Dear Students!
So far, so good - now that we know quite a bit about modeling in this field, we will continue with a dip into the evo-devo
research - one of the most exciting fields at the moment. Peter
Lafreniere will give us an overview about this topic and talk about its
relevance for the evolution of communication on the 10th of October.
Our presenters for this next seminar will be:
Keith - Kirby (evolution of language)
Stefano LaFreniere (the arrival of the fittest)
Yuna (DevReview 2012)
As
usual, you will find these papers on the UMdrive. There are other
papers in the folder that Peter recommended, as well as a book
recommendation for people who want to go deeper, but only the three
papers assigned above are obligatory to read.
Enjoy!!
Uli
I have a question on the article “The Arrival of the Fittest” by LaFreniere. If I understand the last section correctly, LaFreniere concludes from the fact that we observe flexible vocalization and babbling only in human infants the idea that in the evolutionary past infants evolved these gestures to create bonding with their parents. But why are flexible vocalizations more attractive for parents than function-fixed ones? Is it because they surprise them? Are we sure that flexible vocalizations do not generate incorrect interpretations that would not be evolutionarily advantageous? With respect to babbling, I have similar questions: Why would babbling be better appreciated than other vocal gestures such as laugh or squeals? Can we explain by natural selection why parents would prefer babbling instead of other vocalizations? I’m sure there can be good answers, but I would like to hear more about this.
ReplyDeleteActually, there are a few things that are not clear to me about that article. The review gave more details and examples, and this helped. The examples of the fetus in a condition of poor alimentation and of the sweat glands that are activated in a critical age show very clearly what developmental plasticity is.
Also, I’m very interested in the heritability of epigenetic effects. Jirtle’s experiment is somewhat astonishing: mice were given methyl molecules, these deactivated the gene that made the fur yellow and the mice susceptible to particular diseases; the offspring has brown fur and is no longer susceptible to the same diseases because the gene has remained deactivated. I would like to know more about the influence of these processes on evolution. My first impression is that genetic mutation has still a primary role. To what extent does epigenetics contribute to a “shift of paradigm”?
I like the idea of developmental plasticity. An adaptation of myself is that I was born in Taiwan, a warm area, so I feel cold when it is in fact not very cold. Sometimes I wish I were born in a place with low and high temperature so that I can be more flexible moving and working everywhere. From this experience, we can probably infer that people live in a place with extreme temperature are more likely to survive when there is a huge climate change. Besides, I feel that the process of evolution is like the hypothesis/function of Chinese medicine. Taking Chinese medicine is to change/improve people’s overall health. It’s like a manual evolutionary process that is visible in a person’s life. For example, my hands and feet are cold in winter. My parents or relatives recommend me take Chinese medicine for several months or years to improve this problem (i.e., my hands and feet will be warm in winter). The characteristic of having warm hands and feet will probably become a heritable trait as the DevReview article discussed.
ReplyDeleteI wonder the increasing rate of children with autism, for example, is because we take good care of every child nowadays. With the development of technology, we tried “no child left behind” and “we are created equal,” the process of evolution seems to be different from the ancient times. In the past, few people know autism and they are less likely to have children. Since more people know autism and people with autism learned how to adapt to the society, they are more likely to have offspring who may or may not have autism and may carry recessive genes. If this inference is right, then can we say that the process of evolution become slower? Or it is still fast but in other aspect (e.g., learning to adapt).
The ending statement of the LaFreniere, The Arrival of the Fittest, paper actually brought about interesting thoughts regarding the evolution of communication. One question that came to mind was how did technological advances (or environmental advances) shape the evolution of language? Looking back in history, one may argue that spoken language was the primary form of communication. As the environment became more complex and technological advancements began to accrue, the resources available for communication became more abundant as well. As such, would it be plausible to say that the greater resources available to aid in the transmittance of communication could have led to the growing complexities of language? For example, Gutenberg’s printing press invented over 600 years ago, made it possible to print language on a medium. As a direct consequence, perhaps this allowed for individuals to express more complex forms of language that could not have been transmitted via oral communication. Also, the printing press allowed for the dissemination of books, which could directly influence human cognition (i.e. the more books people read, the more knowledge was gained). As a result, the growing capabilities of human cognition may have led to even more sophisticated and complex forms of language as individuals began to progressively acquire knowledge via printed books.
