Video: A Debate on Group Selection
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- Published on Tuesday, 02 February 2010 23:00
On July 7th 2009, the The London Evolutionary Research Network held a extremely interesting debate on group selection in which four eminent speakers in the field discussed the motion: "Is natural selection at the group level an important evolutionary force?"
Stuart West, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Oxford
Herbert Gintis, Professor of Economics, Santa Fe Intitute, University of Siena, and CEU
Samir Okasha, Professor of Philosophy of Science, University of Bristol
Mark Pagel, Professor of Biology, University of Reading
After many months of waiting, the videos have finally been uploaded online. You can now watch the debate videos here.
The evolution of misbeliefs
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- Published on Sunday, 31 January 2010 23:00
An article entitled "The Evolution of Misbeliefs" by Ryan McKay and Daniel Dennett In Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2009) 32, 493-561, freely available here, with commentaries by (among many others) George Ainslie, Roberto Casati, Pascal Boyer, Max Coltheart, Owen Flanagan, Keith Frankish, Gary Marcus, Ruth Millikan, Ara Norenzayan, Dan Sperber, David Sloan Wilson, and a reply by the authors.
Abstract: From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system (e.g., delusions) and those arising in the normal course of that system's operations (e.g., beliefs based on incomplete or inaccurate information). The former are instances of biological dysfunction or pathology, reflecting "culpable" limitations of evolutionary design. Although the latter category includes undesirable (but tolerable) by-products of "forgivably" limited design, our quarry is a contentious subclass of this category: misbeliefs best conceived as design features. Such misbeliefs, unlike occasional lucky falsehoods, would have been systematically adaptive in the evolutionary past. Such misbeliefs, furthermore, would not be reducible to judicious - but doxastically noncommittal - action policies. Finally, such misbeliefs would have been adaptive in themselves, constituting more than mere by-products of adaptively biased misbeliefproducing systems. We explore a range of potential candidates for evolved misbelief, and conclude that, of those surveyed, only positive illusions meet our criteria.
Universal and culture-specific recognition of emotions
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- Published on Saturday, 30 January 2010 23:00
Participant watching the experimenter play a stimulus and indicating her response
There is an intersting forthcoming open access (available here) article of PNAS entitled "Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations," by Disa Sauter, Frank Eisner, Paul Ekman, and Sophie K. Scott.
Abstract: Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information, with conspecifics, for example, to warn humans of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. We examined the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, across two dramatically different cultural groups. Western participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called "basic emotions" (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognized. In contrast, a set of additional emotions was only recognized within, but not across, cultural boundaries. Our findings indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions have vocalizations that can be recognized across cultures, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.
Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics. Madrid 2010
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 29 January 2010 23:00
The goal of this 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication (web site: http://conference.clancorpus.net/) is to promote both theoretical and applied research in pragmatics. Three parallel sessions will be held according to the following topics:
Pragmatics theories: meaning, role of context, semantics-pragmatics interface, explicature, implicature, speech act theory, etc.
Intercultural aspects of pragmatics: research involving more than one language and culture or varieties of one language, lingua franca, intercultural misunderstandings, effect of dual language and multilingual systems on the development and use of pragmatic skills
Applications: usage and corpus-based approaches, teachability and learnability of pragmatic skills, pragmatic variations within one language and across languages, developmental pragmatics, etc.
Read more: Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics. Madrid 2010
Moscow's stray dogs
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- Published on Thursday, 28 January 2010 23:00
From an article in the Financial Times, fascinating both from an anthropological and a biological point of view: 'According to Poyarkov [a biolo
gist specialising in wolves who also studies these dogs, see picture], there are 30,000 to 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow, while the wolf population for the whole of Russia is about 50,000 to 60,000. Population density, he says, determines how frequently the animals come into contact with each other, which in turn affects their behaviour, psychology, stress levels, physiology and relationship to their environment.
"The second difference between stray dogs and wolves is that the dogs, on average, are much less aggressive and a good deal more tolerant of one another," says Poyarkov. Wolves stay strictly within their own pack, even if they share a territory with another. A pack of dogs, however, can hold a dominant position over other packs and their leader will often "patrol" the other packs by moving in and out of them. His observations have led Poyarkov to conclude that this leader is not necessarily the strongest or most dominant dog, but the most intelligent - and is acknowledged as such. The pack depends on him for its survival.'
You can read here the whole article here.
