Language, Thought, and Space (III)

In the second chapter of his book, Stephen Levinson discusses a concept that has been crucial to this blog: frames of reference. (see e.g. these posts) The term as it is used today was coined by Gestalt theorists of perception in the 1920s and was used to signify the steady and constant background against which other objects could be made out and identified. It can be defined as “‘a unit or organization of units that collectively serve to identify a coordinate system with respect to which certain properties of objects, including the phenomenal self, are gauged’ (Rock 1992: 404, emphasis in Levinson 2003: 24).

Frames of references seem to be highly similar across modalities such as vision, touch, gesture, and language. Without these structural similarities (or ‘isomorphisms’) “we could not reach to what we see, or talk about what we feel with our hands, or give route descriptions in language and gesture.” (Levinson 2003: 25). There are, however, also differences: vision is viewer-centred, and touch and grasp are object-centred.

In general, frames of references can be classified by the following distinctions.
Absolute vs. Relative. Psychologically, the received view is that we organize our spatial thinking in relation to objects and ourselves. The frame of reference is thus relative to our own ego-centric bodily coordinates. An absolute frame of reference, on the other hand would consist of fixed angles with coordinates that do not depend on our personal egos as anchoring. And as we have seen, contrary to the received view, both kinds of frames of references are employed in the world’s languages. (Levinson 2003: 27f.).
Similar, but not completely identical is the differentiation between egocentric and allocentric frames of reference. This designates a difference

"between coordinate systems with origins within the subjective body frame of the organism, versus coordinate systems centred elsewhere (often unspecified).” (Levinson 2003: 28).

Our mental maps of our environment and our place are either egocentric or allocentric and landmark-based, including the relations, distances and angles between different landmarks, or allocentric and based on “fixed bearings.” These distinctions can not only be found in the world’s languages, but are also used by neuroscientists when they look at the mental map-building capacities of animals.
In studies of conceptual development it was also argued, following Jean Piaget, that for a long time ‘egocentric’ frames of reference are primary and that children switched to ego-centric frames of reference only to a much later date.

In studies of the visual system we often find a distinction between viewer-centred vs. object-centred. If we identify an object we are also able to mentally rotate it and imagine how it would look from another angle. This means that the retinal impression of the viewer gets interpreted and classified in a more abstract object-centred frame of reference during perception.
Another distinction made when looking at visual imagery and visual perception is that between orientation-bound vs. orientation-free. Orientation-bound information changes with perspective and change of location, whereas orientation-free information does not change. For example, when we rotate a d it can become a b, the information changes. But a ball looks the same from all perspectives and the information is thus orientation-free.
The most important distinction for psychology and language however, is the difference between
“viewer-centred frames, object-centred frames, and environment-centred frames of reference.Ina viewer-centred frame, objects are represented in a retinocentric, head-centric or body-centric coordinate system based on the perceiver’s perspective of the world. In an object-centred frame, objects are coded with respect to their intrinsic axes. In an environment-centred frame, objects are represented with respect to salient features of the environment, such as gravity or prominent visual landmarks. “ (Carlson-Radvansky & Irwin 1993: 224).
Levinson called these the relative, intrinsict and absolute frames of reference. (Levinson 2003: 33).

The distinctions made in various disciplines at times are quite confusing and there are many conflicting positions. However, a broad differentation such as this seems valid.
Next, we have to distinguish between three levels on which different frames of references can be constructed: perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic. There is especially much diversity on the linguistic level, which will be discussed in my next post. As I'm going home tomorrow I don't really know when I'll have access to the internet again, but I hope it wont't be too long.

Reference:
Carlson-Radvansky, L.A. and Irwin, D.A. (1993): Frames of reference in vision language: Where is above? Cognition
46: 223-244

Levinson, Stephen C. (2003) Space in Language and Cognition : Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Rock, I. (1990), The frame of reference, in I. Rock (ed.), The legacy of Soloman Asch, pp. 243– 268. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Language, Thought, and Space (II)

Spatial orientation is crucial when we try to navigate the world around us. It is a fundamental domain of human experience and depends on a wide array of cognitive capacities and integrated neural subsystems. What is most important for spatial cognition however, are the frames of references we use to locate and classify ourselves, others, objects, and events.

