Evolang 08 – More Plenary Speakers

Okay, more biased rambling commentary on Evolang 08…

On day two the proper conference began and we were treated to two excellent plenary speakers, Gary Marcus and Susan Goldin-Meadow.

I’d never heard of Gary Marcus before but he presented one of the most stimulating presentations of the whole week. The title of his talk, “Language as Kluge”, was intriguing, but sounded a bit too technical to really whet the appetite. As he got into his talk I was very pleasantly surprised by the broad brush approach he used, and the attention-to-detail he used to back it up.

Major Language Evolution Papers: #1

Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition – Tomasello et al (2005)

Who’s it by? It’s by Michael Tomasello and some illustrious associates. Tomasello is a cognitive psychologist with an interest in cognitive development.

What’s it about? It presents a unifying hypothesis for a lot of the recent discoveries in human evolution, primatology and childhood development. Tomasello argues that the ability to read and share intentions is the basis for human cognition, and that we are adapted to this purpose in a way that close relatives like chimpanzees aren’t.

Why should an evolutionary linguist care? Because buried deep in that hypothesis is the assumption that language is part of this cognitive aparatus. Tomasello’s argument therefore offers the biggest contemporary challenge to the Chomskian consensus on language evolution, placing it behind the cognition of shared intentionality in terms of both emergence and importance.

So, thanks to the generosity of Chrissy Cuskley, here is a PDF of her presentation about this paper.

‘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…

Oral traditions can affect tribal survival in natural disasters like Tsunamis

This is a very interesting press release from UC Santa Cruz. The researcher found much higher survival rates in areas with previous knowledge of Tsunamis and with long term populations steeped in the oral traditions of the culture

“they had heard stories passed down from their elders about how to recognize a tsunami and how to respond. These people knew that when they saw the sea draw down, it was time to run for the hills. … ”

Oral traditions are a very efficient means of tsunami education,” said Day, a visiting research associate in Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz…

“It became apparent that oral traditions were going back 500 years,” Day explained. “The stories contained information about how to recognize when a tsunami was about to come, such as falling sea levels, and told how people should take action…”

In contrast, Day found from a review of the literature, casualties from other tsunamis are much higher in areas inhabited by recent immigrants with no indigenous knowledge about these events. For example, video evidence showed that many people in Thailand in 2004 did not recognize the warning signs of a tsunami and did not realize that there was a safe place to go less than one kilometer away …”

The focus of the study is obviously the future prevention of Tsunami casualties, but it does offer us an excellent demonstration of the interwoven nature of biological survival, cultural behavior and language. The preservation of knowledge can have a direct relationship with an individual’s genetic survival, and it poses the interesting question as to whether the memetic information contained in an oral tradition is adapted to the needs of its users? For this correlation between oral traditions and tsunami survival to be significant then every oral tradition must have preserved this information.  In addition, any cultural adaptation can only take place at a group level. You can’t have an oral culture of one…

So many unanswered questions are posed by this information that I’d love to see some more research done that focused specifically on the issue on the relationship between oral cultures and group survival.

Armand Leroi – What Makes Us Human

Here is a high quality copy of the second part of Armand Leroi‘s acclaimed What Makes Us Human? documentary. It’s a little shallow in its representation of the issues and occasionally might have you screaming at the screen in frustration. (Pinker’s misrepresentation of the Chimpanzee language research programme had the veins popping in my neck). Overall however, it is a very good overview of all the most popular ideas in the field and is packed with great footage of Alex the Parrot, children with FOXP2 abnormalities, studies into autism and an exploration of mirror neurons. Requires the DIVX codec

Enjoy.

Higher Social Skills Are Distinctly Human, Toddler And Ape Study Reveals

Taken from http://www.sciencedaily.com

Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while children follow the experimenter’s example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even before preschool, toddlers are more sophisticated in their social learning skills than their closest primate relatives, according to a report published in the 7 September issue of the journal Science.

Chimpanzees participated in a comprehensive battery of tasks comparing their physical and social cognitive abilities to those of 2-year-old human children. 

Deacon Blogging Epic – Part 2

 

Deacon and Nativism
Clearly Deacon is arguing something far more subtle than innate grammar. He begins by following the standard UG criticism – that children don’t deduce rules of grammar from nothing, they are in fact embedded in a powerful learning structure. But he goes further to argue that learning also isn’t sufficient to explain the pace and effectiveness with which children aquire language.

The nativist mistake is to attribute language learning competence to internal sources just because learning externally from adults doesn’t seem to be a sufficient explanation. The Skinnerian learning mistake is to assume that all external information must be passed from the minds of adults in the form of learning. Deacon believes there is an alternative explanation, that information is carried in language itself. Language is adapted to people, and is not just an abstract and unforgiving code. Therefore a child wouldn’t have to learn language by trial and error if they didn’t possess UG. If they were tuned towards language their exploration of the novel linguistic structure would be itself be structured and relevant.

“Children’s minds need not innately embody language structures, if languages embody the predisposition of children’s minds” (p109)

Blogging Epic – Deconstructing Deacon 1

Deacon is interested with the interplay between the brain and language in our evolutionary pathway. The key break that he makes with the nativist tradition is that he includes the development of language in the developmental process of the brain, rather than seeing it as a later adaptation. Through this, language is afforded a evolutionary equivalence with brain development that the nativist tradition has always rejected. The other key point he makes is his assertion that it is our capacity for symbolic representation that distinguishes us from other animals, not our capacity for recursive grammar.