Language evolution and universals
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- Published on Sunday, 24 January 2010 11:52
Two ambitious papers just published offer broad contrasting views on the biological and cultural bases of human languages:
Nicholas Evans, N. , & Stephen Levinson (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(5), 429-492. (With commentaries and response) available here,
and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2009) Prolegomena to a Future Science of Biolinguistics. Biolinguistics, Vol 3, No 4 (2009) available here
Read more for the the abstracts
Body movement in language and cognition
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- Published on Wednesday, 13 January 2010 23:00
A study by Daniel Haun, published in the December 15th 2009 edition of Current Biology, reports cross-cultural variability in how people memorize bodily movements in space, depending on how space is encoded in the local language. Here is the first paragraph;
Predation enhances cooperation in wee little birds.
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- Published on Tuesday, 12 January 2010 23:00
In a recent article entitled "The increased risk of predation enhances cooperation"published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Volume 277, Pages 513 - 518 and available here, Indrikis Krams and colleagues experimentally demonstrate an interaction between predation risk and cooperation in breeding songbirds. It is worth reading in the light of current discussions about the co-evolution of warfare and cooperation (for example: Bowles, 2008).
Read more: Predation enhances cooperation in wee little birds.
Does power increase hypocrisy?
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- Published on Friday, 08 January 2010 23:00
An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and available here illustrates how insights into 'power', a notion central in the standard social sciences, can be gained through a cognitive and experimental approach. Abstract under the fold.
Is Imitation Necessary?
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- Published on Monday, 04 January 2010 21:30
In an article entitled "Social Learning Mechanisms and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Is Imitation Necessary?" published in Psychological Science, Volume 20 Issue 12, Pages 1478 - 1483 and available here, Christine A. Caldwell and Ailsa E. Millen make an interesting contribution to the development of experimental studies of cultural transmission and to the discussion of the role of imitation vs. emulation.
Abstract: Cumulative cultural evolution has been suggested to account for key cognitive and behavioral attributes that distinguish modern humans from their anatomically similar ancestors, but researchers have yet to establish which cognitive mechanisms are responsible for this kind of learning and whether they are unique to humans. Here, we show that human participants' cumulative learning is not always reliant on sources of social information commonly assumed to be essential. Seven hundred participants were organized into 70 microsocieties and completed a task involving building a paper airplane. We manipulated the availability of opportunities for imitation (reproducing actions), emulation (reproducing end results), and teaching.Each condition was independently sufficient for participants to show cumulative learning. Because emulative learning can elicit cumulative culture on this task, we conclude that accounts of the unusual complexity of human culture in terms of species-unique learning mechanisms do not currently provide complete explanations and that other factors may be involved.
Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs
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- Published on Wednesday, 23 December 2009 10:21
Jennifer J. Pokorny and Frans B. M. de Waal show that "Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs" (PNAS December 22, 2009 vol. 106 no. 51 21539-21543)
Subjects need to select the odd facial image from among four. On this trial, the odd image is a member of group 1 (Top Left) compared with three members of group 2. For monkeys living in group 1 this trial represents the In-group Odd condition, but for those living in group 2 it is the Out-group Odd condition.(©2009 by National Academy of Sciences)
Abstract: Nonhuman primates posses a highly developed capacity for face recognition, which resembles the human capacity both cognitively and neurologically. Face recognition is typically tested by having subjects compare facial images, whereas there has been virtually no attention to how they connect these images to reality. Can nonhuman primates recognize familiar individuals in photographs? Such facial identification was examined in brown or tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), a New World primate, by letting subjects categorize facial images of conspecifics as either belonging to the in-group or out-group. After training on an oddity task with four images on a touch screen, subjects correctly identified one in-group member as odd among three out-group members, and vice versa. They generalized this knowledge to both new images of the same individuals and images of juveniles never presented before, thus suggesting facial identification based on real-life experience with the depicted individuals. This ability was unexplained by potential color cues because the same results were obtained with grayscale images. These tests demonstrate that capuchin monkeys, like humans, recognize whom they see in a picture.
Uta and Chris Frith on the social brain
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- Published on Tuesday, 15 December 2009 23:00
In the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B entitled "Personal perspectives in the life sciences for the Royal Society's 350th anniversary", a freely available article on "The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been" by Uta Frith and Chris Frith ( Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 12 January 2010 vol. 365 no. 1537 165-17). Also a video interview of Uta and Chris here. Abstract below the fold.
The study of cognition and culture today
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- Published on Friday, 11 December 2009 08:08
A special series of lectures supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute. All lectures to be held at 6pm the London School of Economics, Seligman Library, room A607, Old Building, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.
The videos of the lectures will be available here, at the Cognition and Culture Institute !
- Tuesday January 12th: Paul Harris (Harvard), "Do children think that miracles are just fairy stories?"
