Babel's Dawn

New Biolingusitics Blog

The Biolinguistics journal has just begun a blog. I have no idea how it will turn out, but I have added it to my RSS feeder. http://biolingblog.blogspot.com/

Apes Ain't Us

Applause! Applause! How strange people are. We will work our hearts out for praise.

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Last week’s post (here) looked at a recent paper by David A. Leavens and Timothy P. Racine which discusses the prerequisites of joint attention. The paper’s principle conclusion was that apes are capable of every element of joint attention, so they already have any intellectual abilities needed to support it. The most sustained and productive form of joint attention is speech, however, apes do not have voluntary control of their vocal systems. But they can make sign-language words with their hands, and they have good voluntary control of their gestures. So why don’t they combine joint attention with gesture to have some kind of simple exchanges of words? The authors of that paper seem to think the explanation is in the different “sociocultural contexts” [249] of chimps and humans. In other words, it has nothing to do with biology, which is why, even though I was generally impressed by the paper, I suspect their explanation for the difference between apes and us is incomplete.

Adoption Among Apes

John Hawks' blog has an important report on adoption of orphans by male chimpanzees in the wild, probably as a result of very heavy leopard predation. This is very important in thinking about evolution and the rise of altruism. I'm amazed and impressed.

Apes and Us

James, the Chimpanzee Chauffeur. If a chimpanzee can be taught to drive a car, what can't it learn?

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Regulars on this blog will know that I am a big supporter of the notion that what makes language unique is the “speech triangle,” whose corners are (A) speaker, (B) listener, and (C) neutral topic. The speaker and listener engage injoint attention to a neutral topic. So naturally I was quite interested when I learned of a paper published last year that might challenge this claim. David A. Leavens and Timothy P. Racine published “Joint Attention in Apes and Humans: Are Humans Unique?” in an issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted largely to narratives and theory of mind. Their paper (abstract here ) was a rebuttal to the proposition that joint attention requires a theory of mind. I have not placed much importance on a theory of mind in this blog, but their points are a serious enough challenge to this blog’s long interest in joint attention that honesty requires I present their case.

Computation Is So Pre-Darwinian

The New York Academy of Sciences recently moved into its new offices offering a spectacular view of Ground Zero and downtown New York. It's a great place to get new ideas.

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“Brains don’t compute thoughts, they evolve them,” Terrence Deacon told an audience at the New York Academy of Sciences last November at a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication The Origin of Species. If that claim holds true, then the words we speak are not put together by a computational procedure but emerge from some evolutionary process. Could that be?

Deacon's remark summarized a presentation made that evening by Gerald Edelman, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the immune system. Edelman’s Nobel work showed that the immune system evolves its protection against intruders, and now for many years Edelman has been studying how the brain might work as an evolutionary system. Although I’ve been generally aware of this research, it took my evening at the New York Academy of Sciences to get me thinking about the differences between usages that are computed from those that are evolved.

Of course, there is the well-known fact that languages do evolve. That might count a point toward the evolutionist’s side, but computationists say it doesn’t matter because language’s underlying universal grammar persists without changing. Computationists acknowledge language undergoes many small changes (microevolution) but they deny that language ever takes on a new form (macroevolution).

What are the differences between something computed and something evolved?

Cognitive Daily

I see that the blog Cognitive Daily is closing down after a 5 year run as a leading (maybe the leading) psychology blog. I especially appreciate the help they gave in publicizing Babel's Dawn in its early days as an unknown striver. You can wish them luck here.

The Quest for a Consensus

Fill in the blank, but remember that when you do, a whole view of language comes with it. So don't try to argue that the word you chose is neutral or can serve as the basis of a consensus.

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One of the big differences between science and philosophy is the way scientists agree about many points while philosophers can dispute everything. That fact alone suggests that language studies in general, and the study of language origins in particular is still much more philosophy than science.

Tecumseh Fitch says of biolinguistics, “I know of no other field where scholars seem so ready to champion their own pet hypothesis uncritically, while rejecting those of others as ludicrous” [p. 286 of “Prolegomena to a Future Science of Biolinguistics”].

