Babel's Dawn

Cultural Evolution

I seem to be in a mood for notes. It's summer; I'm working on my book; I have a new job, but I still love working on the blog and keeping my eyes open.

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Discover News reports million year old cannibals. Homo antecessor garbage piles in Spain show human bones mixed in with that of other animals. This finding has no direct bearing on speech origins, but it shows that when we consider group competition, we are talking about something ferocious. The humans wjp were eaten are assumed to be from rival groups because the mathematics of the issue indicates that a group that eats its own in sufficient quantities to provide nutrition will run out of food faster than replacement. The news story takes it for granted that there was no ritual side of the eating of other humans, but anybody who has read Terrence Deacon is bound to wonder.

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Following up on the Hauser story mentioned last week is a report that he may have fabricated data. Monkey intelligence may have to be downgraded, but for this blog the key paragraph says: "his work on morality involved humans and is therefore easier for others to repeat. And much of Dr. Hauser's morality research has checked out just fine, Dr. Haidt said."

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The NY Times magazine has a story asking whether language shapes our thought. Yes and no is the answer. I was glad that the more interesting examples have been mentioned before on this blog.

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Kate Distin has biten off a lot to chew in her new book Cultural Evolution . She wants to explain all of culture "from atheism to zabaglione." It seems like one of those books where the less you know about the chapter's subject, the more insightful the work seems. Her material on language is not worth the trouble of any regular on this blog, but the stuff on economics might give pause for thought.

Summer Notes

Short notes this week—starting with a mention of the Marc Hauser affair. The famed Harvard psychologist is said to have falsified data. Hauser was only an indirect force on this blog. although I reviewed his book on morals reasonably favorably. (See: Ape Communities) Looking back, I notice I said he was not much of a moralist, which turns out to be more true that I had supposed.

In cases like this apologists for science typically pat themselves on the back—science takes care of its own problems. Maybe so, but all his work will now be viewed with a mistrustful eye, and others will have to confirm or deny just about every scrap of it. Quel mess!

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I noticed the other day that Tecumseh Fitch's book make's no mention of Ljilana Progovac's work on sentences and phrases that defy the rules of generative grammar. She does useful, persistent work and it is hard to imagine how a textbook sized discussion of protolanguage could leave her out. (See: Fossilized Syntax; The Eternal Duality; A Protolinguistic Fossil; Intermediate Syntax.)

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Biology Letters has published a report (abstract here) reporting that orangutans in the wild use pantomime (illustrative gestures) to elaborate on messages when communication fails. Mostly they are elaborating on requests, but also on "deceptions and declaratives." Those lying orangs!

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An undated paper by Stuart A. West, Claire El Mouden and Andy Gardner on "16 Common Misconceptions About the Evolution of Cooperation in Humans" is available in full online and should be read by anyone interested in the evolution of language. I had thought I might devote a full post to the paper, but it ends up confirming everything this blog has said about multilevel selection and group competition. Although the paper is a full throated defense of W.D. Hamilton's rule in the 1960s and 70s, the authors report that the more recent theories of multilevel selection and group competition are mathematically equivalent to Hamilton's rule. So the choice of which description to use is a matter of taste.

Mathematically identical theories are curiosities that pop up in science from time to time when thinkers are uncomfortable with one solution's phrasing and interpretation. They come at a problem from another angle and end up in the same place. The most famous example of mathematically identical solutions is probably the Heisenberg-Born matrix account of quantum phenomena and Schroedinger's wave formula of the same thing.

Another valuable point in this important paper is its very clear distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in evolutionary theory. Proximate causes tell how something is done while ultimate causes tell why. It is important to keep the differences clear when thinking about the evolution of language; e.g., the proximate cause of the rise of speech may have been vocalizations that replaced the bonding lost with the disappearance of body hair, while the ultimate cause was adaptation to life on the open savanna. I have come up with a mnemonic to keep these details straight: Phuwy (pronounced 'phooey') which means proximate-how/ultimate-why—You got that?

Early Stone Tool Butchering?

I'm taking a little August time off in the Catskills, but for those who are not relaxing you might be interested in the claim to have pushed back stone tool use to pre-Homo times.

The New York Times seemed to accept the claim; Wall Street Journal is somewhat more wait and see; while the Anthropology.net blogger is downright disbelieving.

The Return of ‘The Poverty’

This Nativity Scene by Bosch could inspire a great many sentences describing its contents, but the nature of attention and perception puts a limit on the form those sentences might take.

A bit of hubbub appeared on the blog this past week in response to my previous post. The author of the paper discussed in that post, Steven Harnad, did Babel's Dawn the honor of posting a couple of comments. And for his trouble he got kicked around a bit.

Is The Battle Almost Over?

If the greatest philosopher of the 20th century could change his mind, why can't the rest of us?

Earlier this summer there was an institute on the origins of language held in Montreal. Nobody took me up on my offer for some onsite reporting about the event, but papers are beginning to turn up online. One presentation, by Stevan Harnad, is particularly interesting because it shows where nativist and empirical inquiries into language origins might touch and where they seem irreconcilable. Having just read Fitch's book (see this post and this one) and his moral of the elephant and the blind men (arguments over language are just arguments over different parts of the whole), it has me wondering if there is any way to decide between the two?