- Monday January 18th: Susan Carey (Harvard), "The origin of concepts"
- Tuesday February 2nd.: Maurice Bloch (LSE), "Reconciling social science and cognitive science views of the self, the person, the individual etc..."
- Thursday February 18th: Stanislas Dehaene (College de France), "How do humans acquire novel cultural skills? The neuronal recycling model"
- Monday March 1st: Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford), "Hearing God: how American evangelicals learn to experience God as real"
- Monday March 8th: Pascal Boyer (Washington), "The naturalness of social institutions: evolved cognition as the foundation of social norms"
- Thursday March 18th: Natalie Sebanz (Radboud), "Acting together: How people share actions, tasks, and memories"
- Tuesday April 27th: Tim Ingold (Aberdeen), "To learn is to improvise a movement along a way of life"
- Monday May 17th: Vanessa Fong (Harvard), "Transformations of Cultural Models as they Pass
from Parent to Child in a Globalized World: Evidence from Two Longitudinal Studies of Chinese Families" - Monday May 24th: Rob Boyd (UCLA) - Monday May 24, "Culture as an evolutionary phenomenon"
- Thursday June 10th: Hannes Rakoczy (Gottingen), "The early ontogeny of collective intentionality and normativity"
- Wednesday June 16th: Rogers Brubaker (UCLA), "Doing things with categories: the cognitive
turn in the study of ethnicity" - Wednesday June 30th: Lera Boroditsky (Stanford), "How do the languages we speak shape the way we think?"
Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: The origins of language
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Monday, 07 December 2009 23:22
Read more: Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: The origins of language
The Biological Link Between Music and Speech
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- Published on Saturday, 05 December 2009 23:00
In PLoS One, two researchers from the Duke Institute for Brain Science, Kamraan Z. Gill and Dale Purves, publish an article providing "A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales" and freely available here.
Abstract: Scales are collections of tones that divide octaves into specific intervals used to create music. Since humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches over an octave in the mid-range of hearing, in principle a very large number of tone combinations could have been used for this purpose. Nonetheless, compositions in Western classical, folk and popular music as well as in many other musical traditions are based on a relatively small number of scales that typically comprise only five to seven tones. Why humans employ only a few of the enormous number of possible tone combinations to create music is not known. Here we show that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest overall spectral similarity to a harmonic series. These findings suggest that humans prefer tone combinations that reflect the spectral characteristics of conspecific vocalizations. The analysis also highlights the spectral similarity among the scales used by different cultures.
Read also the press release from the Duke Institute entitled "The Biological Link Between Music and Speech," reporting research showing that the musical scales most commonly used over the centuries are those that come closest to mimicking the physics of the human voice, and that we understand emotions expressed through music because the music mimics the way emotions are expressed in speech.
Meeting: Culture evolves
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- Published on Saturday, 28 November 2009 11:34
Discussion meeting organized by Andrew Whiten, Robert Hinde, Christopher Stringer and Kevin Laland as part of a wider Festival of Science to celebrate the Royal Society's 350th anniversary. The meeting will take place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre in London, UK on June 27-29, 2010.
Summary: The capacity for culture is a product of biological evolution - yet culture itself can also evolve, generating cultural phylogenies. This highly interdisciplinary joint meeting with the British Academy will address new discoveries and controversies illuminating these phenomena, from the roots of culture in the animal kingdom to human, cultural evolutionary trees and the cognitive adaptations shaping our special cultural nature.
Speakers: Confirmed speakers include Professor Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Dr Alex Thornton, Professor Susan Perry, Professor Carel van Schaik, Dr Simon Reader, Dr Dietrich Stout, Professor Naama Goren-Inbar, Professor Francesco d'Errico, Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr, Professor Stephen Shennan FBA, Professor Ruth Mace FBA, Professor Russell Gray, Dr Mark Collard, Dr Joe Henrich, Dr Luke Rendell, Professor Barry Hewlett, Dr Derek Lyons, Professor Gergely Csibra, Dr Hélène Roche, Professor Paul Harris FBA, Professor Andrew Whiten FBA and Professor Kevin Laland.
You can find the full program here and register for the event here.
Cosma Shalizi on social contagion
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- Category: Initiatives
- Published on Thursday, 26 November 2009 14:38
Statistician and polymath blogger Cosma Shalizi is preparing a paper on social contagion, basically dwelling on the fact that the transmission of behaviours through social influence ('contagion') is very hard to distinguish from the fact that similar people tend to be submitted to similar causal influences, and pair with people similar to themselves. Conversely, social contagion is easily mistaken for mere sociological determinism à la Bourdieu. All he's put online for the moment is a .ppt presentation - but a Powerpoint by Cosma Shalizi is worth a book by some others. Here.
