The Biological Link Between Music and Speech
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Saturday, 05 December 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
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.
Can you tell the language of the mother from her baby's cry?
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- Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog
- Published on Wednesday, 02 December 2009 23:00
- Written by Nicolas Claidière
This study provides the first evidence of the fact that newborns sound production is influenced by the language of their parents. From previous studies we knew that newborns prefer to hear language to which they have been exposed prenatally (e.g. DeCasper, A.J., and Fifer, W.P. (1980). "Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers’ voices". Science 208, 1174–1176) and we also knew that infant's babbling is heavily influenced by the language of their caregivers (see the work by Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies, e.g. B de Boysson-Bardies, L Sagart, C Durand (1984). Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language. Journal of Child Language). Yet, babbling only starts at around 7 month of age and by that time infants have already learned specific features their mother tongue, they can already categorize vowels for instance. So it is quite a surprise to see that newborn's cries can be influenced by their mother tongue.
Read more: Can you tell the language of the mother from her baby's cry?
Death, where is thy sting ?
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- Category: Pascal's blog
- Published on Monday, 30 November 2009 23:00
- Written by Pascal Boyer
I don’t believe any one of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well preserved chemically – even with a sunflower growing out of the top of his head. - John Ruskin
Recently, Dan Sperber alerted us to ancedotal observations of grieving in non-human animals (see blog here - by the way, “anecdotal” is not derogatory here - our observations of grieving in humans are anecdotal too). Are the dead chimp’s compagnons as baffled and shaken by their friend and relative’s death as we would be?
We do not know.
In any case, bereavement in humans is difficult enough to describe and explain. This is an important topic for cognition and culture for many reasons - because it is of obvious interest to all human beings, because it is universal, because it is seemingly framed in such different ways in different places, and because the psychology is not well understood so far.
This used to be a topos for cultural anthropologists, who charted the many similarities in beliefs about death, and even more strikingly, the similarities in people’s ritualization of behaviour around death.
Meeting: Culture evolves
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- Category: Events
- Published on Saturday, 28 November 2009 11:34
- Written by Nicolas Claidière
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.
The scope of natural pedagogy theory (I): babies
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- Category: Pierre Jacob's blog
- Published on Thursday, 26 November 2009 23:00
- Written by Pierre Jacob
This is the first post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication.
According to Csibra and Gergely’s (2009) so-called “natural pedagogical” approach to the psychological bases of human culture, human infants are innately predisposed to automatically interpret what Sperber and Wilson (1986) call an agent’s “ostensive” behavioral stimuli as cues that the agent intends to make manifest to the child some relevant novel information. Thus, the natural pedagogical approach takes for granted Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance-based concept of “ostensive-inferential communicative behavior”, which is defined as a (behavioral) stimulus produced by an agent whereby she makes it manifest to her audience that she intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest (or more manifest) to her audience a set of assumptions. Sperber and Wilson (1986) draw a basic distinction between an agent’s informative intention (to make some assumptions manifest to her audience) and an agent’s communicative intention to make her informative intention manifest. So on relevance-theoretic grounds, a communicative intention is itself a second-order informative intention: it is the intention to make manifest one’s first-order intention. Arguably, for someone to entertain a communicative intention is to intend another to represent one’s own informative intention. If so, then entertaining a communicative intention requires the ability to form a third-order meta-representation. In which case, representing another’s communicative intention requires the ability to form a fourth-order meta-representation.
Two outstanding open empirical issues generated by Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance framework are: (i) to what extent is it psychologically plausible to credit young human infants with the ability to interpret another’s ostensive-inferential communicative behavior and ascribe to an agent, in accordance with relevance theory, a communicative intention? (ii) To what extent is ostensive-inferential communicative behavior specific to human cognition? Arguably, Csibra and Gergely’s natural pedagogy theory offers interesting new empirical insights into these two questions. In this post, I tackle the first question (that of communicative competence in infants). The second post will deal with the issue of human specificity.
