Great apes should have human rights, say Spanish MPs

By Richard Alleyne, Daily Telegraph

Great apes should be given the human rights to life and freedom, Spanish MPs have said.

Members of parliament’s environmental committee urged the government to comply with the “Great Apes Project”, backed by scientists and philosophers who argue man’s closest genetic relatives deserve such accords.

Spain is famous for bull-fighting and has been criticised by campaigners for myriad cases of cruelty to animals.

“This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defence of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity,” said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.

The MPs’ call has cross-party support and is expected to become law.

The government is now committed to update the statute book within a year to outlaw harmful experiments on apes in Spain.

“We have no knowledge of great apes being used in experiments in Spain, but there is currently no law preventing that from happening,” Mr Pozas said.

Keeping apes for circuses, television commercials or filming will become a criminal offence.

Keeping an estimated 315 apes in Spanish zoos will not be illegal, but supporters of the bill say conditions will need to improve drastically in 70 per cent of establishments to comply with the new law.

Philosophers Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri founded the Great Ape Project in 1993, arguing that “non-human hominids” like chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans should enjoy the right to life, freedom and not to be tortured.

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).

D’Errico is a world famous archaeologist and one of the leading proponents of a nuanced multi-regional model of modern human evolution. He argues that emergence was gradual, patchy and complex, rather than rapid and sweeping like some have envisioned. He also promotes the idea that humans weren’t exclusive in their development of some, if not all of the advanced skills we associate with ‘being human’ and in this talk he really went to town on the idea that neanderthals had advanced symbolism that is likely to indicate a capacity for language.

D’Errico convincingly argued that although there is no categorical proof of neanderthal language this is no reason to determine that this rules them incapable of language. He held up the increasing evidence for both symbolic body painting and ceremonial decorations as evidence for advanced symbolic ability in neanderthals. It is more parsimonious, he argued, that symbolic ability indicates language, than to argue for symbolic ability without language. Beads and craftwork are good signs of not only interactive symbolic value, but of oral traditions necessary for the continuation of skills. Behavioural complexities like these indicate transmission of complex symbolic information at a higher level than mere primitive body painting or self decoration. These were in keeping with the evidence for FOXP2 in neanderthals, and other complex non-symbolic behaviours.

I’m sure many will already see the traditional objections to these arguments. Firstly that there is some evidence for speech impairment in neanderthals, and the old classic, that you can’t infer lingusitic or even communicative value from material evidence. These are all valid points but D’Errico reminded me of an old quote I heard about archaelology, describing it as “the necessary inference from limited means”. Language doesn’t fossilise and as the weight of evidence reveals increasing behavioural complexity, so the arm of parsimony swings firmly towards the claim that neanderthals had some sort of complex communicative ability. This is far more plausible than a bunch of mute, uncommunicative neanderthals engaging in complex cultural behaviour.

Whether it could ever be called full human language is a far more difficult question to answer, with lots of difficult related questions about what exactly do we mean by human language, and what influence would interbreeding have had, had if it it occurred? It also acutely poses the question of why humans persisted and neanderthals did not. Overall, a very robust presentation that had people talking about it afterwards.

Finally, the old warhorse Bickerton took to the podium. He ditched his advertised presentation and got stuck into linguistics, surfing on the general anti-Chomskian sentiment withing the room. He attacked the famous paper by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch in which it was argued that the unique defining feature of human language faculty is the capacity for recursion (the ability to embed identical structures within structures of the same kind). This skill, it has been argued, gives human language its intense creativity and flexibility. The evolutionary value of recursion if often confused, and recursion is frequently conflated with ‘discrete infinity’, the linguistic ability make infinite combinations from finite means.

Bickerton attacked the very foundations of the C,H & F claims and argued that recursion is itself a fiction. In reality it was a dressed-up way of describing the iteration of lexical processes. Here’s a few choice quotes from the presentation:

The core process of language consists of an iterative process applied so as to satisfy lexical dependencies

He argued that the evolution of syntax is not the core issue of language evolution. In keeping with Deacon (1997) he argued that the semantic value of language is the most important, as manifested in the mental lexicon:

It thereby becomes possible to produce a more parsimonious theory in which words, with all their lexical and semantic properties evolved first, and then a simple iterative process” .. allowed these lexical values to combine together.