Often, we define a landmark (say ourselves, or a tree, or the telly) and then define an object's location in relation to this landmark. (the mouse is to my right, the bike lies left of the tree, my keys have fallen behind the telly). But as it turns out, many languages are not able to express a coordinate system with the meaning of the English expression “left of.” Instead, they employ a compass-like system of orientation.

They do not use a relative frame of reference, like in the English “the cat is behind the truck” but instead use an absolute frame of reference that can be illustrated in English by sentences such as “the cat is north of the truck.” (Levinson 2003: 3). This may seem exotic for us, but for many languages it is the dominant – although often not the only – way of locating things in space.

What are the cognitive consequences of this? Levinson argues that “

the choice of a predominant frame of reference in language correlates with, and probably determines, many other aspects of cognition, from memory, to inference, to navigation, to gesture and beyond. “ (Levinson 2003: 3).

Levinson has done much work on two languages which feature absolute frames of references:
1. Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian Aboriginal language. Levinson recounts how a Guugu Yimithirr speaker once warned him of an army ant “north of his” foot, or how another one told him where to find the frozen fish in a store that was 45 kilometres away. He pointed to his left and Levinson, just as all speakers of Indo-European and many other languages would probably do, thought he meant that Levinson would find the frozen fish on his right-hand side when he entered the shop. But in fact, he had pointed north-east and intended to communicate to Levinson that he would find the frozen fish in the north-east corner of the shop.

Größere Kartenansicht

2. Tzeltal, a Mayan language. In Tzeltal, speakers use the hills that surround them as points of reference. If they are out of the hills, they still project their frame of reference on their environment. So a speaker asking “Is the hot water in the uphill tap?” in an unfamiliar hotel out of the hills would mean by this ‘Is the hot water in the tap that would lie in the uphill (southerly) direction if I were at home?’ (Levinson 2003: 4).

Größere Kartenansicht

Levinson was particularly impressed by a Guugu Yimithirr speaker who, when referring to a absent person, seemingly pointed at himself but in fact pointed to the place the person had lived before. For Levinson, this indicates that

“in some striking way, the ego has been reduced to an abstract point in space. (Levinson 2003: 5)”

These experiences fit perfectly into and are supported by a more thorough and experimental investigation of this matter. But they fly in the face of much of traditional western thinking on the topic, including the consensus on the nature of spatial thinking in much of cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics which held that it was organized in a relative, egocentric and anthropocentric manner. (Levinson 2003: 10f.).

And in the chapters of his book Levinson sums up a robust body of data that lend support to his thesis that spatial cognition may be differently organised in different cultures, and that the body may not be the fundamental source of our spatial concepts, neither developmentally nor cross-culturally.

However, there are still strong universal trends in cognition in the domain of space. According to Levinson the best way to accommodate all these findings is to concede that human cognition may employ several modes of internal representation and that there is no reason to assume that there is only one form of mental representation. If we accept this view, it seems much more logical to state that the internal representations accessed by and linked to language and cultural practices are in some way influenced and shaped by these linkages. (Levinson 2003: 21f.).
Levinson sums up the key issues that recur throughout his book as follows:

• “What are the ‘natural’, pre-linguistic or innate, spatial concepts in human cognition? How abstract are they? Why does spatial thinking have a centrality in human cognition?
• What is the role of bodily axes and coordinates in spatial cognition?
• What is the nature of the relation between linguistic categories and non-linguistic concepts, both in general and in the spatial domain? Are there a multiplicity of underlying representations, or one multimodal representation of space? If the latter, what is its relation to spatial semantics?
• How much linguistic diversity is there in this domain, not only in expressive form, but underlying semantic parameters? Given that there is diversity, what linguistic universals can be stated in this area?
• Given semantic diversity, what happens to the underlying cognition? Does it remain a universal constant, translated into various restricted linguistic concepts, or does it adapt to the language it must locally support?
• What are the general implications from the spatial domain for the relation between language and human thinking?” (Levinson 2003: 22f.)

References:

Levinson, Stephen C. (2003) Space in Language and Cognition : Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Language, Thought, and Space (I)

I know I still haven't written my third post on Lewontin's paper in which he criticises inquiries into the evolution of language and cognition and it will be some time until I'll be able to post it as I'm going back home on Saturday and won't haven internet access for more than a month.

