerge 1.6 million years ago when the first hand axes began to appear in the fossil record. This is because hand axes are thought to be an external realisation of human thought as they bear little resemblance to the natural objects they were made from.
By 75,00 years ago humans were producing perforated shell ornaments, polished bone awls and simple geometric designs incised into lumps of red ochre.
Humans are known to have emerged from Africa between 60,00 to 50,000 years ago based on archeological evidence. Hoeffecker hypothesises that – “Since all languages have basically the same structure, it is inconceivable to me that they could have evolved independently at different times and places.”
Hoeffecker also lead a study in 2007 that discovered a carved piece of mammoth ivory that appears to be the head of a small figurine dating to more than 40,000 years ago. This is claimed to be the oldest piece of figurative art ever discovered. Finds like this illustrate the creative mind of humans as they spread out of Africa.
Figurative art and musical instruments which date back to before 30,000 years ago have also been discovered in caves in France and Germany.
This looks to be nothing new but archaeological evidence is something which a lot of people interested in language evolution do not often discuss. I also don’t really know what to think of Hoeffecker’s claim that “all languages basically have the same structure”. What do you think?
A while ago, some collegues and I noticed that two prominent books on Language Evolution -Christiansen & Kirby’s Language Evolution and Fitch’s Evolution of Language – both included a picture of an acacia tree in the sunset on their covers. On closer analysis, it turned out that they were the same tree:
Thus began the Acacia Tree Hypothesis of Language Evolution.
Following this up, I was thinking about Dediu & Ladd’s discovery that linguistic tone is has certain genetic correlates. Here’s the map of languages with linguistic tone:
However, I suspected the devious influence of acacia trees and so I found some information on their geographic distribution:
As I suspected, countries in which the acacia tree Acacia nilotica grows are significantly more likely to have tonal languages:
| Tone | No Tone | |
| Acacia Trees | 163 | 117 |
| No Acacia Trees | 104 | 237 |
(Chi-squared with Yates’ continuity correction = 47.1, df = 1, p < 0.0001, data from Crop Protection Consortium and the World Atlas of Language Structures).
The plot thickens …
Dediu, D., & Ladd, D. R. (2007). Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, Microcephalin and ASPM. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 10944–10949.
Fitch, W. T. 2010 The evolution of language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Christiansen, M. and Kirby, S. (2003). Language Evolution. Oxford University Press.
Update:
I’ve added the images David mentioned to the post:
Also, The Babel’s Dawn blog banner
Human Biology are publishing a special issue on “Integrating genetic and Cultural Evolutionary Approaches to Language” this month! Abstracts for all of the papers can be found here.
William Brown‘s paper has been published on his blog ahead of the boat today. The Abstract is below and there is a link to the paper at the bottom.
Language—as with most communication systems—likely evolved by means of natural selection. Accounts for the natural selection of language can usually be divided into two scenarios, either of which used in isolation of the other are insufficient to explain the phenomena: (1) there are group benefits from communicating, and (2) there are individual benefits from being a better communicator. In contrast, this paper argues that language emerged during a coevolutionary struggle between parental genomes via genomic imprinting, which is differential gene expression depending on parental origin of the genetic element. It is hypothesized that relatedness asymmetries differentially selected for patrigene-caused language phenotypes (e.g., signals of need) to extract resources from mother early in child development and matrigene-caused language phenotypes (e.g., socially transmitted norms) to influence degree of cooperativeness among kin later in development. Unlike previous theories for language evolution, parental antagonism theory generates testable predictions at the proximate (e.g., neurocognitive areas important for social transmission and language capacities), ontogenetic (e.g., the function of language at different points of development), ultimate (e.g., inclusive fitness), and phylogenetic levels (e.g., the spread of maternally derived brain components in mammals, particularly in the hominin lineage), thus making human capacities for culture more tractable than previously thought.
Via Simon Greenhill:
Dunn M, Greenhill SJ, Levinson SC, & Gray RD (2011). Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature.
Some colleagues and I have a new paper out in Nature showing that the evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. I’ve written an overview/FAQ on this paper here, and there’s a nice review of it here and here.
The Abstract:
Languages vary widely but not without limit. The central goal of linguistics is to describe the diversity of human languages and explain the constraints on that diversity. Generative linguists following Chomsky have claimed that linguistic diversity must be constrained by innate parameters that are set as a child learns a language. In contrast, other linguists following Greenberg have claimed that there are statistical tendencies for co-occurrence of traits reflecting universal systems biases, rather than absolute constraints or parametric variation. Here we use computational phylogenetic methods to address the nature of constraints on linguistic diversity in an evolutionary framework. First, contrary to the generative account of parameter setting, we show that the evolution of only a few word-order features of languages are strongly correlated. Second, contrary to the Greenbergian generalizations, we show that most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specific rather than universal tendencies. These findings support the view that—at least with respect to word order—cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states.
