Category: Evolution

Ig Nobel 2009

The annual Ig Nobel awards “for achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think” were given out last night, and once again, anthropology has been well-represented. Catherine Bertenshaw Douglas and Peter Rowlinson won the award for veterinary medicine for their demonstration that cows that are humanized by giving them names produce more milk than those that remain, uh, anonymous. Although they are veterinary scientists their work appears in the interdisciplinary anthropological journal Anthrozoös. Meanwhile, the Ig Nobel for physics went to the biological anthropologists Katherine Whitcome, Liza Shapiro and Daniel Lieberman for their work (which appeared in Nature a couple of years ago) explaining why pregnant women don’t tip over. This is extremely important as it bears directly on the evolutionary costs and benefits of bipedalism, among other issues.

See the full list of winners here.

Bertenshaw, Catherine and Peter Rowlinson. 2009. Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production. Anthrozoös, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 59-69.
Whitcome, Katherine, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman. 2007. Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins. Nature, vol. 450, 1075-1078.

Steve #1032

I am extraordinarily pleased to announce that I have been officially inducted into the roster of Steves at Project Steve, maintained by the National Center for Science Education. As Steve #1032, I join at least 1031 of my peers who, in addition to holding doctorates in fields related to evolution, are named Steve, Stephen, Steven, Esteban, Stephanie, etc. My sole duty as a member of this illustrious society is to promote, through undogmatic scientific inquiry, teaching and research about the origin and evolution of life. To which end, I can do no better than to quote from the NCSE itself:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools. (NCSE, 2008)

What happens in Vegas

In a couple of hours I’m off to Las Vegas for the 2009 Society for Anthropological Sciences conference, where I’m presenting a paper entitled, “Frequency dependent biases in the transmission of communication technologies”. If any of my readers are going to be there (unlikely though that may be), it’ll be … well, it will be more compelling than the abstract that follows below makes it seem:

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Frequency dependent biases in the transmission of communication technologies

Frequency dependent bias is a form of horizontal cultural transmission bias in which the frequency of a cultural trait influences the likelihood that others will adopt it. Previously seen as a unitary phenomenon, frequency dependence in fact consists of three separate types, each involving distinct decision-making processes and having different patterns of acceptance, retention, and abandonment. In particular, communication technologies, whose popularity determines their utility, exhibit unusual characteristics of cultural transmission. A brief case study from the phylogenetic history of written numerals demonstrates the usefulness of considering the different effects of frequency for the adoption of new communication technologies. More broadly, the prevalence of frequency dependent phenomena in various cultural evolutionary contexts suggests the need to evaluate decision-making processes more rigorously when evaluating the adoption and retention of cultural traits.

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I’ll try to put together something interesting in the way of a blog post while I’m away, provided I don’t get sucked in by the charms of the city. Catch you on the flipside!

Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin

As you probably know if you are reading this blog, today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, FRS (1809 – 1882), probably the finest naturalist of his age and the originator of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. In my evolutionary anthropology and history of anthropology classes I always start by asking how many people have heard of Darwin – of course every student raises their hand – and follow that up by asking how many of them have actually read Darwin, at which point the crickets start chirping. For the anthropologist, The Origin of Species isn’t especially interesting, given that Darwin only alludes to the probability of human evolution in the final pages of that expansive volume. For me, the more interesting text is The Descent of Man (1871), which neatly adumbrates virtually every significant debate in evolutionary anthropology, including many in linguistic anthropology. This is not to say that Darwin was always right, or that nothing has happened in the past 125 years. But he was asking the right questions, many of the same questions with which we still struggle, and I can think of no better tribute than to discuss his work in the context of those questions. I present a selection of quotations from the Project Gutenberg e-text of the 1874 second edition of the Descent, followed by questions and citations to recent literature dealing with these issues.

One can hardly doubt, that a man-like animal who possessed a hand and arm sufficiently perfect to throw a stone with precision, or to form a flint into a rude tool, could, with sufficient practice, as far as mechanical skill alone is concerned, make almost anything which a civilised man can make. The structure of the hand in this respect may be compared with that of the vocal organs, which in the apes are used for uttering various signal-cries, or, as in one genus, musical cadences; but in man the closely similar vocal organs have become adapted through the inherited effects of use for the utterance of articulate language.

– What is the relationship between tool manufacture and the use of language? (Stout et al. 2008)
– To what extent is ape vocalization a precursor to, or analogous to, human speech? (Arbib et al. 2008)

The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. But we can trace the formation of many words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds. We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. The manner in which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like correlated growth. We have in both cases the reduplication of parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth.

Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed or blended together.

– How closely can the analogy between linguistic and biological change be drawn? (Chater et al. 2009)
– To what extent is linguistic change phylogenetic? (Gray et al. 2009)
– Should language change and language death be seen as parallel to biological extinction? (Mufwene 2004)

From the fundamental differences between certain languages, some philologists have inferred that when man first became widely diffused, he was not a speaking animal; but it may be suspected that languages, far less perfect than any now spoken, aided by gestures, might have been used, and yet have left no traces on subsequent and more highly-developed tongues. Without the use of some language, however imperfect, it appears doubtful whether man’s intellect could have risen to the standard implied by his dominant position at an early period.

– What is the relationship between the evolution of language and the evolution of modern human cognitive capacities? (Coward and Gamble 2008)
– What is the nature and structure of ‘proto-language’? (Botha 2008)

With respect to perfection, the following illustration will best shew how easily we may err: a Crinoid sometimes consists of no less than 150,000 pieces of shell, all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiating lines; but a naturalist does not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts, and with none of these parts alike, excepting on the opposite sides of the body. He justly considers the differentiation and specialisation of organs as the test of perfection. So with languages: the most symmetrical and complex ought not to be ranked above irregular, abbreviated, and bastardised languages, which have borrowed expressive words and useful forms of construction from various conquering, conquered, or immigrant races.