Cosma Shalizi on social contagion
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- Category: Initiatives
- Published on Thursday, 26 November 2009 14:38
- Written by Olivier Morin
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.
Some like it hot
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- Category: Ophelia's blog
- Published on Wednesday, 25 November 2009 09:59
- Written by Ophelia Deroy
Relativity in culinary matters and in taste is a big issue - our tastes (or distastes) for things are indeed shaped by what we are used to eat and see eaten, as well as other factors, genetics being one. Now they combine with less strictly sensorial aspects - and disgust for instance integrates, as Rozin pointed out, what he calls "cognitive aspects" such as the idea that substance X is contaminating.
In his reply to Nicolas Baumard' post "Is a universal Michelin guide possible?", Jonathan Mair raises some interesting questions about "culinary relativism". The first idea is that there is no room for relativism once foods, ingredients and recipes circulate : " Relativism really requires sealed units (culture) within which everything is familiar and between which many things are completely unfamiliar. Most people are faced with a whole range of degrees of exposure to different unfamiliar foods" The other has to do with possible differences in perceptions, revealed by linguistic differences : "As an English speaker I think of spicy things as being hot, obviously not the same hot as boiling water, but not altogether different either, and if something is too hot it burns no matter which kind of hot it is. I was surprised to find out this doesn't work in many languages - spicy things are itching or stinging in Spanish for example (possibly a bad translation, in any case, they're not hot and I don't think they burn). In Chinese there's also a completely different word for 'hot hot' (re, tang) and 'spicy hot' (la). But, in Mongolian (which was my fieldwork language) there is one word for both (haluun) just as there is in English."
Maybe I am missing something, but I don't see why relativism, either concerning sensation and perception, or concerning the more cultural aspects of food preparations and culinary principles, couldn't apply in groups that are "open" and when foods available more widely.
Language faculty? Semiotic system? Or what?
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Sunday, 22 November 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
To what extent does the use of language involve a language-specific ability, to what extent is it subserved by a more general symbolic or semiotic system? This is an old and ongoing controversy to which an article pre-published online in PNAS on Nov. 18, 2009 (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0909197106) and freely available here, "Symbolic gestures and spoken language are processed by a common neural system" by Jiang Xu, Patrick J. Gannon, Karen Emmorey, Jason F. Smith, and Allen R. Braun, makes an interesting contribution. Their abstract:
"Symbolic gestures, such as pantomimes that signify actions (e.g., threading a needle) or emblems that facilitate social transactions (e.g., finger to lips indicating ‘‘be quiet''), play an important role in human communication. They are autonomous, can fully take the place of words, and function as complete utterances in their own right. The relationship between these gestures and spoken language remains unclear. We used functional MRI to investigate whether these two forms of communication are processed by the same system in the human brain. ... Results support a model in which bilateral modality-specific areas in superior and inferior temporal cortices extract salient features from vocal- auditory and gestural-visual stimuli respectively. However, both classes of stimuli activate a common, left-lateralized network of inferior frontal and posterior temporal regions in which symbolic gestures and spoken words may be mapped onto common, corresponding conceptual representations. We suggest that these anterior and posterior perisylvian areas, identified since the mid-19th century as the core of the brain's language system, are not in fact committed to language processing, but may function as a modality-independent semiotic system that plays a broader role in human communication, linking meaning with symbols whether these are words, gestures, images, sounds, or objects"
Examples of pantomime (top row, English gloss: unscrew jar)
and of emblem (bottom row. English gloss: I've got it!)
The authors distinguish different types of meaningful gestures. With good reasons, they focus on gestures that are neither linguistic, like in sign language, nor peri-linguistic like gesticulations accompanying speech. As in the two examples illustrated above, they look at what they call 'pantomimes' and 'emblems'. These cause similar patten of brain activation as their linguistic glosses.