But in the next couple of days I want to write something about different: How different cultures speak about and conceptualize space.
In my opinion, this is a very fascinating avenue of linguistic research that gives much insight into the nature of language and cognition as well as their relationship. In addition, it also presents us with new facts and considerations when we try to study the evolution of these traits.
By studying language and cognition cross-culturally we come to the problem of language evolution from the other way so to speak.

I will focus on the work of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands and especially on the introductory part of Stephen Levinson's (2003) book "Space in Language and Cognition." I've started reading it because I wanted to improve my knowledge of some aspects of the cognition-oriented strands of linguistics and anthropology I unfortunately know way too little about.

I’ve written about the idea of frames of references and cognitive coordinate systems before , I haven’t said much about linguistic data that bears on this question. More generally, I, following other researchers, have argued that cognition and cognitive representations of communicative interactions are to a large part spatial in nature or at least analogous to spatial thinking. But research done by the people at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands and others has shown that there is a surprising diversity in linguistic frame of references across cultures.

What exactly does this mean for any account of cognition? What we have here is of course related to the contentious issue of the relation of language and thought. Generally there people who tend too emphasize the importance of a Language of Thought over language itself (e.g. cognitivism), with others tending toward the view that language and culture shape your cognitive style to a significant amount (e.g. linguistic relativism, linguistic determinism). These theorists can be called “lumpers” who do not see it necessary to distinguish between the semantic content of a language and underlying conceptual representations, and “splitters” who insist on this distinction. (Levinson 1997: 13f.)

The issue is often seen as a black and white matter, with Benjamin Lee Whorf being portrayed as the bad guy who had a way too extreme view. This, however, is misguided, as Whorf’s main interest was not to advocate any idea of linguistic determinism per se but instead to stress the importance of how perspectives embodied in a language influence what we pay attention to in a situation and also how we conceptualise it: “‘users of different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world’” (Whorf 1956: 221).

This is not to say that language is a prison we can’t get out of. But, as language and social practices can be said to embody certain perspectives on the world, it is reasonable to argue that a child growing up in a certain community will also learn to adopt and construe these perspectives during her cognitive development. As language is a primary source that introduces children to new ways of organizing the world around them it stands to reason that the concepts and viewpoints expressed in a language have a significant impact on cognitive representations.

Of course research on the non-linguistic cognition of infants and non-human primates has shown that their mental representations are already surprisingly sophisticated and complex. Some of these cognitive capacities are certainly specified innately or at least helped by innate biases. Others may emerge due to the nature and early imprint of cultural interaction. But some concepts, namely abstract, relational ones, seem to be absent from non-human cognition completely, and in humans seem to be provided and picked up primarily by and through language during cognitive development. In fact, research on infant and childhood cognition supports the fact that the acquisition of relational concepts with the help of language may be one of the key factors that made us “so smart” (Gentner 2003, Penn et al. 2008).

If we bear this in mind, the question then is not whether language influences or determines thought, but to clarify the interactions and relationship between innate biological propensities, the environment, language and other cultural practices. If for example, we allow for multiple modes of representation in cognitive processing we may get a much clearer view on the issue. If, as mentioned above, we see semantic representations and conceptual representations as different levels of representation we can accommodate the variety of semantic distinctions in different levels with maintaining some form of ‘psychic unity of mankind’ with shared atomic concepts across our species. (Levinson 1997)

In my next post I’ll write about how the research done by the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguists on the relationship between cross-linguistic differences in descriptions of space sheds light on this topic. I will draw on the 2003 book Space in language and cognition: explorations in cognitive diversity by Stephen C. Levinson, the director of the language and cognition group at the institute, in which he sums up much of the research that was done there over the years.

References:
Gentner, D. (2003). Why we’re so smart. In D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp.195-235). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. (1997) From outer to inner space: Linguistic categories and non-linguistic thinking. In E. Pederson & J. Nuyts, eds., With Language in Mind: the Relationship Between Linguistic and Conceptual Representation, 13-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. (2003) Space in Language and Cognition : Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Penn, Derek C, Keith J. Holyoak. and Daniel J. Povinelli (2008): Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (31:2): 109-130.