Historically, pretty much every scholarly field was like that. But as astrology became astronomy and alchemy was transformed into chemistry something new appeared. Disputes persisted on the edge of research, but a consensus had been achieved on fundamentals. Fitch’s essay in the current issue of the online journal Biolinguistics is an attempt to propose a consensus. It’s a noble ambition. Does he succeed?

Tamed Males

Many people interested in the origins of language have noticed the humanity’s peculiar sexual arrangements and wondered if they had anything to do with language’s start. What arrangement are those? Humans engage in a variety of heterosexual arrangements—polygamy, monogamy, polyandry—but we don’t organize our societies around systems in which males and females mate widely and randomly with each other (bonobos do that), nor do the males fight among themselves over who gets to mate with anyone and who does not (gorillas do that). To put it technically, adult human societies are organized in many ways but whatever way they choose they minimize competition between sperm. How could that have anything to do with language?

Well, Terrence Deacon has looked at the relation between sexual organization and the need for symbols to enable that organization. Chris Knight has investigated the impossibility of language under the standard ape society structure in which males contribute very little to survival. They fight among themselves and take what they want from the females. Until that system changed, Knight argues, language as a social tool was impossible. This blog has also insisted many times that the trust and sharing that language requires is only possible if the chief form of evolutionary selection was group selection rather than selection at the individual level.

At the technical level, all three of us have been saying that to have language you have to get rid of competition between sperm. So the breakthrough analysis of the Y chromosome’s genetic structure that has just appeared in Nature (introduction here ) is a real support to these ideas. It turns out that the human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes have diverged so much and so fast that it is as though we shared a last common ancestor from 310 million instead of 6 million years ago. What’s more, while chimpanzee sperm has been streamlining for ever  tighter competition, the human Y chromosome looks to be competition free. This kind of finding is exactly the kind of thing that Deacon, Knight, and this blog have been looking for.

For full stories on the report see The Washington Post and The New York Times.

NY Times Story on Monkey Chatter

I see The New York Times has run a story titled "Deciphering the Chatter of Monkeys." It has the usual hyperactive tone and misses many things that are routine on this blog, but there it is and you may be interested. I'd be interested in whatever criticism or praise you've got to offer about this story.

Genes and Language

Genes work as part of a eco-system, not as lines of code in a computer program. Some of its outputs are predictable, some are not.

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Here’s a bit of unexpected news. An authoritative book almost 500 pages long and listing over 150 genes related to language has recently been published in Spanish. It is not (yet?) available to English language readers. It’s a good reminder that not all the important work on language origins is being conducted in English. Antonio Benitez-Burraco has published Genes y Lenguaje Aspectos Ontogenéticos, Filogenéticos y Cognitivos [Genes and Language: Ontogenetic, Phylogenetic, and Cognitive Issues] in Barcelona. I wouldn’t know about it at all if it were not for a review by Victor. M. Longa  in the latest issue of the online journal, Biolinguistics. Should I master Spanish so that I can read it? Probably, but for the moment I’m going to have to settle for the 8 page review (here)..

10 Hypotheses About Language and Thought

Ardi and I wish you happy holidays.

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This is my last post of the year. I’m taking Christmas and New Year’s weekends off, so barring some unexpected heaven knows what, I’ll be silent. I thought I go out with a list of hypotheses that I’d like to see tested

This blog disagrees with mainstream linguistics in a fundamental way by having a functional definition of meaning. For most people meaning is a bit mysterious. It seems to be some kind of content that is passed from speaker to listener, but all sorts of paradoxes appear when you investigate that idea closely. Meaning becomes as mysterious as mind. On this blog, the meaning of words comes from their ability to pilot the attention of both the speaker and listener (Thanks to Giorgio Marchetti for that insight.), and the meaning of sentences comes from a series of focused points of attention (provided by words) that create a perception. In short, language is perception by other means. This view of language and meaning has left me with a different question from many other people who ask how language began.