I am not competent enough to interpret brain imagery evidence, let alone criticise it. Still, I would like to raise two issues.
Human expansion, drift, and cultural evolution
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Thursday, 19 November 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
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.
Is the spell broken? Reflections on evolutionary debunking and religious beliefs
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- Category: Helen De Cruz's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 17 November 2009 23:00
- Written by Helen De Cruz
summarizes this position very aptly: If religion is natural, i.e. if religious beliefs can be explained as a byproduct of everyday cognitive capacities, we need not invoke supernatural entities to explain these beliefs.- Causal premise: belief is the result of evolved psychological predispositions
- Epistemic premise: There is no connection between the truth value of our evolved beliefs and their fitness functions (natural selection is not a truth-tracking process).
- Conclusion: Therefore, religious beliefs are unjustified.
Read more: Is the spell broken? Reflections on evolutionary debunking and religious beliefs
Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Sunday, 15 November 2009 21:53
- Written by Lucien Dontask
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?
“I read Playboy for the articles”
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- Category: Hugo's blog
- Published on Sunday, 15 November 2009 16:52
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Zoe Chance and Michael Norton have a delightful book chapter on the very creative ways in which people justify their questionable decisions. They report an experiment in which male participants were given a choice between subscriptions to two sport magazines. One covered more sports while the other had more featured articles. More interestingly, it was also mentioned that one of the magazines had a swimsuit edition (cf. figure : it should be noted that I only browsed through covers of swimsuit editions in order to find an illustration for this post). Want to take a guess at which magazine the participants preferred?
Boys being boys, they tended to pick the one with the advertized swimsuit edition, irrespective of its other features. This would hardly make the headlines (it's the reason there are swimsuit editions in the first place). More to the point, people felt compelled to justify their choice in a way that would be more acceptable than "I want to look at hot girls in bikini"...
As a result, when asked how much they valued the features of the two magazines, they tended to say that the feature on which the magazine with the swimsuit edition was stronger was the most important feature-whichever that feature was.The paper is well worth a read because it also provides a concise summary of the experiments documenting the many ways in which people justify their morally dubious decisions.
FOXP2 again in the news
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Thursday, 12 November 2009 09:51
- Written by Dan Sperber
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.
Alloparental care and wandering baby monkeys
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- Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog
- Published on Sunday, 08 November 2009 23:00
- Written by Nicolas Claidière
Pierre Jacob recently discussed Sarah Hrdy's book Mothers and Others in which she argues that humans, like New World monkeys but unlike other apes, are cooperative breeders. As Pierre summarizes, cooperative breeding implies that newborns and youngsters have evolved the capacity to engage adults in caring for them and that adults have evolved the capacity to share the care of their offspring. Adults are therefore naturally attracted toward newborns, who eventually solicit their attention, and inexperienced mothers compete for newborns with other adults, including the mother, to gain more experience in parental care. The following video, just filmed by Mark Bowler at the Living Links Center in Edinburgh (where I am now pursuing my research) nicely illustrates Hrdy's description of alloparental care.
Scott Atran: A memory of Lévi-Strauss
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- Category: Scott Atran's Blog
- Published on Wednesday, 04 November 2009 16:40
- Written by Scott Atran
Margaret Mead, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss on a Portuguese stampIn Memory of Claude Lévi-StraussIn Memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss
In Memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguably the world's most famous and influential anthropologist, died on October 30 at the age of 100. This is a lasting memory of my first encounter with him.
In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals with people whose ideas I wished to know more about than I thought I could get from their writings. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants at the American Museum of Natural History, so I asked her how I might go about getting my wish. She said "talk to these people and see if they'll meet." So I went to see Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Jean Piaget in Geneva, and Jacques Monod in Paris, and they agreed; but I wondered if Levi-Strauss would because he seemed so aloof . Margaret licked her lips and laughed: "Well, that's his look, aloof and frail, but he's more playful than he lets on and he'll outlive me by thirty years if a day. Just tell him I sent you."