Human expansion, drift, and cultural evolution
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- Published on Thursday, 19 November 2009 23:00
A new paper in PNAS, "Y chromosome diversity, human expansion, drift, and cultural evolution," by Jacques Chiaroni, Peter A. Underhill and Luca L. Cavalli-Sforza (Published online Nov. 17, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0910803106).
Abstract The relative importance of the roles of adaptation and chance in determining genetic diversity and evolution has received attention in the last 50 years, but our understanding is still incomplete. All statements about the relative effects of evolutionary factors, especially drift, need confirmation by strong demographic observations, some of which are easier to obtain in a species like ours. [... ]All these observations are difficult to explain without accepting a major relative role for drift in the course of human expansions. The increasing role of human creativity and the fast diffusion of inventions seem to have favored cultural solutions for many of the problems encountered in the expansion. We suggest that cultural evolution has been subrogating biologic evolution in providing natural selection advantages and reducing our dependence on genetic mutations, especially in the last phase of transition from food collection to food production.
Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Sunday, 15 November 2009 21:53
The workshop on "Cognitive Social Sciences-Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?" (here) is to be held at CogSci 2010 in Portland, Oregon, on August 11, 2010. This workshop is aimed at exploring the cognitive (psychological) basis of the social sciences and the possibilities of grounding the social sciences in cognition (psychology).
Read more: Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?
FOXP2 again in the news
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Thursday, 12 November 2009 09:51
The gene FOXP2 has been in the news ever since it was revealed in 1998 that the members of an extended London family who had a serious language impairment also had an abnormal version of that gene. In a letter in today's (November 12) edition of Nature, a team led by Daniel Geschwind of UCLA reports that they inserted the chimp and the human versions of the gene into human brain cells and looked at expression of the genes that the protein regulates. They found that the human version increased the expression of 61 genes and decreased the expression of 51 genes compared with the chimp version of the protein. "These data," they write in the abstract, "provide experimental support for the functional relevance of changes in FOXP2 that occur on the human lineage, highlighting specific pathways with direct consequences for human brain development and disease in the central nervous system. Because FOXP2 has an important role in speech and language in humans, the identified targets may have a critical function in the development and evolution of language circuitry in humans."
More in Nature News. An interview with Dan Geschwind can be heard here, and the 2008 Francis Crick Prize Lecture by Simon Fisher on "A molecular window into speech and language" visible here provides useful background.
Claude Lévi-Strauss has died
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- Published on Tuesday, 03 November 2009 19:18
Mind and society: Special issue on social simulation
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- Published on Wednesday, 21 October 2009 11:52
Read more: Mind and society: Special issue on social simulation
The cultural group selection hypothesis
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- Published on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 07:47
A new paper by Adrian V. Bell, Peter J. Richerson, and Richard McElreath published online in PNAS (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0903232106) entitled "Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality" (Restricted access) in which they argue that cultural group selection is much mores likely than genetic group selection to have promoted the evolution of altruistic and cooperative behaviours in humans. In essence: "What is the scope for group-level selection on cultural variation and how does this compare to the equivalent for genes? [...] Despite good reasons to believe our estimates of cultural variation are underestimates, we find much greater scope for multilevel selection on human culture than on human genes."
Abstract: Whether competition among large groups played an important role in human social evolution is dependent on how variation, whether cultural or genetic, is maintained between groups. Comparisons between genetic and cultural differentiation between neighboring groups show how natural selection on large groups is more plausible on cultural rather than genetic variation.
New book on: Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind
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- Published on Friday, 09 October 2009 23:00
Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind
Published by: Psychology Press, List Price: £37.50
"An enormous amount of scientific research compels two fundamental conclusions about the human mind: The mind is the product of evolution; and the mind is shaped by culture. These two perspectives on the human mind are not incompatible, but, until recently, their compatibility has resisted rigorous scholarly inquiry. Evolutionary psychology documents many ways in which genetic adaptations govern the operations of the human mind. But evolutionary inquiries only occasionally grapple seriously with questions about human culture and cross-cultural differences. By contrast, cultural psychology documents many ways in which thought and behavior are shaped by different cultural experiences. But cultural inquires rarely consider evolutionary processes. Even after decades of intensive research, these two perspectives on human psychology have remained largely divorced from each other. But that is now changing - and that is what this book is about."
Read more: New book on: Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind
Cultural anthropology of the distant future?
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- Published on Monday, 28 September 2009 13:00
In a provocative post at 3 Quarks Daily Sam Kean asks: "Will the Manhattan project always exist?" raising interesting possiblities about future representations of the present, which by then will be a distant past. He writes:
"Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There's a good chance the answer will be "no." If nothing else, there's reason to think this could be a contentious point among men and women of learning, debatable on both sides."
