Category: Evolution

Helen De Cruz (1978-2025)

I learned the sad news today that Helen De Cruz has died (Daily Nous). Helen was a philosopher whose work spanned cognitive science, religion, archaeology, epistemology, evolution, and numerous other fields. At the time of her death she held the Danforth Chair in Humanities at Saint Louis University. I never met Helen in person but she was one of those folks who one gets to know surprisingly well through correspondence and mutually respectful reading. If you’ve never heard of Helen De Cruz, all I can say is that it is not too late to get to know her. As she noted aptly in her fascinating new paper this year on friendship with the ancients, by imagining ourselves in dialogue with a writer, we can enjoy the benefits of real closeness with them.

I first encountered Helen’s work many years ago, during a phase of her career when she was mainly working from an evolutionary / Darwinian perspective on mathematical objects such as numbers, articles with titles like ‘Why are some numerical concepts more successful than others?‘, ‘An Extended Mind Perspective on Natural Number Representation‘ and ‘Towards a Darwinian Approach to Mathematics‘. This work integrated thinking in the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary psychology, and epistemology, as applied to mathematical concepts.

For those who knew Helen only through her more recent work, this theoretical approach may seem out of character – and indeed, it’s one about which she later came to have some misgivings or at least to revise her Darwinian stridency. But what it shares with all her work is a profound respect for interdisciplinary insight across the humanities and sciences. It is eclectic but not eclecticism for its own sake; rather, a principled commitment to thinking diversely across disciplines. This early work came out as Helen was finishing her first PhD, in archaeology, and working on her second, in philosophy of cognitive science. So in Helen I found a fellow traveller, not “actually” an archaeologist, cognitive scientist, or mathematician, but someone engaged with all those disciplines, and more, in our own different ways. Later, I would learn that we share an interest in early music, and in science fiction, and many other things. We corresponded a little, in those early days, and thereafter, mostly sharing offprints and a few ideas.

Later, one of the factors that led me to choose MIT Press for my own book Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History, and specifically, to work with my amazing editor Phil Laughlin, was that I learned that Phil had edited Helen’s book (co-authored with Johan De Smedt), A Natural History of Natural Theology (MIT, 2015). Then, as these things turn out, Phil turned to Helen, due to her expertise in quirky cognitive mathematical things, as a reviewer for my manuscript. Her review was generous and positive, for which I am very grateful! Some of those comments eventually ended up in one of Helen’s superb posts on her blog, Wondering Freely, about exceptions and universals, a topic of interest to both of us.

Helen’s latest and last academic book is her remarkable Wonderstruck, a thoughtful inquiry into the role of emotions such as wonder and awe as sense-making tools. This seems at first far afield indeed from her early work on the evolutionary foundations of mathematical concepts. But there is a throughline here – about the universal human capacity for meaning-making and pattern-seeking, a grounding in naturalism without falling into the trap of pure rationalism. I need to pay more attention to this recent work.

A couple years ago, when I and my co-editor Helena Miton were putting together a interdisciplinary list of cognitive-adjacent humanists and social scientists on the topic of ‘cognitive technologies’, I reached out to Helen, not with any particular expectation, but just out of a general sense that she might be the sort of person who might have something to say. Am I ever glad I did! Her contribution, co-authored with Johan De Smedt, ‘Cosmovision as Cognitive Technology‘ is a tour de force blending cognitive science, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, and indigenous epistemology. They argue that the articulation of the body with cosmological ideas among Nahua (Aztec) herbal specialists served important mnemonic and information-transmission functions. It’s open access, and more importantly, highly accessible. We didn’t rush to get it to print, but we knew well, a few months ago, that time was short, so I am incredibly grateful that we were able to get it out in April.

Helen was frank about her cancer diagnosis online, and when she went into hospice a month or so ago, we were all sad but surely not surprised. Even from hospice she continued to post on Bluesky and on her Substack, until abruptly stopping about three weeks ago, confirming what we all knew was coming. Helen in her relatively short career published more than most of us ever will, more insightfully, and always with kindness. Still, today’s news is a great loss for all of the many fields to which Helen had contributed over the years.

Call for Papers: Strange Science: Anthropological Encounters with the Fringe

Call for Papers, 2015 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado (Nov. 18-22, 2015)

Strange Science: Anthropological Encounters with the Fringe

Anthropology has a long history of interactions with non-mainstream or pseudoscientific ideas. In our scholarship, classrooms, and public outreach, we are frequently confronted by advocates of ideas far beyond mainstream scientific understandings. Some of these ideas are directly challenged by anthropological data, such as ‘scientific’ racism, intelligent design, hyperdiffusionism, ancient aliens, 2012 millenarianism, pyramidology, and cryptozoology. Other pseudoscientific ideas are non-anthropological, but encountered in interaction with publics interested in medicine, the environment, or religion: homeopathy, climate change denial, biorhythms, dowsing, etc. What can – and what should – we do about them? What is our obligation to address (or not) these ‘strange’ sciences? And what tools does anthropology – as a ‘strange science’ itself, confronting challenges to its scientific status both from within and without – bring to bear that other disciplines lack?

Archaeologists have long been interested in addressing their publics about the value of scientific reasoning and in particular in countering mythical and often pernicious ideas about the past (Feder 2014). Similarly, biological anthropologists have done much to address the myth of biological race and to confront creationist ideas (Marks 2012). But our encounters with fringe ideas are more numerous and more complex than these, and cross all the subfields. We are also faced with different sorts of challenges: when these ideas come from our students or consultants, how do we maintain respectful social relationships while still making knowledge claims? How do we justify our knowledge claims in an environment ever more given to epistemological skepticism about the authority of science?