I ran from La Bastille to the College de France on Rue des Ecoles and up the steps to knock on his door. He opened it, saw the sweat running down my face and, asked rather coldly: "Monsieur, que'est-ce que je peux faire pour vous?" I said I was an anthropology student from America and had a bunch of questions for him. He was gracious but distant and said, "Ask two."
Claude Lévi-Strauss has died
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- Category: Events
- Published on Tuesday, 03 November 2009 19:18
- Written by Dan Sperber
A question about polemics
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- Category: Brian's blog
- Published on Sunday, 01 November 2009 14:08
- Written by Brian Malley
Recently I came across a quotation that expressed, with wonderful clarity, something that I kind of half-knew but had not articulated so well to myself. The historian John P. Meier, in the course of an argument about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, made the following generalization (Meier 1991, IV:279):
Despite the theoretical purpose of addressing and confuting one’s adversaries outside, most religious apologetics and polemics are directed inward. Their real function is to give a sense of assurance and reinforcement to the group producing the polemics. Most apologetics and polemics are thus an attempt to shore up group solidarity and conviction within a community that feels insecure and under attack. The a priori conviction of such polemics is simple and unshakeable: “We are right and they are wrong, and now we will think up some reasons to prove that they are wrong.”
A good social-scientific description this is not, but I think it is a sound observation nonetheless.
Grieving animals?
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Sunday, 01 November 2009 11:29
- Written by Dan Sperber
Picture: Monica Szczupider, in the National Geographic Magazine (Nov. 2009)
Outbreak!
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- Category: Hugo's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 27 October 2009 23:00
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew have compiled and "Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior". This is quite an impressive endeavour that can be used for scholarly purposes (it is well referenced) and for fun (because people do weird things sometimes). The articles I've read so far have been on the skeptical side (e.g. on the mass hysterias or the Dutch tulip bubble), and so it seems that the this book avoids the dangerous pitfall of using these examples lightly to demonstrate the 'madness of crowds' (or people in general).
An illustration of dancing mania (found here).
Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans, Robert E. Bartholomew, Anomalist Books (2009)
The universality of music: Cross-cultural comparison, the recognition of emotions, and the influence of the the Backstreet Boys on a Cockatoo
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- Category: Nicolas' Blog
- Published on Sunday, 25 October 2009 23:00
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are specific to a specific musical culture. A recent paper, "Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music" by T. Fritz, S. Jentschke, N. Gosselin, D. Sammler, I. Peretz, R. Turner, A. Friederici, S. Koelsch in Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 7, Pages 573-576 - freely available here) reports a cross-cultural study with participants from the Mafa tribe in Northern Cameroon and participants, each group being ignorant of the musical tradition of the other (here is an example of Mafa music). Results show that the Mafas recognized happy, sad, and scared/fearful Western music excerpts above chance, suggesting that the expression of these basic emotions in Western music can be recognized universally.
"The Mafa flutes consist of two functional components, a resonance body made out of forged iron and a mouthpiece crafted from a mixture of clay and wax. The flute is an open tube which is blown like a bottle, and has a small hole at its bottom end with which the degree to which the tube is opened or closed can be controlled. The depicted set of Mafa flutes is ‘‘refined'' with a rubber band."
The recognition of emotional expressions conveyed by the music of other cultures had been experimentally investigated only in three previous studies. These studies aimed at indentifying cues that transcend cultural boundaries, and the authors made an effort to include listeners with little prior exposure to the music presented (e.g., Westerners listening to Hindustani music).