Whorf, B.L. (1956,) Language, thought and reality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Links & Delay

I know I wanted to write another post on Lewontin's paper, but I'm going back to Germany in a few days and I'm caught up in packing, sending parcels, etc. etc. It's incredible how much stuff accumulates in 10 months.... I don't exactly how long it will take my to settle in back in Germany but I hope I'll be back to blogging soon.

Anyway, the recent debates about evolutionary psychology and the evolution of cognition are quite interesting to follow at the moment. In his brilliant Wednesday Round Up, Daniel Lende of Neuroanthropology.net has listed some very interesting post on the topic under the heading "Evolution – or Men Fighting Back against Sharon Begley vs. Other Men Just Getting on with Things".

I myself am quite critical of the sex-centred adaptationism of many evolutionary psychologists, but in general I think evolutionary considerations should be an important part of any theory of cognition.

Other takes on the issue are David Brooks' New York Times op-ed piece criticising evolutionary psychologists' simplifiyng take on human nature and Jerry Coyne's comments. Coyne was a student of Richard Lewontin and I think you can see this in his criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology.

Go check it out!

Studying the Evolution of Cognition and Language: Are We Wasting Our Time? (Part 2)

In my last post I discussed some of the criticisms faced by people interested in the evolution of cognition.
One of the harshest critics is Richard Lewontin, who, at the end of his article "The Evolution of Cognition: questions we will never answer", advises his readers to “

to give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood. History, and evolution is a form of history, simply does not leave suffcient traces, especially when it is the forces that are at issue. Form and even behavior may leave fossil remains, but forces like natural selection do not. It might be interesting to know how cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.. (Lewontin, 1998: 130).”

But what leads Lewontin to conclude his essay in such as pessimistic and definitive manner?
According to Lewontin, there are three main strains of evolutionary explanations. And with each strain there are problems with evolutionary inquiries into cognition.

Historical Explanations
Firstly, there is a strain that explains the patterns of similarities and differences between animals through historical relatedness. Humans, for example, are more similar to and share more traits with chimpanzees than with lemurs because the human/chimpanzee lineages split some 5-7 million years ago and the lemur/human lineage split some 78 million years ago.

Functional Explanations
Secondly, there is a strain that tries to explain these patterns by looking at the functions they perform and the adaptive advantage they may have. The bodily similarities of sharks, dolphins, seals, and penguins for example can be explained by the fact that their bodies are adapted to swimming in the sea. Similarly, the differences between closely related species can be explained by adaptations to different environments. The differences between cows, goats, and deer, for example, only arose in the last 10 million years due to the different environments they had to adapt to. (Lewontin 1998: 116).

Problems for Studying the Evolution of Cognition
This is of course a problem for studying the evolution of cognition. Chimpanzees are the closest relatives that still exist but we and them may both have diverged so far from our ancestors that studying the cognitive differences between us may not really give us an insight into much human evolution. Indeed, there even is a study claiming “

more genes underwent positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution.” (Bakewell et al. 2007).

Overall,

“Humans and chimpanzees are nevertheless very similar in their proteins, on the average, but vastly different in the sizes of their brains and their ability to write books about each other.” (Lewontin, 1998: 117).

But here is a point where I disagree with Lewontin: the research shown earlier indeed indicates that there probably was not a large amount of changes in brain-related genes that led to human cognition:

“This conclusion, however, does not preclude the possibility that substantial accelerations occurred in the evolution of a few nervous system genes during human origins. Indeed, several such examples are known, including genes that control brain size and speech development. (Shi et al. 2006).

And indeed, a recent article based on assumptions similar to that of these researchers and Lewontin, by Derek Penn and his colleagues, (2008) doesn’t see things so negatively as Lewontin but instead sees these considerations as offering a great chance.

If there really is “profound functional discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds” we can ask if there is a core ability that is responsible for it.
For Penn et al. psychological, comparative and developmental studies point towards the conclusion that this cognitive cap

“is largely due to the degree to which human and nonhuman minds are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system.”