The goal of this panel is to address anthropological encounters with ‘strange science’ in the field, in the classroom, and in encounters with colleagues, from the perspective of scientifically-oriented anthropology across all subfields. Within a framework that posits that anthropology can, indeed, make verifiable truth-claims, abstracts are welcome that discuss any anthropological dialogue or engagement with non-mainstream scientific ideas, past or present, including but not limited to those mentioned above.

Please respond to this call by April 3, 2015 by emailing an abstract of no more than 250 words to Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University) at chrisomalis [at] wayne.edu. A discussant slot would also be extremely welcome. Please feel free to distribute to any colleagues or students who may be interested. As with any AAA panel, all panelists must be registered AAA members and additionally register for the conference.

New study on co-evolution of language and tool-making

There’s an interesting new study in PLOS One, ‘Shared Brain Lateralization Patterns in Language and Acheulean Stone Tool Production: A Functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound Study‘ (Uomini and Meyer 2013) with evidence that potentially bears on questions relating to the co-evolution of linguistic capacities and stone tool-making (for a useful summary, see Michael Balter’s news article in Wired).   The authors scanned the brains of expert flint-knappers both during knapping activities and during a standard linguistic task, showing that the parts of the brain that are activated are common to both activities among the participants.   This is one small piece of a much larger general argument that sees language capacities as much older than many linguists have traditionally accepted, co-evolving along with the Acheulean tool tradition (up to 1.75 million years ago).  In contrast, when I was a student, we all learned without much debate that the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ of 35,000-40,000 years ago was the dividing line for language origins.   Research on Paleolithic language ranges from the utterly wonderful to the utterly ridiculous, mostly because there is no agreement as to what sorts of evidence can be reasonably brought forward in support of different hypotheses, and because all the evidence is, by necessity, inferential rather than direct.  So we will see.

Language evolution lecture

I’m here at the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Society for Anthropological Sciences joint meetings in Albuquerque, NM. Tonight we will have a keynote address by Nobel laureate / polymath Murray Gell-Mann on ‘The Evolution of Languages’. I’ll be very interested to see what Gell-Mann has to say on this issue that is close to some of my own research interests. Stay tuned.

Thanksgiving link roundup

Today, most of my colleagues are toiling away in an attempt to cook and carve some sort of fowl. Me, well, I’m Canadian, and even though I work over in the Dark Nether Reaches and get to enjoy its three-day week, I live over here in Canada’s Deep South and get to … have a flu shot and catch up on posting some links of interest?

I don’t have much to add about the sad passing of Dell Hymes last week. I didn’t know him but I know many people who did, and no one who purports to be a linguistic anthropologist (or sociolinguist … or anthropological linguist … or …) can possibly be ignorant of his work. The NYT description of him as a “Linguist with a Wide Net” is utterly evocative and has me imagining it literally. He will be missed, but his legacy on the discipline will remain vital for decades.

While Turkey officially switched from the Arabic to the Roman alphabet in the 1920s, at the same time it prohibited the use of letters not used to represent Turkish – which includes the ‘ordinary’ Roman letters Q, W, and X. While sometimes portrayed as a ban on those letters specifically, it is a more general ban on non-Turkish characters, as far as I can tell, which would seem to prohibit all sorts of texts. Ostensibly designed to promote national unity and secular rule, the law has only been applied to Turks of Kurdish descent. As someone who until last year was a resident of a region where texts written in my native language are under severe legal constraints, this has been a matter of some interest and concern to me for a few years now. Mark Liberman tells us more over at Language Log.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are investigating the cultural evolution of language, arguing that language change is patterned by the biological constraints of the human brain – in other words, language changes to accomodate itself to the sorts of brains we possess. They are examining this idea experimentally using an artificial language of simple syllables used to describe alien-looking fruit … which is not as bizarre as I may have made it sound. Edinburgh is doing a lot of exciting work these days in linguistics, what with Jim Hurford, Simon Kirby, and Geoff Pullum (among others) housed there.

Relatedly, Marc Changizi claims (following up on work he has been doing for the past several years) that there are strong cognitive / evolutionary constraints on the graphemes (discrete written units) of writing systems, creating similiarites across writing systems that reflect the cultural evolution of graphemes to accomodate the needs and capacities of the human brain. I have more doubts about this one, which I may talk about in more detail – basically my concern is that the cross-cultural analysis is weak and inadequately accounts for borrowing (Galton’s problem). But it’s interesting work that deserves some attention. Hat tip to The Lousy Linguist for both this item and the previous one).

Lastly, Alun Salt has recently published a very interesting paper, ‘The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples‘ arguing for a more rigorous statistical approach to archaeoastronomy and establishing solar orientations. He’s not the first to use statistical analysis in archaeoastronomy but he does note with some dismay that there is generally insufficient concern with quantitative reasoning among archaeoastronomers to be able to apply statistical tests effectively. Salt highlights some of the complexities in making these determinations – leap second daters, take note! More important than the article itself, though, is its venue, the open-access PLoS ONE. Although ‘cheap’ by open-access standards, the fact that authors must pay ‘only’ $1350 to cover publication costs is, I think, problematic in humanities and social science disciplines where grants are small and getting proportionally smaller.

To my American friends, good luck with your birds, and thanks for reading!