Review of 'The Origins of Human Communication' in Science Magazine

The April 3rd issue of Science Magazine features a review of Michael Tomasello's "The Origin of Human Communication" (see my ongoing summary of the book here, here, and here) by Nick Enfield, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguists in the Netherlands and is co-editor of "The Roots of Human Sociality" (part of which I discussed briefly here. See also Enfield's Reviews of James Hurford's The Origins of Meaning and Peter Macneilage's The Origin of Speech here).

Here's how Enfield neatly sums up Tomasello's position on the evolution of language

Requests form one of three classes of social action on which Tomasello builds his account of human communication. The others are informing-helping (e.g., when one person points to keys that another just dropped) and sharing (e.g., when two people's attitudes toward a third person align in the course of a gossip session). He summarizes research showing that all three social motives are fully evident in the communicative behavior of prelinguistic infants and all but absent among our closest relatives, the great apes. Humans have a special combination of cooperative instincts, prosocial motives, high-level intention attribution, and moral propensities (3). Tomasello contends that without this unique psychological wherewithal in the domain

Although he applauds Tomasello's general solution for evolution of complex language, Enfield rightly points out that one of Tomasello's shortcomings is that he doesn't follow through with his idea how we got from a gesture-based shared intentionality inrastructure to full blown syntactic language. In accordance with Paul Bloom's assertion that

"Every species gets the syntax it deserves" (Bloom 2000)

Tomasello links the social functions of requesting, informing and sharing to rising levels of linguistic complexity.

"He dubs these "simple syntax" (strongly dependent on immediate context), "serious syntax" (for making unambiguous reference across contexts), and "fancy syntax" (for organizing long and complex narratives). But this is essentially as far as his links to grammar go, promissory notes notwithstanding."

In this regard, I'm looking forward to the forhtcoming second volume of James Hurford's Language in The Light of Evolution series which focuses on the origins of linguistic form.

What should also be mentioned is that Tomasello has an aversion to telling "fairy-tales," that is, tentative evolutionary scenarios of how exactly language could have evolved during our evolutionary history. This position is directly opposed to that of Derek Bickerton, who in his new book "Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans" argues that the only way to get even a faint idea of how language could have evolved is to look at the environment and changing niches our pre-human ancestors lived in.
After having read the book, I have very mixed feelings about Bickerton's proposal and will come back to it in a later post.

Hat tip: Deric Bownds' Mindblog

Immanuel Kant & Mental Time Travel

In my previous post I pointed out that new evidence coming from the chimpanzee Santino's behavior may be crucial for discussions whether 'episodic' planning and prospective Mental Time Travel exist in non-human animals.

This relates to the proposal by Suddendorf & Corballis (1997, 2007) that Mental Time Travel is unique to humans and that from an evolutionary perspective:

"that the crucial selective advantage mental time travel provides is flexibility in novel situations and the versatility to develop and adopt strategic longterm plans to suit individual selected goals."

Mental Time Tavel thene evolved so we are able to plan future behavior based on the recall of past episodes. But our "episodic memory" only provides the "raw material" for future planning, it isn't useful in itself. From an evolutionary perspective, being able to relive past memories may only be a byproduct, and in itself may not very useful. It's only use might be that it provides us with "raw" material.
Acording to this argument, the crux then is is that our ability to recall past episodes is only a necessary design feature of being able to plan flexibly for the future.
The philosophical implications of such a view may be rather bleak, given that it reduces another of our most cherished features of what makes us human - namely our memories and life histories, which give us a sense of having a, a continous, purpose- and meaningful existence - to an accidental spandrel. But what is also interesting from a philosophical point of view is that Suddendorf & Corballis weren't the first to come up with this idea.

Interestingly, I just found a quote from Immanuel Kant in a paper of a friend of mine:
Recalling the past (remembering) occurs only with the intention of making foresight of the future possible […] we look about us from the standpoint of the present in order to decide something or to be prepared for something. Empirical foresight is the anticipation of similar cases […] and requires no rational knowledge of causes and effects, but only tahe remembering of observed events as they commonly follow one another, and repeated experiences produce n aptitude for it" (Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 79)

Bibliography:

Kant, Immanuel (2006) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Suddendorf, T. and M.C. Corballis (1997), Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind, Genetic Social and General Psychology Monographs 123, pp. 133–167.