Sara Shettleworth (2009), in her critique of Bolhuis & Wynne’s (2009) arguments which are quite similar to that of Lewontin, agrees that

“There is evidence from behavioural studies that many of humans' mental powers are shared by other animals, including simple forms of learning, memory and categorization, and the elements of social, spatial and numerical cognition.
Only against this background does it make sense to propose, as some have, that there is a distinct small set of mental powers that is unique to humans […].”

Other researchers also defend the view that, contrary to Lewontin, we can learn a lot about the evolution of primate and human cognition by comparing different extant species. Jonathan Kenneth Burns (2004), for example, directly attacks Lewontin's arguments in an article on the evolution of Schizophrenia by stating that primatologist Richard Byrne

“has listed the establishing of a reliable pattern of descent as one part of a methodology for inferring the history of primate cognition (Byrne 2000). Many authors have confirmed the close evolutionary relationship between simian and ape species and modern Homo sapiens, with strong data from comparative psychology, molecular biology, and physical anthropology. Thus, cladistic analysis provides us with living relative species with which we can test the hypothesis that there is a heritable variation for social cognition that increases fitness.“ (Burns 2004: 868)

Evolutionary Constraints
But back to Lewontin’s article. The third strain of evolutionary theory he mentions is the one focusing on developmental and physiological constraints in the evolution and development of organisms. In the billion years of vertebrate evolution, for example, no organism ever developed more than four limbs.
Equally, mammals that went back into the sea and became whales and seals, the turned their limbs into flippers and flukes, but still retained their basic mammalian skeletal architecture.
This probably means that there are basic biological constraints because the available material regulates which evolutionary changes are possible, although the functions and activities of organisms and their parts may change quite dramatically over evolutionary time.
It also implies that

“when new functions arise in evolutiom, they often do so through a process of recruiting previously existing organs or physiological activities.” (Lewontin 1998: 117).

But If a trait is unique to one species it may be that we can’t really find any direct precursors and that it thus has no real “observable evolutionary history.”
What is more, we can’t be sure if a similar trait in other species it is far from clear if

"we are dealing with the same trait in the genetic, anatomical, and physiological sense.” (Lewontin 1998).

Platforms for the evolution of human cognition
I would argue however, that studies that show that similar cognitive activities which activate and rely on similar neural systems are a strong candidate for homologous platforms for human cognitive evolution. In fact, we now know that there are strong neural similarities between aspects of the macaque conceptual system and the human once (Gil-da-Costa et al. 2004).
With research like this we can thus probe into the “common architecture” that “underlies the conceptual systems of different species”, and ask how “additional systems” may have extended “human conceptual abilities significantly” (Barsalou 2005).
We also know now that “Communicative Signaling Activates ‘Broca’s’ Homolog in Chimpanzees,” and recent comparative neuroimaging studies have given new and important insights into the evolution of specialized language areas in human evolution. (for a great summary see this post).

Concluding Remarks
These examples lead me to think that we can learn a lot about the evolution of human cognition and language if we draw together the massive amount of data on the subject from all the different disciplines in a coherent and sensible manner. We simply have much more data to work with than at the time Lewontin voices his criticisms. Studying the evolution of cognition is – or has become – more than a ‘Paleofantasy’ in which we simply tell stories because we don’t know enough. Quite to the contrary – often it is the incredible wealth of data from different disciplines that presents the biggest problem.
Sverker Johansson's (2005) gargantuan collection of data relevant to the study of language evolution bears testament to this. The Study of language evolution, after it has moved beyond its ‘adaptationist’ beginnings in the early to mid-nineties – which Lewontin rightly criticized in some respects – is still a developing and growing field and I certainly agree with Willem Zuidema (2005) who states that

“Only when we have precise scenarios of the evolution of language and worked out ways to test empirically the plausibility of one scenario against another, can we conclude . if that turns out to be the case that there are too many alternative scenarios consistent with the available data. In my view, we have certainly not reached this stage yet.”

I hope I can wrap up my discussion of Lewontin's article next week.

References:

Bakewell,Margaret A., Peng Shi, and Jianzhi Zhang (2007:) More genes underwent positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution. PNAS 104: 7489-7494.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.” Trends in Cognitive Science 9.7: 309-311.