So lets begin by looking at Deacon’s take on the semiotics of language. He begins by arguing that there is something special about symbolic language that animals cannot produce. In Deacon’s argument, language is not something that needs to be seen as a higher replacement for all other systems of communication, rather it evolved alongside and in conjunction with these other forms. However there is something in this niche that is different. Most animals can be taught to use arbitrary signs but there is “something more” that humans do with signs which “constitutes our symbolic competence” (p68).

Reciprocity in Rats

John Hawks notes this interesting story that might be interesting to people who are investigating the evolution of reciprocity in conjunction with the evolution of langauge. The rats seem capable of iterated reciprocal altruism, as well as a more generalised reciprocity.

Mirror Neurons… hmmm…

The more I read about mirror neurons the more unsure I become about their relevance. For the uninitiated, mirror neurons are a new type of neuron that has been discovered in macaques (and are presumed to be present in humans) that fire when observing someone performing an action. There is a nice little PBS mini-documentary on them here. Jim Hurford wrote an excellent article explaining their limitations (2003) and putting a deft boot into some of the more grandiose claims of the mirror neuron scientists.

So first lets look at some of those claims. Perhaps my uneasiness with mirror neurons is in part based upon the fact that I can’t help but feel there is something inherently pop sciencey about their media coverage. I don’t doubt their existence or the significance of their discovery, but they have emerged as a panacea concept, a functional missing link in our understanding of brain functions. A few people have argued that they explain everything in social interactions and language use, including the dominance of visual information in our species and the impact or imitation on behaviour. Rizzato and Arbib are the people who make the greatest claims about the relevance of mirror neurons. They hold the belief that:

“Human language (as well as some dyadic forms of primate communication) evolved from a basic mechanism that was not originally related to communication: the capacity to recognize actions.”

The ability to read others is here a precursor to the evolutionary motivation to communicate, a position that crosses over slightly with the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis and Corballis’s theories on the gestural origins of communication. For Rizzato and Arbib the emergence of mirror neurons allowed us to develop sophisticated interactive behaviour that in turn lead to protolinguistic systems as ways of exploring the difference between action and perception. Mirror neurons were an essential step on the adaptive pathway drawn to full language use.

A slightly more nuanced analysis is presented by V. S. Ramachandran who argues that mirror neurons were more likely co-opted exaptations whose presence is necessary but not sufficient (to borrow those old philosophical terms) to explain the evolution of language. Mirror neurons permitted the first great leap towards tool use and culture because they permitted imitation through observation, and somewhere in this melting pot language evolution took place. The exaptation of mirror neurons is far more circumstantial than in Rizzato and Arbib’s account, and they are a self supporting explanation for language evolution.

Jim’s response to these claims is quite succinct and relies on several simple points:

1. Mirror neurons do not produce arbitrary signs – all mirror neurons permit us to do is feel the same stimulation from watching something as performing it ourselves. The abstract Saussurian sign that is essential to the formation of grammatical symbolic language could actually restricted by mirror neuron systems, because it restricts interations from making the leap to abstract symbolism.
2. Mirror neuron structures are probably common. Remember all these hypotheses about human mirror neuron activity are made based on experiments conducted upon macaques, not upon humans or even Great Apes – This is perhaps why my pop science detector was flashing. There must also be some sort of relationship between mirror neurons and motor neurons in order for the transferal from perception to action. To this extent it seems unlikely that mirror neurons are functionally separate from motor systems and Hurford argues that we will probably find a lot of mirror neurons in natural systems as it is the whole behaviour that is adaptive, not perception or action alone. Hurford also makes the case that many examples of mirror neuron stimulus are not necessarily caused by the individual living out an action through perception. It’s something like the difference between empathy and sympathy – we don’t always have to replicate first-hand experience through perception in order to experience a neural stimulation. The PBS documentary above argued that mirror neurons might explain the passionate connection a fan experiences through watching sport. But it’s not that the fan experiences victory vicariously through a mirror neuron-powered identification with their sporting hero, but instead that they experience a perceptual distance, a second degree sense of victory that lacks the same value as for the man on the pitch.
3. Finally, for mirror neurons to permit the mapping of symbolic meaning then signifiers and signifieds must fundamentally be the same. However, as is clear to anyone using a language, the many different aspects of symbolic language use, the word, the symbol, the phoneme, do not possess identical features. Mirror neurons facilitate the repetition of sameness, whereas linguistic systems are fundamentally built upon the linking of difference to the same function.

So yes, a very difficult subject, that still needs a lot of expansion if it is going to prove more than a sideshow. Like Jim I’m happy to conclude that “There is a long way to go from mirror neurons to language”. I’m dubious of their ability to explain that niggling evolutionary step from sociality to language, not least because they are present in creatures like Macaques that are social but not language-using. (Using the limited powers of Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar, I didn’t manage to find any research about mirror neurons in non-primates.) It seems you still need the sociality→mind reading→language pathway for them to play this vital role in language evolution. If we look at langauge as more an abstract complex skill than a mechanism for social cohesion, then mirror neurons seem much better suited to explain human empathy than human language.

If anyone can enlighten my skimmed knowledge of the subject I’d love to hear from you.