Mind and society: Special issue on social simulation
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Wednesday, 21 October 2009 11:52
- Written by Dan Sperber
Read more: Mind and society: Special issue on social simulation
Proper names in mind, language and culture
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 20 October 2009 16:36
- Written by Dan Sperber
Proper names are a standard topic of anthropological research, focusing on the variety of naming systems across cultures and on the role of names in social relationships and verbal interactions (for a recent collection, see The Anthropology of names and naming, edited by Gabriele vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn; Cambridge UP 2006). Proper names are also a standard topic in philosophy of language, where their contribution to the meaning of the utterances in which they occur raises a number of challenging issues. A major philosophical approach to proper names is that proposed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (1980) where he suggested that when a proper name, say "Plato", is effectively used, it succeeds in referring to the name-bearer via a causal chain that relates, through often countless acts of communication, the present use to the initial naming of Plato. With the role it gives to cultural transmission, this "causal theory of reference" (extended to natural kinds name by Hilary Putnam) can be seen as a properly anthropological theory. It has rarely however been fleshed out or discussed by anthropologists (Atran Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science,1990, pp 64-71, is one interesting exception), nor have philosophers paid much attention to the anthropology of proper names. As for the psychology of proper names, it has remained until recently an underdeveloped topic.
The last issue of Mind and language, Volume 24 Issue 4 (September 2009), with five papers on proper names, is particularly welcome in this context. It helps bridge the gap between philosophy and psychology. I hope it will inspire someone to work further on bridging the gap with anthropology. Read on for the abstracts.
Simian Oeconomicus II
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- Category: Nicolas' Blog
- Published on Sunday, 18 October 2009 19:57
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
Abstract: A crucially important aspect of human cooperation is the ability to negotiate to cooperative outcomes when interests over resources conflict. Although chimpanzees and other social species may negotiate conflicting interests regarding travel direction or activity timing, very little is known about their ability to negotiate conflicting preferences over food. In the current study, we presented pairs of chimpanzees with a choice between two cooperative tasks-one with equal payoffs (e.g., 5-5) and one with unequal payoffs (higher and lower than in the equal option, e.g., 10-1). This created a conflict of interests between partners with failure to work together on the same cooperative task resulting in no payoff for either partner. The chimpanzee pairs cooperated successfully in as many as 78-94% of the trials across experiments. Even though dominant chimpanzees preferred the unequal option (as they would obtain the largest payoff), subordinate chimpanzees were able to get their way (the equal option) in 22-56% of trials across conditions. Various analyses showed that subjects were both strategic and also cognizant of the strategies used by their partners. These results demonstrate that one of our two closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee, can settle conflicts of interest over resources in mutually satisfying ways-even without the social norms of equity, planned strategies of reciprocity, and the complex communication characteristic of human negotiation.
Importantly, there are also big differences between humans and chimpanzees.
The cultural group selection hypothesis
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 07:47
- Written by Nicolas Claidière
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.
Elinor Ostrom: Nobel Prize in Anthropology!
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- Category: Nicolas' Blog
- Published on Monday, 12 October 2009 20:40
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
I have never quite understood why there is a Nobel Prize just in economics. Why a prize basically on financial relationships? Why not a prize for the human sciences as whole instead? After all, there is a prize in biology, and no prize in marine biology, or a prize in physics and no prize in physics of condensed matters (what about a prize in "Peace in Middle-East" or "Literature in prose"? Anyway, it is not really a Nobel Prize). Be that as it may, if there had been a Prize just in anthropology rather than in just in economics, I would still have nominated Elinor Ostrom, (the 2009 Noble Prize in Economics).