"A span of thousands of years is both extremely short and impenetrably long. It's short because human nature will not change much in that time. Which means our human tendency to discount the past and pooh-pooh the achievements of antique cultures will not have diminished. Dismissing technical achievements in the remote past is especially tempting. We're willing to believe that people philandered and murdered and philosophized uselessly like we do today, but we conveniently reserve the notion of technical progress for ourselves. It's really a poverty of imagination: They didn't have the tools or libraries or scientific understanding we do today, so how could they have accomplished much? We tend to conflate science and technology, as if one cannot exist without the other. But without much science the Greeks did calculate the circumference of the earth; the Chinese did invent paper, gunpowder, and the printing press eons before Europeans; the Polynesians did navigate thousands of miles of open ocean on tiny barks; and the Egyptians (among many others) did log as much about the movement and appearance of stars and planets as astronomers know today. Nor are those special examples, or even unique-many technologies arose more than once."
A bubble in the Humanities market?
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- Published on Saturday, 26 September 2009 08:27
Philip Gerrans discuss bubbles in the academic market in "Bubble Trouble", published July 9, 2009 in the THES and available here. He argues that the humanities are in the same state financial markets were in before they crashed. Of relevance here both as a critique of, and as an epidemiological approach to overvalued research. Gerrans begins:
"The cause of the meltdown in global financial markets is obvious: leveraged trading in financial instruments that bear no relationship to the things they are supposed to be secured against. ... The academy, too, is a market - a large one in which the value of any piece of research is ultimately secured against the world. If the world is not as described or predicted in the article or book, the research is worthless. A paper that claims that autism is caused by vaccination or terrorism by poverty is valuable only if it turns out to be a good explanation of autism or terrorism. That is why an original and true explanation is the gold standard of academic markets: the double helix, On the Origin of Species, Henri Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne.
"The academic market is also like the financial market in another way. Stocks trade above their value, which leads to bubbles and crashes. Brain-imaging studies, for example, are a current bubble, not because they don't tell us anything about the brain, but because the claims made for them so vastly exceed the information they actually provide. As with a leveraged investment in mortgage bonds hedged by a foreign-exchange credit swap, most customers have no idea how a brain-imaging result is produced and what it is really worth. Those who do - the ones in labs using complicated statistical algorithms to map impossibly messy signals to artificial 3D models of brains - are usually very circumspect about the results. But every week we read in the science pages that brain-imaging studies prove X, where X is what the readers or columnists already believe. Women can't read maps! Men like sex! Childhood trauma affects brain development! There is an Angelina Jolie neuron! The bosses of big labs that employ hundreds of people use these studies, along with artfully placed articles about them, to get funding for future research. In a similar way, directors of mining companies raise funds on the basis of prospecting reports "leaked" to the financial press."
In the Journal of Cognition and Culture
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- Published on Monday, 21 September 2009 13:08
Good stuff in the last issue (vol 9, 1-2, 2009) of the Journal of Cognition and Culture (that provides "an interdisciplinary forum for exploring the mental foundations of culture and the cultural foundations of mental life. The primary focus of the journal is on explanations of cultural phenomena in terms of acquisition, representation and transmission involving cognitive capacities without excluding the study of cultural differences"). See the ToC below.
A debate in Nature on Darwin and the mind
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- Published on Sunday, 20 September 2009 23:00
How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion
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- Published on Friday, 18 September 2009 09:05
Why would we do just the opposite of what we want to do?
Read more: How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion
Keyboards, Codes and the Search for Optimality
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- Published on Saturday, 12 September 2009 18:46
For some of our readers, this may be old hat, but for others this article by Robert Dorit in the September-October 2009 (Volume 97, Number 5, Page: 376) issue of the American Scientist entitled "Keyboards, Codes and the Search for Optimality" available here revisits in a cogent manner the issue of optimality in biology and technology. Here are two illustrations from the article:
The QWERTY keyboard: Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin received a patent for this keyboard layout in 1878. With few changes it became the layout that is still standard on computer keyboards today. The QWERTY keyboard, as it is called (after the first six letters in the top row of letters), may not optimal, but people have significant resistance to switching to something new.
This circular diagram of RNA bases depicts the near-universal genetic code. It is read like a tree diagram, starting at the center, giving the three bases that code for each of the resulting amino acids. Starting with U, for instance, and choosing U again for the second of the three bases, either a U or C in the third position results in the amino acid phenylalanine. This redundancy helps to temper the effects of mutations. Much like the QWERTY keyboard, this genetic code, which evolved early in the history of life (and perhaps even prebiotically) may not be optimal, but it is good enough.