– Is it possible to classify languages according to principles of regularity or purity, and is it worthwhile to do so? (Hoffman 2008)
– What is the role of migration, warfare and cultural contact in understanding the evolution of languages? (Nichols 2008)

One can only imagine that Darwin would be pleased to see such active and interesting research being done so long after his own seminal efforts. Happy birthday, Mr. Darwin.

Works cited

Arbib, M. A., K. Liebal, S. Pika, M. C. Corballis, C. Knight, D. A. Leavens, D. Maestripieri, J. E. Tanner, M. A. Arbib, and K. Liebal. 2008. Primate Vocalization, Gesture, and the Evolution of Human Language. Current Anthropology 49, no. 6: 1053-1076.
Botha, R. 2008. Prehistoric shell beads as a window on language evolution. Language and Communication 28, no. 3: 197-212.
Chater, Nick, Florencia Reali, and Morten H. Christiansen. 2009. Restrictions on biological adaptation in language evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 4 (January 27): 1015-1020.
Coward, F., and C. Gamble. 2008. Big brains, small worlds: material culture and the evolution of the mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1499: 1969-1979.
Gray, R. D., A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill. 2009. Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement. Science 323, no. 5913 (January 23): 479-483.
Hoffman, K. E. 2008. Purity and Contamination: Language Ideologies in French Colonial Native Policy in Morocco. Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 03: 724-752.
Mufwene, S. S. 2004. Language birth and death. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1: 201-222.
Nichols, Johanna. 2008. Language Spread Rates and Prehistoric American Migration Rates. Current Anthropology 49, no. 6 (December 1): 1109-1117.
Stout, D., N. Toth, K. Schick, and T. Chaminade. 2008. Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1499: 1939-1949.

and of course …

Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man. London: John Murray.

Genes, languages, and archaeology

John Hawks has a new blog entry entitled ‘Gene-culture models and reductionism‘, which is a thoughtful response to a 2004 letter in American Anthropologist. The letter adopts a highly skeptical view towards the possibility that genetic information can tell us much about prehistoric population history and specifically that it can tell us much about cultural and linguistic prehistory. Hawks, in contrast, takes a more moderate view that leaves open the possibility that we can use genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence in tandem, while acknowledging that naively using one as a proxy for the other two is a serious error. Read it, then come back here. It’s short, and I’ll wait.

This is a subject of some interest to me, as a historically and prehistorically-minded linguistic anthropologist (or a linguistically-minded archaeological anthropologist, I don’t care which). The late Bruce Trigger and I published a chapter in 2004 (perhaps we could have found a better venue for it) in which we talk about the naive ways in which Iroquoian studies have used archaeological evidence to attribute ethnic identification (esp. ‘Iroquoian’ vs. ‘Algonkian’) to sites, and linked this problematic issue to broader problems in the use of archaeology to reconstruct language and ethnicity (Chrisomalis and Trigger 2004). The AA letter rightly points out that identifications of tribes or fixed social structures that correlate with genetic populations – or, unmentioned, languages – is problematic, and the notion that any of these must correspond with overarching ethnic identities is doubly problematic, as Barth (1969) argued persuasively decades ago. And yet …

It has long been recognized (since the 19th century at least) that language families are organized phylogenetically and that biological taxa are phylogenetic. This is partly a reflection of reality, and partly a reflection of the mutual reinforcement of phylogenetic models in linguistics and biology through academic interdisciplinary discourse over the past couple hundred years. But the problem noted by Hawks (and which no one interested in the subject can ignore) is that biological transmission (excepting some viruses) is vertical – you get all your genetic material from your parents alone – whereas cultural and linguistic transmission is both vertical and horizontal – that is, you get a lot of your culture from non-kin, including people who may not be part of your ‘tribe’. This is the sort of work that people like Steve Shennan (2002) are doing, and while I am not always convinced by the answers he reaches (particularly, I remain unconvinced that vertical, parent-child linguistic and cultural transmission is as important as he thinks it is), the research deserves more attention than it is getting.

On Tuesday, I am introducing my class to this subject through Colin Renfrew’s (2000) paper ‘At the edge of knowability: towards a prehistory of languages’. Again, I’m not always in agreement with Renfrew (I’m more of a skeptic than he is), but I’m thrilled that people are asking these questions. As social scientists and humanists, linguists and archaeologists need to forcefully assert the relevance of their data, and not let themselves be run roughshod by geneticists who treat their apex of the triad as the cornerstone of all knowledge in the field. One of my hopes for this blog, and for my research in general, is to be able to contribute to ongoing discussions on this issue. This post is, at best, a preliminary introduction to a topic which I suspect you will see here very often in the months (dare I hope for years?) to come.

Works cited

Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Chrisomalis, S. and B.G. Trigger. 2004. Reconstructing prehistoric ethnicity: problems and possibilities. In In J. V. Wight and J.-L. Pilon (eds), A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast, pp. 419-433. Mercury Series, Paper No 164. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Renfrew, C. 2000. At the Edge of Knowability: Towards a Prehistory of Languages. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10(1): 7-34.
Shennan, S. 2002. Genes, memes and human history: Darwinian archaeology and cultural evolution. London: Thames & Hudson.
Wildcat, D., I. Sumi and V. Deloria Jr. 2004. Commentary: A Response to Doug Jones. American Anthropologist 106, no. 3: 641.