Blogging Suspended! Apologies

Having tried to get back on the wagon and failed, I’m just going to suspend the blog until I can get through the current morass of work I have to do. It’s just producing too many half written entries and too much guilt. See you whenever I get back behind the keyboard and can start writing.

I’m back baby… and the Spanish want to give Chimps human rights

Apologies for the monster gap in posts. It’s been an epic couple of months of lost internet connections, holidays and crazy research work (more on that to come later). Anyway, to kick things off…

They’re British and they Work in Telecoms…

No internet thanks to the spectacular incompetence of BT, so blogging has dried up to a trickle as I can only get on at work. Here is the rather excellent Marcus Brigstocke ranting about his similar experience…

Koko the Gorilla meets Mr Rodgers

Mr Rodgers meets Koko the sign language using gorilla on his TV special about accepting people with differences…

Evolang Post #5 – d’Errico and Bickerton

There were just two more plenary speakers at the end of the conference and both delivered fascinating and controversial presentations.

The archaeological positions on language evolution are complicated and frequently bitter. Archaeologists are reluctant to speculate on anything that doesn’t fossilise and the emergence of language is embedded into several, broader debates about how humans emerged. Firstly there is a debate about how late or early modern human behaviour emerged. Secondly a debate about when anatomically modern humans emerged, and finally a debate over the geographical pattern of emergence of modern humans (both behaviourally and biologically).

Elephants Painting?

I’ve had a few emails recently asking about this clip that has been doing the rounds on youtube.

I’m pretty dubious that it represents an elephant truly drawing an abstract image of itself as some sort of therapy. None-the-less it remains fascinating.

Heated hobbit debate takes new turn with thyroid theory

From the Guardian Science.

“The bitter scientific squabble over the true identity of the fossil hobbit has taken another acrimonious turn. An analysis by Australian researchers suggests the diminutive creatures were not members of a new species at all, but suffered from a congenital thyroid deficiency that stunted their growth.”

Read more here

Major Language Evolution Papers: #2

Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution

Mesoudi et al 2004

Who’s it by? Alex Mesoudi, a psychologist with an interest in modelling cultural evolution. Andrew Whiten, a psychologist and primatologist, most famous for the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis, and Kevin Laland, a biologist with an interest in animal social learning, cultural evolution and niche construction.

What’s it about? Mesoudi et al neatly outline the relationship between cultural evolution and biological evolution, and explore the different methodologies for analysing and modelling cultural evolution.

Why should an evolutionary linguist care? Unless you are only obsessed with the biological basis for languag, then culture is likely to play an important role in any account of language evolution. It may account for many of the features of language that Chomskian accounts have presumed are innate. It also represents a parallel and fascinating area for evolutionary explorations to move into.

Anyway, here is Erin Brown’s excellent presentation on the paper.

Current Issues In Language Evolution: Presentations and Papers

I’m taking advantage of Simon Kirby’s Current Issues in Language Evolution class to make a series of posts on some of the major papers on language evolution that have been released in the past ten years. I’ll blog about some of the papers as we cover them in class, and hopefully provide online copies of the presentations that people have produced with some basic information and commentary. The aim is to provide a set of blog posts that will provide newcomers with some of the key papers in the field, and some detailed analysis of their claims.

‘The Superorganism’ is Back in Fashion

A New E. O. Wilson Book About Group Selection

*Corrected*

The great biologist E. O. Wilson is releasing a new book call The Superorganism in which he is develops the group selection argument to posit the existence of higher level evolutionary units. An idea that has already been eloquently proposed by the other great Wilson (David Sloane Wilson) in Unto Others. This is going to be very interesting for us on two completely different levels…