Bolhuis, Johan and Clive D. L. Wynne (2009):Can evolution explain how minds work?' Nature 458: 832–833.

Burns, Jonathan Kenneth. (2004) An evolutionary theory of schizophrenia: Cortical connectivity, metarepresentation, and the social brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
27(6):831–55; Discussion, 855–85.

Byrne, Richard W.(2000) Evolution of primate cognition. Cognitive Science 24(3):543–70

Gil-da-Costa, Ricardo, Allen Braun, Marco Lopes, Marc D. Hauser, Richard E. Carson, Peter Herscovitch and Alex Martin. 2004. “Toward an evolutionary perspective on conceptual representation: Species-specific calls activate visual and affective processing systems in the macaque.” PNAS 101.50: 17516–17521.

Johansson, Sverker (2005): Origins of Language: Constraints on Hypotheses. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Lewontin, R. C. (1998) The evolution of cognition: Questions we will never answer. In D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg, editors, An invitation to cognitive science, Volume 4: Methods, models, and conceptual issues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Shettleworth, Sara J. (2009). Cognition: theories of mind in animals and humans. In: Nature 459: 506.

Shi, Pen Margaret A. Bakewell and Jianzhi Zhang(2006):Did brain-specific genes evolve faster in humans than in chimpanzees? Trends in Genetics 22: 608-613.

Studying the Evolution of Cognition and Language: Are We Wasting Our Time? (Part 1)

This is my penultimate post in my short series on human uniqueness (1, 2, 3).

In a recent article in nature, Johan J. Bolhuis and Clive D. L. Wynne asked “Can evolution explain how minds work?” (subscription needed) and were of the opinion that there are severe problems with comparative paradigms. They pointed out major problems with evolutionary interpretations of cognitive traits. In their view, this research was fraught with anthropocentrism, e.g. it was mostly focused on humans or seen from a human perspective, and it doesn’t take into account the problem of convergent evolution:

“Different species may have arrived at similar solutions to cognitive problems because they have experienced similar selection pressures, not because they are closely related. In other words, evolutionary convergence may be more important than common descent in accounting for similar cognitive outcomes in different animal groups” (Bolhuis & Wynne 2009).

In addition, we don’t know which selective pressures our ancestors faced in their environment. Cognitive traits also leave little to no traces in the fossil record. This means that we mainly have to guess which cognitive traits may have evolved in response to some presumed selection pressures.

Bolhuis and Wynne also hold that comparative researchers have “naïve evolutionary presuppositions” and hold that

“As long as researchers focus on identifying human-like behaviour in other animals, the job of classifying the cognition of different species will be forever tied up in thickets of arbitrary nomenclature that will not advance our understanding of the mechanisms of cognition.” (Bolhuis & Wynne 2009).

This argument is of course not new and can be found – in an even stronger form and on a more general level – in the critical writings of Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould, and maybe most vocally, Richard Lewontin. Lewontin even goes so far as to say that the only thing we know about the evolution of human cognition is precisely that it evolved. That’s it. (Lewontin 1998: 108). This is especially so with complicated cognitive traits like linguistic competence.

We don’t even know in how far language is an innate genetically specified ability and in how far it is only a by-product of other evolutionary changes and is shaped and specified by culture. What’s more, we can’t possibly know how hereditary mechanisms (both genetic and cultural) acted in our remote ancestor, and we don’t know anything about the survival advantage these presumed mechanisms may have had in the past. Lewontin draws the conclusion that “reconstructions of the evolutionary history and the causal mechanisms of linguistic competence […] are nothing more than a mixture of pure speculation and inventive stories.” (Lewontin 1998: 111).

He explicitly directs his criticism at proposals like that of Pinker & Bloom (1990) (see also this post) who argued that natural selection is the only force that can explain the evolution of such a ‘complex adaptive’ trait like language. But we can’t show how natural selection might have been at work in each of the unknown stages that were necessary for language to evolve. Consequently, Pinker & Bloom’s argument is flawed.