I want to know how the ability to pilot one another’s attention began and developed, while many people want to know how we came to have the ability to express and understand strings that carry meaning. Thus, many of the technical questions that underlie orthodox quests for language origin have no testable answers. For example, the question of how we evolved a parser that lets us interpret a sentence is stymied by the fact that we have no idea how said parser works in the brain. Thus, orthodox researchers are forced to fall back on assertions that the parser did evolve and shrugged shoulders over what kind of system must exist to transfer these meanings. It is very rare to see theories of meaning that are specific enough to allow for hypotheses that let us get into the brain and see if the structures are there and how they differ from non-human brains.

It occurs to me that I’m in a different position. I don’t have a mysterious definition of meaning, so I ought to just lay out a series of hypotheses about how this non-mysterious power arose, and suggest what might be sought in order to disprove the hypothesis. So here is my list of what I’d like to see tested.

Babel's Dawn: The Book

I have signed a contract with Counterpoint to write a book with the tentative title of Babel's Dawn: A Natural History of the Origins of Speech. Counterpoint also published my book on the discovery of the Ice Age, The Ice Finders, and had a great experience with the editor in chief, Jack Shoemaker. He only suggested about three changes to that first book, but each one made the book much better.

Naturally I am delighted. This project has made me a great believer in blogs and I can think of no better form for learning what is going on in a field of inquiry. It has forced me to read hundreds of articles that I never would have seen otherwise, and I get the benefit of comments from others. At the same time, there is nothing like a book for telling a story and weaving themes together. Heaven knows what I will end up with, but I start with the thought that I will be focusing on three themes:

• The story of the origins of speech from the last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos to the first story.
• How evolution works: using the rise of a new trait to show in detail how evolution transforms species from one thing to something very different.
• What it means to be human: show the rise of a whole series of traits that support speech and distinguish homo sapiens from other animals.

I also want to thank my agent, John Thornton, who has worked tirelessly on this project.

I hope the book will appear in early 2011.

Ardi Is #1

Science magazine has declared the work on "Ardi"  "the scientific breakthrough of 2009" (see: New Details on 4.4 Million Year Old Hominid). In an editorial, the editor in chief at Science writes, " This breakthrough “changes the way we think about early human evolution."

Division of Labor — Pre Homo sapiens style

The same magazine reports that Israeli archaeologists, led by Nira Alperson, have explored an 800,000 year old site near the Dead Sea and found evidence that work in a hominid settlement was divided by type. Flint was worked in one location, shell fish cracked open in another, and vegetable remains found in another.

Early Sorghum Working

The same issue reports that evidence of sorghum residue on hundred thousand year old stone tools have been found in a cave in Mozambique. Sorghum is a grain that is still widely consumed in Africa. Seed (grain) eating is usually dated much closer to an 11 thousand year old date. 

None of these stories directly relates to language, but each of them pushes back the date of other features thought peculiarly human, implying that the date for language in some form should probably be pushed back as well.

I might add as a personal note, during my teaching years in an African village I was very familiar with the sight of women pounding grain to break it open, so I feel it is easy for me to imagine a world in which the Mozambique cave dwellers did such work.

The Signs of Sarcasm

Nicaraguan sign-language users enjoy a chat. Is their tone of voice in their smiling faces? 

Instead of reporting some news, I want to ask a question and I urge all readers with knowledge of signing to contribute.

One of the differences between speech and writing is tone of voice, which enables speakers to underscore a point, or to speak sarcastically, or to contradict themselves (e.g., shout angrily, "I'm not mad.") Emotional vocalization can also stand alone, allowing for moans, sighs, etc.

My question (springing from a vast pool of personal ignorance): To what extent are these emotional vocalizations duplicated in signing? Do signers ever feel the need to express the equivalent of, "Don't speak to me in that tone of voice, young man?" How does one go about being sarcastic while signing? Moans and sighs seem pretty automatic, but is there any sort of equivalent in sighing? Is the signing equivalent of tone-of-voice an inevitable part of signing (as it seems to be in speech), or is it something deliberately added.

Answers from experience as well as references to any literature on the subject will be greatly appreciated.