There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where interacting groups use several languages. In fact, by some estimates, bilingualism is the norm for most societies. If one views language as a tool for communicating about objects and events, it seems strange that linguistic diversity should be maintained over time for two reasons. First, it seems more efficient, during language use, to have a one-to-one mapping between signals and meanings. In fact, mutual exclusivity is exhibited by young children and has been argued to be an innate bias and crucial to the evolution of a linguistic system. How or why do bilinguals over-ride this bias? Secondly, learning two language systems must be more difficult than learning one. What is the motivation for expending extra effort on learning an apparently redundant system?
Despite these obstacles, stable bilingualism exists in many parts of the world. How might these arise and be maintained? Continue reading “The emergence of stable bilingualism in the lab: An experiment proposal”
More elephant based news!
A new study from the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published today, has found that elephants pay attention to the oldest female elephant in their group when a predator is approaching.
The research, carried out in Kenya, used recordings of roars from both male and female lions and monitored the reactions of groups of African Elephants. It has been known for a long time that elephants social groups are formed around a matriarchy. The experiment found that groups of elephants with matriarchs quickly organised themselves into defensive bunch formations after appearing to stop and pay attention to their female leader. These groups were also much more likely to approach the loud speaker producing the roar in an aggressive manner.
Male lions present a greater threat to groups of elephants as they are much more likely to attack elephants when alone and are usually much more successful than females who will only attack when part of a group. The elephants showed an ability to differentiate between male and female lions. The study also showed that matriarchs who were much older were much more likely to react in the appropriate way to roars made by male lions which is thought to be the result of experience.
The signals which allow the Matriarch to elicit this co-ordination among her group are still largely unknown due to the lack of loud vocalisations and Karen McComb and Graeme Shannon, who lead the initial study, are now looking into finding quieter, less obvious vocalisations and posture cues.
The study provides the first empirical evidence that within a social group, individuals may gain benefits from paying attention to an older leader because of their abilities in making decisions when under threat. This generates insights into selection for longevity in cognitively advanced social mammals.
A study published on PNAS.org yesterday has shown that elephants might have shared goals which gives them the ability to co-operate.
An experiment was done using the classical 1930s cooperation paradigm used to test the co-operative abilities of monkeys and apes. This paradigm is used to explore the cognition underlying coordination toward a shared goal. This explores what animals know or learn about the benefits of cooperation and also tests their ability to comprehend a partner’s role in cooperation.
The experiment comprises of 2 animals who need to work together to pull 2 ends of the same rope in order to pull a platform towards them which holds a reward such as food.
Experiments such as this have never been done on animals apart from primates before. Plotnik et al. (2011) subjected this experimental paradigm to elephants and have shown that elephants can learn to coordinate with a partner. The elephants also delayed pulling he rope for up to 45 seconds if the arrival of their partner was delayed which showed that they comprehended that there was no point to pulling on the rope if their partner lacked access to the rope. The elephants learnt that this was the case much more quickly than has been shown in Chimpanzees in other studies.
Observations from the wild suggest that in nonhuman primates these co-operative abilities exist but experimental results have been mixed. Plotnik et al. (2011) claim that convergent evolution may have lead elephants to have reached a level of cooperative skill equal to that of chimpanzees.
You can see a video of the elephants doing the experiment here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9417000/9417308.stm
References
There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where linguistic diversity emerges and persists within groups of interacting individuals. Previous research has identified the use of linguistic cues of identity as an important factor in the development of linguistic diversity (e.g. Nettle, 1999). Gareth Roberts looks at this issue with an experimental paradigm.
This experiment was a game where individuals had to trade commodities in a series of rounds. At each round, individuals were paired up either with a team-mate or a competitor, though the speaker’s true identity was hidden. Players were given random resources, but scored points based on how ‘balanced’ their resources were after trading (that is, you were punished for having much more meat than corn, for example). A commodity given to another individual was worth twice as much to the receiver as to the donor.
Players could only interact through an ‘alien’ language via an instant-messaging system. Prior to the game, individuals learned an artificial language which they were to use in these interactions. All participants were initially given the same starting language. There were several conditions that manipulated the frequency with which you interacted with your team-mate and whether the task was competitive or co-operative. In the co-operative condition, four players were considered as part of the same team and the task was to get a high a score as possible. In the competitive condition the four players were split into two groups and the task was to score more than the other team. In this condition, then, the main task was to identify whether your partner was a co-operator or a competitor.
The results showed that, if players interacted frequently enough with their team-mates and were in competition with another group, then linguistic diversity emerged. Over the course of the game each team developed its own ‘variety’, and this was used as a marker of group identity. For example, in one game two forms of the word for ‘you’ arose. Players in one team tended to use ‘lale’ while players in the other team tended to use ‘lele’, meaning that players could tell group membership from this variation. Thus, linguistic variation arose due to the linguistic system evolving to encode the identity of the speakers.
The diversity seemed to arise both from drift and intentional change, both of which have been documented in the sociolinguistic literature. Roberts suggests that linguistic markers make good social markers because they are costly to obtain (so difficult for free-riders to fake), salient and flexible enough to cope with changing group dynamics. In the next post, I’ll be thinking about a similar experiment looking at how linguistic variation might arise in a co-operative scenario.
Roberts, G. (2010). An experimental study of social selection and frequency of interaction in linguistic diversity Interaction Studies, 11 (1), 138-159 DOI: 10.1075/is.11.1.06rob