Babel's Dawn

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)..