Suddendorf. T. and M.C. Corballis (2007), The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel and is it unique to humans?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30, pp. 299–351

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Santino the Outlaw & Mental Time Travel

With a lot of essays coming up I have almost no time to blog. But here are some interesting links:

First, there's an interesting story about Santino, a chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo,who stored stones on strategic locations with "malice aforethought" so to speak, in order to throw them at visitors (see, e.g. here and here).
This ties in with a discussion of in how far non-human animals are able to plan ahead, or inhowfar the posses the ability of "Mental Time Travel."
I have briefly mentioned the importance of such an ability for the evolution of language and perspectival mental representations before (here) and Edmund Blair Bolles has a much more comprehensive post on the importance of episodic thinking and communication of episodes for the evolution of language discussing a recent article by Michael C. Corballis on "Mental Time Travel and the Shaping of Language"

How Strong is a Chimpanzee?

John Hawks has a very interesting article in Slate in which he looks at the experiments that have been done to find out how strong chimpanzees really are.
As it turns out, claims of chimpanzees being 5 to 9 times stronger are exaggerated, but they are still about twice as strong as humans.
The short article makes for really enjoyable reading, Go check it out.

I was surprised to read that that a chimp on all fours can easily outrun a human sprinter...

Michael Tomasello - The Origins of Human Communication (summary pt. 3)

I wanted to finish this summary on the weekend but just didn't get round to it because I've got a lot to do right now. Here it is anyway:

Like I said in my last post, the rest of Chapter 2 focuses on what in the chimpanzee/human lineage provided a basis for modern language.

Pointing

One crucial factor is chimpanzees' ability to use and comprehend pointing.

In the wild, chimpanzee pointing is very rare. But approximately 60 to 70 percent of all captive chimps spontaneously use pointing in an imperative manner in their interactions with humans, e.g. by pointing to food that is out of reach as a request for the human to get it. But pointing gestures that aren't imperative are virtually absent. This even applies to language-trained apes such as Kanzi. In the few studies that have been done on this, 96-98 percent of all their pointing were imperative. The other 2-4 had no clear function.

Thus there is nothing in chimpanzees' pointing behavior that would suggest that they are capable of or interested in sharing attention within a joint attentional frame.

On the other hand, in a Brain Science Podcast interview, Stuart Shankar, co-author of The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans , reports of a an encounter he had with the bonobo Panbanisha in which she showed him various plants and classified them, for example, as poisonous. Shankar interprets this as truly sharing attention and informing for the the sake of informing, but Tomasello argues that these kinds of gestures are not to be seen as as truly declarative or informative, as they are more

„recognitory or classificatory, as the ape simply recognizes something and produces the associated sign in recognition“ (Tomasello 2008: 38).

Comprehending Pointing

Interestingly, chimpanzees are much worse comprehending other people's pointing than they are producing it themselves.

In a cool experiment, Tomasello and his colleagues have shown that in a cooperative situation, chimpanzees are unable to grasp the fact that the hidden food is in the bucket that the experimenter is pointing to. Human infants, on the other hand, are able to understand this task by 14 months of age. (Behne et al. 2005) In a competitive version of this task, however, chimpanzees fare much better (Hare & Tomasello 2005). These results suggest that chimpanzees have problems with "shared intentionality," i.e. recognizing situations where you have shared cooperative goals with others and have the same shared attentional frame.

Intentionality & Perception

According to Tomasello, apes and young human children both attribute simple forms of intentionality to other actors. For example, when a human repeatedly tries to give food to a chimpanzee but fails because he is clumsy, the chimp reacts patiently, whereas he gets frustrated when the human is failing to pass him the food for no good reason or because of unwillingness.

Most of the time enculturated chimpanzees also imitate

“demonstrator’s action more often when he freely chose his action than when he was forced to use it by some constraint” (Buttelman et al. 2007: F37, see here).

Crucially, chimpanzees also understand that others have perceptions and see things. In a competitive task with a dominant chimpanzee, for example, subordinate chimps, secretly take a food reward when the other one is unable to see him, but not when the food can be seen by the dominant chimp.

According to Tomasello then,

"The overall conclusion is thus that apes understand others in terms of their goals and perceptions and how these work to determine behavioral decisions, that is, they understand others as intentional, perhaps even rational, agents (Tomasello 2008: 4)

Intentionality + gestural fexibility = evolutionary foundations of language ?

This seems to be the conclusion Tomasello draws at the end of the second chapter. Clearly, when a chimpanzee produces a gesture, he does this in a very flexible manner that even shows sensitivity to the attention of the other. Ape vocalizations on the other hand are mostly inflexible and do not take into account the presence or absence of attention to the displays. Thus there is strong evidence that the capacities apes display in the gestural modality

"are the original font from wich the richness and complexities of human communication and language have flowed. " (Tomasello 2008: 55).