The article concludes:
"Neither our technology nor our biology can evade the hand of history. History underlies the configurations of the QWERTY and the AZERTY keyboards. Within the keyboards, vestiges of an even deeper history remain: The central row preserves traces of the original alphabetical arrangement that existed in the very first typesetting machines."
"History, too, accounts for the universality of the genetic code. And here again, even deeper traces of prebiotic evolution can be found: Certain base triplets show particular physical attraction for the amino acids they would eventually come to encode. Everything has a past, though it may sometimes be concealed. The power of the evolutionary perspective resides in its acknowledgment of the importance of that past."
Is autonomy as a universal aspiration?
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- Published on Saturday, 05 September 2009 12:57
A 'Science News' dispatch reporting on the work of Charles Hewlig, Eliot Turiel and other cross-cultural moral psychologists, answers yes. Read it here.
Excerpts :
During the teen years, kids in Asian and Western cultures alike gravitate toward a broader class of moral imperatives, including rights to privacy, education and freedom of speech, Helwig and colleagues find in another new study published in the August Social Development. Adolescents also appeal to democratic notions, such as majority rule, to justify a preference for representative forms of government — even if they live in a communist or authoritarian society.
(...)
Simply put, from childhood on, many people critically appraise their cultural values, says psychologist Elliot Turiel of UC Berkeley.
In the medical case nicely described by Denis, there is the added fact that such tipping is illegal. Any other important difference? We may feel that doctors should treat all patients equally well, but then we should object to private medecine or surgery, and so on when it can fix its prices and offer better services to patients who can pay more. My guess is that even people who don't object might still see tipping doctors are immoral.
The general point is this: this case might be best approached within a discussion of tipping in general, a discussion very well worth having from avariety of points of view: cultural, economic, rational choice, reputation, and so on.
Anyhow Denis, get well soon!
Denis, your story strikes a Romanian chord. The situation around here is even worse, from what I can tell. But it is quite a fascinating question, with different answers from different points of view.
For an economist, it is a matter of price formation. In the state system, Romanian doctors are paid a fixed (and miserable) wage, largely unrelated to quality or effort. The incentive to pocket bribes is huge, and patients know it so well. In the private sector (with transparent and varied prices for medical services), bribes are almost unheard of. Also, there is a more or less efficient market for bribes. Patients find out how much a doctor expects, usually from past patients, or from other doctors. Surgeons receive more than GPs, professors more than debutants, etc.
But I think there is something more about "medical envelopes", from a cognitive point of view. First of all, there is a vast asymmetry of competence between doctors and patients, which gives the former a large freedom of action. Is this pill better, or another one? Surgery or not? Home treatment or hospitalisation? To make things worse, the post-hoc reckoning is not very helpful, since most decisions may be medically justified, but you might also end up dead. The patient is at the mercy of the practitioner since she does not know what choices are better. The best way to make sure one gets the proper treatment is to insure the benevolence of the doctor, and a bribe is the simplest path to gain the doctor's amity.
Second, there is something special about this particular social exchange: the patient is dealing in an ultimate value - her health. Something everyone in Romania says is that there is no price too high to be healthy. (Paradoxically, giving up smoking somehow does not make the list - self-hint-hint-nudge-nudge). If people would risk not bribing a policeman to avoid a fine, they are extremely unlikely to jeopardise their health in this manner. One cannot afford to stick to abstract principles (like discouraging corruption) when her life is at stake.
Finally, there is something like a Maussian gift in the affair: one passes a fat envelope even without the explicit mention of an economic exchange. It is not that the surgeon would not operate without being bribed - the patient just shows gratitude without visible economic reckoning. Of course, under the veil of generosity stands the solid self-interest of the patient. The fat envelope is meant to make sure that no scalpel is lost in her belly. But no-one says it out loud. It's a "I know that you know that I know etc" which makes sure that the transaction is smooth and polite.
To end with a personal anecdote: I was (and to some extent I still am) very wary of giving out envelopes to doctors. A little bit of moral prudishness, a little bit of fear (what if he feels insulted?), a bit of monetary unsaviness. Those who are more competent in these matters reassured me: "just put the envelope on his desk - he knows what to do next" After all, he is the expert, and I am not.