First, Ostrom's work is both theoretically and empirically grounded. It is theoretically grounded because her enquiry started from the problem of collective action discovered by the rational choice theory. There are situations where everyone stands to benefit from the contribution of others and even more so if they do not contribute themselves (see Garrett Hardin's famous article on the tragedy of the commons in Science 13 December 1968: Vol. 162. no. 3859, pp. 1243 - 1248). Her work is also empirically grounded for Elinor Ostrom has started her work from the observation that, despite the apparent paradox, people do solve problems of collective actions. She has studied literally thousands of examples all over the world: Forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, irrigation systems, and so on. She came with a great book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
Her work is also of importance for a second reason. Today, issues of collective actions have become a central problem in evolutionary anthropology. There are supposed to present the greatest challenge to evolutionary theories of human cooperation. There are studied experimentally in public good games. Ostrom's work reminds us that humans do not need cooperative tendencies to solve tragedies of commons and build successful institutions. They only need to talk, to organize themselves, and to find the adequate solution for their particular problem. I am not saying (as in rational choice theory) that humans are selfish. Far from it. I do think that they are truly cooperative. I am only suggesting that public goods games, problems of collective action and large scale cooperation (villages, tribes, churches, etc.) may not need a general evolutionary solution to be explained and that evolutionary theories should focus rather on small scale cooperative interactions.
New book on: Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Friday, 09 October 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
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
g Tum-mo heat meditation
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- Category: Brian's blog
- Published on Thursday, 08 October 2009 20:30
- Written by Brian
Preparing for a lecture on homeostatic mechanisms, I came across a surprising phenomenon, g tum-mo heat meditation, that raises an interesting question about human enculturability. Homeostatic mechanisms are those that maintain our bodies (or our lives) in a state of balance between two (or potentially more) extremes that might be fatal. Insofar as some of our homeostatic mechanisms are controlled by the central nervous system and involve behavior, they fall within the purview of psychology, and I treat the body temperature, thirst, and hunger regulation cycles in my Introduction to Psychology class. The phenomenon that surprised me pertains to the first of these systems.
A Buddhist monk has his vital signs measured as he prepares to enter an advanced state of meditation in Normandy, France. During meditation, the monk's body is said to produce enough heat to dry cold, wet sheets put over his shoulders in a frigid room (Photo courtesy of Herbert Benson).
Body temperature regulation is quintessentially cognitive in nature. We have heat sensors distributed throughout our bodies. The heat sensors in the body's periphery-let's use the feet as an example-are a suite of neurons, each of which has a slightly different temperature at which it slows its activity. By detecting which neurons are normally active and which have slowed, the central nervous system can tell the temperature of the feet. The effectors for changing temperature are also located in the extremities: control of little hairs, blood vessel constriction, and shivering are all local. Despite the fact that both the detectors and effectors are local, the detectors do not communicate directly with the effectors: instead, they send their signals all the way up to a center in the brain, and then the brain sends the signal all the way back down to the effectors in the feet. It is cognitive in nature in that the whole thing is an information detection and communication system, and it is so automatic that it is often called a reflex.
Experimental demonstration of cultural attitudes to punishment?
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- Category: Nicolas' Blog
- Published on Tuesday, 06 October 2009 09:41
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
In a pairwise interaction, an individual who uses costly punishment must pay a cost in order that the opponent incurs a cost. It has been argued that individuals will behave more cooperatively if they know that their opponent has the option of using costly punishment. We examined this hypothesis by conducting two repeated two-player Prisoner's Dilemma experiments, that differed in their payoffs associated to cooperation, with university students from Beijing as participants. In these experiments, the level of cooperation either stayed the same or actually decreased when compared with the control experiments in which costly punishment was not an option. We argue that this result is likely due to differences in cultural attitudes to cooperation and punishment based on similar experiments with university students from Boston that found cooperation did increase with costly punishment.
The study replicates an earlier finding in which the results were pretty clear: The more you punish your partner the more likely you are to end up with nothing... As Gandhi was said to put it, "an eye for an eye will make the world go blind"...
Read more: Experimental demonstration of cultural attitudes to punishment?
Nick Enfield reviews Atran and Medin's The Native Mind and the Construction of Nature
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- Category: Nick Enfield's blog
- Published on Monday, 05 October 2009 10:26
- Written by Nick Enfield
(We have asked Nick Enfield to share with us and thus open to discussion his review of The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, [MIT Press, 2008] published in the TLS, September 18).