He argued that merge, one of the fundamental components of recursion, which allows the combining of smaller units into larger units, was actually part of the lexicon and had an underlying neural basis. He didn’t extrapolate as to what or where this neural basis might be.

As you probably know already, Bickerton is best known as a proponent of proto-language, the idea that there was a stage of primitive language that preceded full-blown language. Bickerton argued that the difference between proto-language and language would be in how the words were assembled by the lexicon. In proto-language they would project singularly to the motor-articulatory system, whereas in language they would be assembled beforehand.

A very robust and pleasing talk. Deacon was very persuasive in his arguments although I think a lot of detail remains to be filled in. I’ve never been convinced by the primacy of recursive syntax in either our linguistic ability or its evolution. This was a very plausible alternative argument, but I feel bashing Chomssy, Hauser and Fitch is increasingly becoming a straw man argument. As Chris Knight mentioned in the question session afterwards, they are all now beginning to disagree about the claims of the paper, with only Chomsky sticking rigidly to his guns. Hauser and Fitch are far less interested in the value of the broad language faculty, than just the narrow faculty and recursion.

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.

Certainly elephants are a lot more interesting than previously had been thought. We need to find out more about the conditions under which the elephant painted, My money is on heavy degree of enculturation and (given the way it seems to be performed for tourists) some solid Skinnerian conditioning. If it were spontaneous and genuine it would pretty much rewrite a lot of what we know about animal cognition. Not even Kanzi can paint like that. The giveaway is the fact that the animal paints like a human would, in profile, with a cute flower in its trunk.

However, to be a bit less cynical for a while, the picture is an awful lot like cave paintings in style, with the use of obvious lines to delineate natural edges. It has been suggested that cave paintings look like this because these are the clearest factors understood by human cognition. Lots of studies of art under impaired cognition, experiments at recognizing degenerated images of animals, examining Autistic art or artwork from people with cognitive disorders, has found that this is the most straightforward way for the human mind to represent the essential kinesthetic information. (I haven’t got the references to hand, I’ll try to add them later). I don’t really think this is likely to be what is happening with the elephants, though. The influence of humans is a far more parsimonious explanation.

Anthropology.net and New Scientist have recently reported on a couple of developments in the Neanderthal language debate.
Firstly, a new paper is in the works that will cast doubt upon the conclusions of the now famous Neanderthal FOXP2 paper from last year. Krause et al found the same adaptive variation of the language-implicated FOXP2 gene as is found in humans in Neanderthal DNA sequences, and claimed that the this was evidence for FOXP2 as a homologous trait that was present in our common ancestor. Cue endless headlines about how this finding is proof that Neanderthals had language.

Thanks to a talk by D’Errico at Evolang (post upcoming) I do believe that Neanderthals had some sort of fairly sophisticated vocal communication, but this based on the archeological record rather than the presence/absence of FOXP2. As many commentators noted at the time, the presence of FOXP2 is not proof of language. Firstly, FOXP2 is by no means the sole gene responsible for language. Secondly, the role of FOXP2 in producing language is far from clear, another paper last year found similar adaptive variation in echolocating bats and suggested it might more likely be a gene for co-ordinating orofacial movement. Certainly FOXP2 is a gene whose main role is the activation/deactivation of other genes.

Well an as yet unpublished paper is apparently going to take issue with one of the main claims of the original study, namely that this finding was consistent with a homologous adaptation in the common ancestor of humans and neanderthals. Here’s the abstract:

Krause et al. (2007) recently examined patterns of genetic variation at FOXP2 in two Neandertals. This gene is of particular interest because it is involved in speech and language and was previously shown to harbor the signature of recent positive selection. The authors found the same two amino-acid substitutions in Neandertals as in modern humans. Assuming that these sites were the targets of selection and no interbreeding between the two groups, they concluded that selection at FOXP2 occurred before the populations split, over 300Kya. Here, we show that the data are unlikely under this scenario but may instead be consistent with low rates of gene flow between modern humans and Neandertals. We also collect additional data and introduce a modeling framework to estimate levels of modern human contamination of the Neandertal samples. We find that, depending on the assumptions, additional control experiments may be needed to rule out contamination at FOXP2.