References:

Behne, T., Carpenter, M., and Tomasello, M. (2005). One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions behind gestures in a hiding game. Developmental Science, 8, 492–499.

Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., Call, J., and Tomasello, M. (2007). Enculturated apes imitate rationally. Developmental Science, 10, F31– 38.

Hare, B., and Tomasello, M. (2004). Chimpanzees are more skillful in competitive than in co-operative cognitive tasks. Animal Behaviour, 68, 571–581.

Tomasello, Michael (2008): The Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press.

Charles Darwin & W. Tecumseh Fitch & Derek Bickerton on the Evolution of Language

Over at Language Log there are two very nice guest posts on the occasion of Darwin's 200th Birthday and his view of the evolution of language. The first post, by W. Tecumseh Fitch of St. Andrew's University, in which he reexamines Charles Darwin's proposal that the ancestors of humans first developed a emotionally expressive musical protolanguage which later developed into modern meaningful symbolic language. He discusses this view in the light of present-day evidence and concludes that

"suitably updated, [it] provides a compelling fit to both the phenomenology of modern music and language, and to a wealth of comparative data. "

He further argues that:

"This year of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday seems an opportune time for Darwin' own model of language evolution to regain the prominence it deserves."

In the second post, Derek Bickerton comments on Fitch's essay and critices his verdict that

"Darwin's view of language was ahead of its time, and his model and arguments remain surprisingly relevant."

Instead, he argues, although Darwin got a lot of things right,

"in many cases he was, inevitably, limited by the state of knowledge in his time."

In regards to the speculations on the evolution of language, Darwin's lack of knowledge about the ancestral environments of pre-humans ist the graves limitation.

In a savanna environment in which much of homo evolution supposedly took place, a musical, singing way of communication would simply be bizarre and even extremely dangerous because it would attract predators.

This is a problem Bickerton sees with a lot of theories of language evoltion. For example, he also critized the lack of regard for the environmental context of language evolution in a review of James Hurford's fantastic book, "The Origins of Meaning:"

"Hurford gives a favorable mention to niche construction theory, and I kept hoping he was going to draw the conclusion I drew from it: that the key to the origin of language must be sought somewhere among the niches constructed by human ancestors between the date of the last common ancestor of humans and other apes and the present—niches very different from any occupied by other apes. But he did not."

For Bickerton, Darwin, unknowingly, and Fitch, unwittingly, have made the same mistake:

"The notion of a terrestrial and heavily-predated primate indulging in any form of vocal activity-especially one that must, in quantity as well as quality, have exceeded those of all other primates barring gibbons-is simply bizarre,."

Both posts make for very interesting reading and I'm looking forward to the publication of both Bickerton's "Adam's Tongue" (out next month) and Fitch's book "The Evolution of Language" which apparently is in press as well.

Update: W. Tecumseh Fitch has replied to Bickerton's criticism with a post with the entertaining title ""Silence on the Savannah!" On Bickerton's Yodeling Australopithecines and Missing the Point of Musical Protolanguage"

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

So today is Darwin's 200th Birthday, aka Darwin Day.
There are quite a lot of interesting posts up.
John Wilkins adresses the myth that Darwin didn't actually adress the origin of species in his book, and Ed Yong has tackled human evolution in the 6th post of his 8 part series celebrating Darwin's bicentennial.

There's also a lot of discussion on how to assess Darwin's importance in modern evolutionary biology, especially about the usage of the term "Darwinism" (for positive voices see for example, here, here, for more negative assesments see here, here, and here)

Overall, I like the assesment made by John Wilkins in his very nice article "Not Saint Darwin:"

"What we remember Darwin for is a synthesis and the empirical support he brought in its defense. He brought together many ideas that were `in the air', so to speak, reading more widely than almost anyone else as well as doing his experimental and anatomical work, and more importantly, managed to filter out most of the bad ideas.

Darwin's achievement was to identify crucial questions and offer a coherent theoretical account that answered them

[...]

So let us remember Darwin not as the discoverer of anything (apart from the cru-
stacean nature of barnacles etc.), but as the guy who set of a fruitful, active, com- plex and ultimately explanatory research program in biology, which continues to become ever more active.
Don't make him a saint, an authority, or a hero. He's just a damned good scientist."