ReplyDeleteIn the developmental review paper the authors states that “the language acquisition device makes learning any human language a relatively effortless task for infants, whereas the task is impossible for animals not so equipped.” From this statement, is the author inferring that animals cannot learn human language solely because they don’t have the LAD? Are there other competing theories that give reason as to why animals cannot learn human language?
In the Kirby paper, "The Evolution of Language," Kirby presents a diagram to illustrate a way of thinking about language in terms of concepts & intentions and then articulation & perception with language as the "coding" in between. While the diagram seemed like a nice, neat representation of language, I appreciate the fact that in the paragraphs that followed, Kirby made clear that there are many factors that go into communication that cannot possibly be represented in a single diagram. For instance, a fascinating example he gave is how unlimited syntax in language is. He called it "unbounded, yet faithful, transmission of information" and said that arguably the only other example in nature that could be compared to the unique unbounded, trans-missive nature of language would be the genetic code itself (2). Pretty amazing to think about it like that. Another example he gives is how flexible the language is with adding new words, also. So what stands out to me, in at least this one part of the paper, is the fact that so much flexibility can be present but the coding system between articulation and interpretation (or intention and perception) can still transmit information between the two so that both sides are on similar, if not the same, pages.
ReplyDeleteThere really nothing to disagree with in this paper, as it is mostly just an overview of the many different studies being done in the field of language emergence study. Kirby concludes by saying that if researchers from several different disciplines would cooperate together in the study of how language emerged, more headway could be made.
In LaFreniere's paper "Arrival of the Fittest" (which is an interesting idea on its own), he separates human language from animal communication on the basis of symbolism. That human language enlists symbols in order to express the past, present and future is what makes it unique. He also talks about the comparative genomics which has found that there are gene sequences related to language that are present in humans but not in chimps.
There was one statement that LaFreniere made in his key ideas that I did not see more fully explained in the paper (maybe I missed it), that I had a question about: (Key Idea 5) When did language first appear? Based on a variety of convergent evidence, it is
probable that a complex linguistic environment was established and began to spread
approximately 100,000 to 50,000 years ago in Homo sapiens.
I'm just curious as to exactly what evidence he's referencing to led to these estimations.
"lead" not "led" =)
DeleteThis week’s articles are similar to one another in the sense that they all center on the idea of “the epigenome, which regulates gene expressivity, can be inherited via the germline,” and thus touch upon the big question of “nature and/vs. nurture”. LaFreniere’s The Arrival of the Fittest is very likely a condensed version of his (and his colleague’s) Developmental Review(DevReview) submission. So I found it helpful in my study to reference one to another. In his DevReview article, the author provided three featural evidence for the epigenetic control of gene expression: 1) the altered gene expression is stable and for the most part irreversible; 2) it is often directly influenced by environmental agents; and 3) the alterations in gene expression are heritable. He further applied these concepts to language evolution by asking three questions related to language development/evolution in The Arrival of the Fittest:
ReplyDelete1) When did language first appear? Based on a variety of convergent evidence, it is probable that a complex linguistic environment was established and began to spread approximately 100,000 to 50,000 years ago in Homo sapiens.
2) How did language evolve? The initiation of a novel trait, such as language, could occur via environmentally driven processes from exaptations, and subsequently be transformed into domain-specific biological adaptations via genetic assimilation.
3) As an EEA, a linguistic environment created new challenges and new selection pressures for humans and greatly accelerated biological and cultural evolution, insuring that modern humans must continuously adapt to change.
Would appreciate if we can talk about these points before his talk.
LaFreniere’s Fittest article also drew my attention to a key aspect of evo/devo discussion-- the “recurrent environmental change.” He pointed out that “ Recurrent environmental events are a critical force in evolution.”
“Normal development is conceptualized as the result of species-specific, universal genetic endowments interacting with the range of environments universally encountered by individual members of the species that were recurrent over evolutionary time (p.3).”
Is it possible that language evolution is not a one-time-thing but a universal consequence for all the languages?
I apologize for too many quotes, for these terms are still challenging for me to find another way of saying them.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOK! Sorry for the re-posting. I'm not sure what's happening, but whenever I post my full comment the site removes one of the two parts of the comment. So, here goes another attempt...