"Very well-rounded analysis. A few thoughts. First, I am glad you mentioned nurses in your comment* because in the article you discount this, perhaps unintentionally. I remember my aunt consistently bribing the nurses when my uncle was recovering from a stroke for several months in the hospital. Also, I've had many conversations with my family here in Hungary about this, trying to understand the rationale behind this irrational system (I'm originally from the US). I think both motivations could be at play here. I got the impression that, in addition to the bribe, people are still very sensitive to the "wage supplement" aspect. That is, most people I've talked to find the wages of doctors and other health care providers rather deplorable. Even if GMs are a considerable expense for my working class family members, they seems to use the wage supplement as a way to render this dysfunctional reality more palatable somehow. I also think there is a third factor at work here - but I think it's linked to the others. I've witnessed situations where doctors behave very condescendingly toward patients or their families, despite a hefty bribe of some 20,000 HUF. Part of that harks back to the days of the socialist regime - when the power of public authorities was unquestioned. As one of my Hungarian friends likes to say about health clinics here: "they just want to make you feel like they still have power over you." When my aunt and I went to visit my cousin in critical care last year, the doctor didn't want to give us the time of day. We didn't give her a tip, but we kept pressing her for answers. I said to her, "is it a virus or a bacteria?" The doctor looked at me like a deer in headlights. I think she was surprised I even knew the difference. She opened up quite a lot to us after that and we never gave her a tip. Finally- and I'll get off my soapbox - private insurance systems are not necessarily more transparent. The US being a case in point. There is a great (surprisingly) 28-pg TIME article about this, "The bitter pill: why medical bills are killing us." I'm sue you'd find it relevant. Anyway, thanks so much for posting this!!"
*This is the comment by me which Eva refers to:
"I should have also added that, in fact, there is GM directed to nurses when they are perceived as the primary caretakers. Usually this is the case for families having elderly parents in retirement houses."
That GM thing reminds me of a funny routine that happens in France: around the end of the year, firemen and mailmen knock at your door to sell (ugly) calendars. Folk wisdom holds that if you don't buy the calendar, firemen will not rush if there is a fire in your house. Similarly, mailmen will be more likely to lose important mail you receive. What is striking is that this belief seems to carry on though it makes complete non-sense. I bet the situation is a bit different as for GM: the physician obviously remembers you and s/he is more likely to act benevolently towards you with a bit of extra money...
Azzouni certainly has the bona fides to weigh in on this. But it seems to me that the pure sociology of it isn't quite so simple.
Take Wiles' first proof of Taniyama-Shimura. It had an error, but it took concerted efforts by extreme experts to locate it. But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that he and Richard Taylor were able to ascertain that piecing together two parts of the theory that didn't quite seem to work on their own was in fact enough to 'patch' the proof together (Wiles himself says as much).
So, Yes, the original proof was wrong. To a much lesser extent, Perelman didn't fill in all the blanks in his landmark proof of Poincare, leading to a (minor scandal) where two other mathematicians claimed to give the "first" proof based on the "ideas of" Perelman and Hamilton.
The question is this: if someone had done the patching of Wiles' proof for him, would THEY be the prover? How large does the hole have to be? When an error is found, who gets to decide whether it is trivial, whether it wrecks the proof entirely, and who will be the one credited with the insight that makes the whole thing work?
These are not trivial matters, and the issue isn't apportioning credit, but deciding what an error truly is. Typos don't count. Proving incorrect results certainly do. But what about "generally correct" ideas that eventually lead to a proof? How loose do those ideas have to be?
I don't think there's ANY argument about when large, demonstrable errors have been found in published proofs. But there are many other cases -- like de Branges' purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis -- that fall through these neat cracks.
In respect to kinship terminologies, Levinson's question, "What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?", is not answered by Kemp and Regier's analysis for one simple reason: Terminologies have a structure and logic, like grammars for language, that determine the possible range of kinship terminologies. Kemp and Regier assume any partition of the space of genealogical relations is a potential terminology and then show that existing terminologies occupy only a small portion of this space due, they assert, to a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness. This would be like saying a sentence can be any subset of all possible vocabulary words, then asserting that the realized languages have sentences that are a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness, but ignoring the fact that the simplicity and usefulness of sentences is created through the grammar of the language that constrains what are admissible sentences. The same is true for kinship terminologies, and the answer to Levinson's question has already been made by showing that kinship terminologies have a generative structure that determines the corpus of kinship terms, starting from the primary kin terms of a terminology, along with kinship concepts that are expressed in the terminology (such as reciprocity of kin terms), and the kinship structural properties embedded in a particular terminology (Read 1984, 2001, 2007, 2009; Read and Behrens 1990; Leaf and Read 2012, among others). For example, the difference giving rise to the fundamental division of terminologies into descriptive versus classificatory (bifurcate merging) terminologies derives from two different ways that sibling relations are conceptualized in different societies: (1) a sibling is the child of my parent other than myself (descriptive terminologies) or (2) siblings are those persons who have parents in common (classificatory terminologies) (Bennardo and Read 2007; Read, Fischer and Leaf 2013). Trying to understand kinship terminologies (and hence kinship systems) without first working out the generative logic of a terminology is like trying to understand languages without working out the grammar of a language. Extensive work has already been published on the generative logic of kinship terminologies and this work makes evident what constrains the variability in kinship terminologies that Levinson asks about.