A very simple explanation for the presence of FOXP2 in neanderthals would be that there was some sort of interbreeding between the species. The original paper made the broad assumption that interbreeding did not take place between humans and neanderthals on the basis of the fact that other randomly selected genes were undisturbed and the selective sweep for the FOXP2 gene came after our common ancestor. At the time people like John Hawks expressed a cynicism about the strength of this assumption. The writers of this new paper argue that the evidence presented in the original paper does not imply a homologous adaptation in a common ancestor. They argue that it is consistent with low level interbreeding, but the lack of definition means that we cannot also rule out the possibility that it got there from human contamination. An interesting prospect.

On a similar note Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University, has used models of the Neanderthal vocal tract to try and simulate what Neanderthals sounded like. He has even made a ‘recording’ of a neanderthal pronouncing a vowel sound. McCarthy argues that neanderthals lacked the capacity to produce the basic human quantal vowels, thus seriously impeding their ability to use language.

In contrast to a modern human “E”, the Neanderthal version doesn’t have a quantal hallmark, which helps a listener distinguish the word “beat” from “bit,” for instance. Though subtle, the linguistic difference would have limited Neanderthal speech, McCarthy says.

I’m very dubious that this proves anything about neanderthal language. Firstly, who says it evolved in the same way as humans? Secondly it is based on a fairly narrow set of evidence, expanding upon the work of Lieberman, who argued that neanderthals had impaired language ability. It might add some weight to the idea of a limited langauge faculty, but I don’t think it can really be used to argue that this rules out language in neanderthals.

As far as Evolang goes I must confess that beer and tapas had diminished my note-taking skills at this point and so some of these sketches might be a little vague, but I’ll try to be as fair and accurate as I can be.

Simon Kirby presented a kind of ‘greatest hits’ of the work being carried out at the LEC in Edinburgh. I better restate my biases in the interests of disclosure. I am one of the vast crowd of ‘Edinburghians’ who made up the largest group at Evolang, but I hope this won’t distort my reporting of their or other people’s ideas.

The general thrust of the LEC research has been that the role of cultural transmission has been largely ignored by investigations into language evolution, and the shadow of Chomsky has made us compartmentalise and isolate the features and stages of language evolution. Kirby (and all the other Edinburghians he referenced) have consistently demonstrated that many of the so-called innate features of grammar can be explained by the repeated iterated application of small biases. He once again showed his Iterated Learning Model, which envisions the emergence of linguistic traits and a complex interactive process between biological evolution, ontogeny and cultural transmission. He referenced the work of Beqa, Cornish and Dediu, (amongst others) as practical experiments into the way small biases can manifest as large changes in language. I’ll be covering some of these in a later post.

The two pleanries who had the least impact upon me were Camilia José Cela Conde and Juan Uriagereka, who represented the two opposite ends of the language evolution spectrum. Cela Conde, an archaeologist, was certainly ballsy. He marched into the middle of a conference on language evolution and told us that we were basically wasting our time. He argued that both archaeological and genetic evidence is at present inconclusive, and we can’t make any meaningful conclusions about how language evolved. Obviously, I don’t really agree with him, but I felt there were two particular points he failed to address properly. Firstly he didn’t go into any of the behavioural evidence from fields like psychology, or comparative studies between species. Secondly some of his evidence was shaky. He offered quite a cartoony interpretation of the FOXP2 evidence, suggesting that the field were treating it as ‘the language gene’, which is far from accurate. Most evolutionary linguists I know are very cynical about what FOXP2 can tell us, and the rest of the genetic picture is yet to be explored. He seemed to be creating quite a straw man argument based on quite old evidence. Still, it was refreshing to have a negative voice.

I’m not going to cover Juan Uriagereka here, simply because I don’t have enough information to report it accurately. A more comprehensive version of the talk is here, at Babel’s Dawn.