ReplyDeleteI ave a few questions and concerns about the paper I will be presenting on tomorrow (Kirby 2007).
My first question may be missing the broader point Kirby is trying to make, but I'll ask anyways. On page 4 Kirby mentions that, "...we do not consider the various vocalizations like screaming, laughter, or crying to be linguistic, but they are arguably communicative." Why are screaming, laughter, and crying "arguably" communicative? What other purposes could they serve if they did not (at least at one point in time) transmit a message to someone else? I know we discussed this, at least in some detail during the talk on laughter, but I can't seem to remember what the take home message was.
My second question deals with the examination of the Hawaiian Pidgin example. Three examples are given, which roughly translate to mean: Good, See America., Tomorrow Forbidden., Not work. Good, much-much good. Kirby goes on to say that these are not a "full human language" for several reasons, one being that they are missing the recursive feature that full human languages contain. However, I see recursion in the examples of the Hawaiian pidgin. The multiple uses of "good" and "much" allows for a degree of goodness and amount. Could speakers of this pidgin not say "much-much-much good"? This reminds me of Everett's (2005) work on the Piraha language, which he claims has no recursive features (no numbers etc) but is still a very rich language. He draws an analogy of the finite amount of moves that can be taken in chess and how this finite feature of chess does not say anything of the richness of the game itself.
I also have an issue with Wray's view of the transitional process from a protolanguage to a full language. I understand the point that Wray is making: that it is important to investigate the existence of these collocations, adjuncts, and sentence frames -- but here is where I'm confused. Is she arguing that we began with these collocations and adjuncts and then broke them down into smaller parts to allow for a more robust and flexible language? I would argue that these expressions exist today as heuristics. We can get the same point across using various words, even a novel combination of words, but we choose to use these expressions to quickly get a point across. These expressions are localized in the sense that they do not make sense to the speakers of another language. Also, to form a collocation, wouldn't the parts of that collocation already have to have distinct meanings?
DeleteMy third (set of) questions arise in section 4 (page 10) in the discussion of the evolutionary mechanisms of language. This may be another tangent, but I am wondering how, if at all, today's theories on the evolution of language take into account biocultural evolution (e.g, lactose tolerance as the result of animal husbandry; the maintenance of sickle-cell allele in some tropical populations due to the spread of sub-Saharan agriculture). How much does the evolution of language literature take into account behavioral genetics, or transgenerational epigenetic? My more general question is, can culture ever change or impact this "biological endowment" of the ability to learn language? Can the usage of computers (heavy emphasis placed on constant stimulation, multi-tasking, regular exposure to large amounts of information) subtly change our biology?
DeleteI remember how the Piraha language is limited by its culture, in the sense that they tend to not discuss anything beyond current moment, but taken to the other extreme where you have a culture which places a large emphasis on recreational drug use, would the language then evolve in such a way that new words, phrases, or meanings are created to further enable the broadening of the scope of attention? Consider the Amazonian tribe, Cashinahua, where members of this tribe partake in the consumption of the hallucinogen, DMT, via a brew. I wonder what their language looks like. I wonder if their language allows them to discuss with more ease broader questions than those of the Piraha.
All the articles this week focus on the interplay between environmental factors, biological adaptation, and evolution. I will admit that the epigenetics was particularly tricky to parse through given my limited exposure to this area. The Kirby article provided a nice survey of the literature and provided some insight into the to other two articles. The underlying idea seems to be that while language may have some innate aspects to it, it is ultimately a very dynamic system that is constantly evolving in the language itself, as well as biological changes over the short term. As someone who spends a great deal of time reading early musicological manuscripts, I am always amazed how, even when they are written in English, how difficult it is to understand the texts. For example, in the 1770s Englishman Charles Burney has a memoir of his travels throughout Europe, however, much of his English has very strange word ordering by modern conventions. Hauser/Chomsky refer to this flexible ordering of noun phrases a recursion. However, this idea fails to take in account the natural adaptive processes. Also, a reoccurring concept within these articles is that there may be multiple adaptive processes at work.
ReplyDeleteI suppose this set of articles was the most challenging set for me. Simply put, the genetic and biological aspects are those of which I have the least exposure. However, the underlying processes we have discussed thus far seem to hold true. While we do not know how language evolved, there are shadows that seem give us plausible frameworks.