I think Lewontin’s argument applies to some of the sweeping ‘adaptationist’ evolutionary approaches to language and cognition. But I don’t think his 1998 critique really captures the state of the research today or even earlier. In the 2003 anthology ‘Language Evolution’ (Kirby & Christiansen 2003, see also this post) which pretty much presented the state of the field there were many researchers who had a substantial amount to say about the evolution of language without falling into the theoretical pitfalls Lewontin warned about. At the end of his article Michael Tomasello, for example, cautions that “I am afraid that I have no real evolutionary fairy tale with which to conclude.” But he still has to clarify what valuable implications his research has for a general account of the evolution of language and cognition and is able to spell out some of the cognitive mechanisms which had to evolve and in how far culture has been an important aspect in this respect (Tomasello 2003: 108f.). Similarly, Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch voice similar criticism to that of Lewontin and Chomsky (which is not very surprising given that they co-authored two papers with the latter). However, they hold that the “comparative approach to language has been and will continue to be a powerful approach to understand both the evolution and current function of the language faculty.” (Hauser & Fitch 2003: 159). I completely agree with them, especially if we throw developmental science into the mix. By looking at non-human primates we are able to “isolate and study those components of the language faculty inherited from our non-human ancestors” (Hauser & Fitch 2002: 159). What is more, comparative research can also give us insight into possible advantages and selection pressures that led to the evolution of features. If we find similar traits and neural subsystems in other primates it is reasonable to assume that these are homologous and due to our shared evolutionary history. If on the other hand, other primates don’t have these traits but other species, e.g. songbirds, jays, parrots or deer, have them, they may be analogous and due to similar environmental or social selection pressures. If we carefully compare many different species across different taxa we get an increasingly better picture of the evolution of cognition in humans and other species.

But a broad survey of the field shows that this is already done as Sara Shettleworth (2009a) points out. Consequently, Bolhuis and Wynne’s criticism falls apart if we actually look at the field they are criticising and it is more as if they are flogging a dead horse (2009b). But we can see that Tomasello, Hauser, Fitch, Bolhuis, Wynne and Shettleworth all think that comparative cognition can give us important insights into the evolution of the organisms they study and compare. But it has to be done carefully and critically and within a throroughly worked out theoretical and methodological framework. In light of this, much of Lewontin’s criticisms seem to be misguided or at least do not really apply anymore. But does this really mean that there are no real general problems with evolutionary inquiries into the evolution of cognition?

In my next post I will address the additional criticisms Lewontin launches at the study of the evolution of cognition.

References:

Bolhuis, Johan and Clive D. L. Wynne (2009):Can evolution explain how minds work?' Nature 458: 832–833.

Hauser, M. D. & Fitch, W. T. (2003). What are the uniquely human components of the language faculty? In: Language Evolution: The State of the Art. Ed. by Christensen, M. & S. Kirby) pp. 158-181. Oxford: Oxford Unviersity Press.

Normal 0 21 Lewontin, R. C. (1998) The evolution of cognition: Questions we will never answer. In D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg, editors, An invitation to cognitive science, Volume 4: Methods, models, and conceptual issues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Pinker, Steven & Paul Bloom (1990): “Natural Language and Natural Selection.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4: 707-726.

Shettleworth, S. J. (2009a). The evolution of comparative cognition: Is the snark still a boojum? In: Behavioural Processes , 80, 210-217.

Shettleworth, Sara J. (2009b). Cognition: theories of mind in animals and humans. In: Nature 459: 506.

Tomasello, M. (2003). On the different origins of symbols and grammar. In Language Evolution: The State of the Art. Ed by. M. Christiansen & S. Kirby. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Michael Tomasello - Why We Cooperate

Michael Tomasello has a new book out in October called "Why We Cooperate." What is interesting about this publication is that Tomasello presents his findings on great ape and infant cognition and and social and developmental psychologist Carol Dweck, anthropologist Joan Silk, philosopher Brian Skyrms, and developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke respond to and explore the implications of his work in light of their own research.

Here's the description:

"Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she's likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to.

As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.

In Why We Cooperate, Tomasello's studies of young children and great apes help identify the underlying psychological processes that very likely supported humans' earliest forms of complex collaboration and, ultimately, our unique forms of cultural organization, from the evolution of tolerance and trust to the creation of such group-level structures as cultural norms and institutions.

Scholars Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke respond to Tomasello's findings and explore the implications."