References
Bennardo, G. and D. Read 2007. Cognition, Algebra, and Culture in the Tongan Kinship Terminology. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7: 49-88.
Leaf, M. and D. Read. (2012) Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane. Lanham: Lexington Press
Read, D. l984. An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 4l7-440
Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117.
Read, D. 2007. Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology 46(4):329-364
Read, D. 2009. Another Look at Kinship: Reasons Why a Paradigm Shift is Needed. Algebra Rodtsva 12:42-69.
Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An expert system for the algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393.
Read, D., Fischer, M. and M. Leaf. 2013. What are kinship terminologies, and why do we care? A computational approach to analyzing symbolic domains. Social Science Computer Review 31(1): 16-44.
Yes, kinship is back -- or more accurately, it is reclaiming its original vigor. Haven't you heard of the Kinship Circle? For each of the past three years, and as part of this year's annual meeting of the Amerian Anthropological Association as well, we have had highly successful sessions on kinship. The sessions have been integrated with the themes of each of the meetings. We have had an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar and the United States, presenting a wide range of papers, ranging from more "classic" questions about kinship systems to current research that is challenging some of our theoretical ideas about what constitutes kinship. The papers from the first two sessions will be published shortly.
Dwight Read
Fadwa El Guindi
Dear learned scholar of mathematicians, I disagree with your premise that mathematicians do not disagree, and, being wonderful souls, are easily converted to consensus. No less a scholar, intellectual and role model than Von Neumann (1961), the founder of game theory, argued against your premise. In fact, he bemoaned that unlike physicists, mathematicians who don't agree behave in an unsocial manner by striking out in new directions, leaving their conflicts unresolved. In his article, the first in his collected works, Von Neumann wished that mathematicians disagreed as physicists did. Whenever conflict arose between two physicists (e.g., Bohr and Einstein), physicists refused to ignore it, often bringing their field to a standstill until a resolution was found (i.e., consensus via debate, unlike your fanciful example of consensus without debate). I have long cherished Von Neumann's insight, and his remarkable paper on mathematicians. BTW, in my research, I too have found that consensus without conflict is indeed possible, except that none of the participants can agree on the result.
Von Neumann, J. (1961). The mathematician. Collected works, Pergamon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html?_r=3&
People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.
This story of an incredibly gullible scientist (or so it seems) might also be relevant to your remark that the optimality of epistemic vigilance can only be measured in view of its fit to the milieu. An optimal epistemic vigilance would enable people to believe most of the true things they are told and to disbelieve most of the false things they are told (especially the costly one). The inconvincible sceptic as well as the gullible has less than optimal epistemic vigilance. The optimal vigilance fall in between, but its precise position depends on whether the environment is full of false claims or not. It would be interesting to know whether there are different cognitive developments of epistemic vigilance depending on the type of environment in which a child grows up. This could account for some variability across individuals.
As for scientists, they are supposed to instantiate high epistemic vigilance. So how can Frampton be at the same time so gullible and a good physicist? I see two non-exclusive possibilities:
(1) Frampton exercises epistemic vigilance, but only in the domain of physics. This can happen because the scientific environment fosters argumentative abilities. By contrast, Frampton did not wish or need to convince others that he was having a relation with a beautiful model. He did not need to find good reasons for his beliefs and did not wish to adress counter-arguments. Hugo Mercier pointed to me that this difference in the argumentative context could explain the fact that Newton, with so great achievements in physics, did so badly in chemistry/alchemy. There was in alchemy no need to convince others; it was a secret enterprise.
(2) Frampton does not exercise much epistemic vigilance, but does well in physics nonetheless because the process of checking the plausibility of claims is distributed to others. Only very selected information arrives to his creative mind. This is thanks to the process through which scientific information comes to be distributed---the review process for instance. In science, epistemic vigilance is distributed across individuals and institutionalised. In that context, some gullibility might be an advantage. The schoolgirl, in any case, does better by believing the apparently crazy things that her teacher says (e.g. sound is the vibration of matter). At the research level also, it can pay to believe improbable hypotheses; it means pursuing a high risk, high reward research programme.