One success of twentieth century anthropology was to debunk the myth of primitive thought. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the sophisticated cognition of non-literate, ‘traditional' people than their knowledge and understanding of the biological world. Explorers and other intrepid travellers have known this for centuries, but it was in the 1950s that the wonder of indigenous peoples' knowledge of nature became a core interest of anthropological science. Harold Conklin's seminal Yale doctorate entitled ‘The relation of Hanunóo culture to the plant world' was based on extended fieldwork in the Philippines with a tribe of forest-dwelling traditional cultivators. Their knowledge of local plant life was not only vastly superior to the average modern European's, but their classification turned out to have significant similarities with what is known of biological taxonomy from modern science. A rich tradition of ethnobiological research on traditional cultures around the world has since discovered principles underlying some of humans' most fundamental cognitive capacities. Through this, we now know a good deal about how the human mind categorizes, organizes, and exploits large bodies of knowledge such as those encoded in biological taxonomy.
Why is the biological knowledge of traditional societies so remarkable to an educated westerner? The literature is littered with awestruck descriptions of the fieldworker's sense of wonder at what villagers know. Ask a traditional cultivator to name as many tree species as he can, and the list will go on and on and on, literally into the hundreds. And it is more than a mere list of names: he will also have a rich body of knowledge about the functions of different trees, and their ecological interrelations with other plants and animals. One might wonder how they do it, but the real question is: How is it that we can't do it? The average educated westerner knows as much about nature as a Hanunóo tribesman is likely to know about computer software. Atran and Medin's book opens with this unsettling fact. When the authors ask their US university students to name all the trees they know, these young people are at a loss. Here is the response of a Northwestern Honours student: Oak, pine, spruce, ... cherry ... (giggle) evergreen,... Christmas tree, is that a kind of tree? ... God what's the average here? Needless to say, it is not merely an inability to name the trees, but also to say anything sensible about their functions or ecological roles. Compare this to the richly annotated lists of up to 500 species readily elicited from members of the least technologically advanced and least formally educated small-scale traditional cultivator societies.
Read more: Nick Enfield reviews Atran and Medin's The Native Mind and the Construction of Nature
Gloria Origgi reviews Jon Elster's "Le désintéressement"
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- Category: Gloria's blog
- Published on Thursday, 01 October 2009 14:32
- Written by Gloria Origgi
(Jon Elster has just published (in French) the first volume of a trilogy: Le désintéressement : Traité critique de l'homme économique Tome 1 (Paris, Le Seuil, 2009). We have asked Gloria Origgi to review it for us.)
In one of his perfect narratives, Heinrich Von Kleist tells the sad story of two secret lovers separated and condemned to death just before the earthquake that was to destroy
Santiago de Chile in 1647. Having miraculously survived, they enjoy for a few days the mercy of an enchanted social atmosphere. Their judges and executioners, transformed by the tragedy and the ensuing chaos, multiply gestures of altruism and generosity. The blissful mood persists for a short while, but soon the rules and norms of civil life are being reinstated and a Mass is celebrated during which the crime of the two poor lovers is denounced as the cause of all the evil. The lovers, unable to escape the fury of collective condemnation, are clubbed to death. The reciprocal altruism and the disinterested society that the cataclysm had spawned turns out to be ephemeral, unnatural, as if the ferocious end were a way to compensate for the uncanny sense of self that the people had experienced when acting in such a disinterested manner.
Jon Elster's latest book (Le désintéressement, Paris, Seuil, 2009, 377 pp.), based on his Collège de France lectures in 2006-2007, discusses the very possibility of disinterested action. Is it possible for a human being to act in a truly disinterested manner? Do disinterested actions have a psychological unity or are they the mere product of circumstances? Is disinterestedness an individual or a collective phenomenon?
Read more: Gloria Origgi reviews Jon Elster's "Le désintéressement"
Cultural anthropology of the distant future?
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Monday, 28 September 2009 13:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
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."
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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.