Scott Atran gave a lecture entitled "For Friends and Faith: Understanding the Paths and Barriers to Political Violence" at Hampshire College in the lecture series on science and religion. The abstract: "Many creatures will fight to the death for their close kin, but only humans fight and sacrifice unto death for friends and imagined kin, for brotherhoods willing to shed blood for one another. The reason for brotherhoods-- unrelated people cooperating to their full measure of devotion--are as ancient as our uniquely reflective and auto-predatory species. Different cultures ratchet up these reasons into great causes in different ways. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end... especially for young men, mortal combat in a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and glory to gain maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. This century's major terrorist incidents are cases in point."
The video of the lecture is available here and that of the Q&A session here.
Here are the winners of the 2010 mini-grant competition organised by the International Cognition and Culture Institute and funded by the Programme in Culture & Cognition at the LSE to encourage anthropologists to perform in the field an experimental study on children’s and adults’ reasoning about human social kinds:
Tamara Hale (LSE): "Essentialism without groups in an afro-descendent village in Peru."
Cristina Moya (UCLA): "The evolution of ethnic categorization: Cross-cultural and developmental tests of innate priors in urban US and the Peruvian altiplano."
Zohar Rotem (The New School for Social Research, New York): "The role of linguistic difference in bilingual children’s essentialist reasoning about social kinds in Israel"
Cătălina Tesar and Radu Umbreş (University College London): "Blood, beakers and dowries. An inquiry into essentialist thinking about kinship and ethnicity among Cortorari Roma in Romania"
We congratulate the winners and express our gratitude to all the participants in the competition!
These two days of talks and discussion will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss the value of applying evolutionary thinking to the cultural evolution of language as well as the commonalities and differences between various existing applications.
Linguistics has traditionally been cautious of analogies between evolution in language an in biology. Common ancestry and descent were proposed earlier for languages than for biological species, but while biological evolution has flourished into a science with solid theories that generate testable hypothesis, the study of the cultural evolution of language -- evolution that is independent of changes in the human genome -- is only beginning to test its innumerable, often speculative and unrigorous, theories. McMahon (1994) concluded that the way forward is Darwinian thinking. Since then, a number of independent proposals have convergently applied explicit analogies with the elements and processes of the evolutionary synthesis (Mayr & Provine, 1998) to cultural language dynamics. They all assume that language evolution and change are caused by cultural mechanisms such as social transmission and language usage in context.
For those who want more on the topic, here is, at Blogginghead.tv, a very earnest discussion between Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober on Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong.
ott Atran
