home

Here’s a wiki for the Pinker and Bloom article. All groups are responsible for parts 1 (introduction), 2 (the role of natural selection), and 6 (conclusion). Group 1 is also responsible for part 3 (design in language), Group 2 is also responsible for part 4 (arguments for language for being a spandrel), and Group 3 is also responsible for part 5 (genetic variation).

__** INTRODUCTION (All) **__

"All human societies have language." (p.2).

Pinker states that "modern English is not an advance over Old Engish". My question is the opposite, "is Old English an advance over Modern English"? Or put another way, is English devolving? It certainly sounds as if it is. The English language of three hundred years ago sounds much more formal, more literary that present day English. Possibly it sounds that way simply because it is different. I'm not sure if this is relevent to the dsicussion, but it would be interesting to hear what people think.

Language is learned and grammar is already fixed therefore children don’t have to invent it. The idea of calculating machine cannot become more specialized you can tell this by applying them to a computer which cannot be prepared to do a task that is unrecognizable. "Language was not invented by some groups and spread to others like agriculture or the alphabet." (p.2). "Within societies, individual humans are proficient language users regardless of intelligence, social status, or level of education." (p.2).

"Aspects of language skill can be linked to **characteristic regions of the human brain**." (p.2). "The ability to use a natural language belongs more to the study of human biology than human culture; it is a topic like echolocation (see below) in bats or stereopsis (see below) in monkeys, " (p.2). "All modern students of language agree that __at least some aspects of language__ are due to species specific, task-specific biological abilities." (p.2). "It would be natural, then, to expect everyone to agree that human language is the product [the theory] of Darwinian natural selection." (p.2).
 * **W** **ernicke's Area** (language recognition) and **Broca's Area** (language recognition).

" Noam Chomsky, the world's best-known linguist, and Stephen Jay Gould, the world's best-known evolutionary theorist, have repeatedly suggested that language may not be the product of natural selection, **but a side effect of other evolutionary forces such as an increase in overall** **brain size and constraints of as-yet __unknown laws of structure and growth__.**" (p.2-3).

If indeed language is a side-effect (or spandrel) of an increase in brain size or some unknown law of structure and growth, it may well be luckiest and most advanageous accident that mankind has ever stumbled upon. It would seem doubtful that something so pivotable to the success of man would be an accident.

//[]// p. 157-158: “… we may easily err in attributing importance to characters, and in believing that they have been developed through natural selection. __**We must by no means overlook the effects… of the complex laws of growth, such as correlation, compensation, of the pressure of one part on another**__.… But structures thus indirectly gained, although at first of no advantage to a species, may subsequently have been taken advantage of by modified descendants, under new conditions of life and newly acquired habits.”
 * "//Darwin recognized “laws of growth” as being a more important evolutionary process than natural selection." - R.C. Craw//
 * **1872: //On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 6th Edition.//**


 * **1888: //The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex//. 2nd Edition.**

p. 61: “… I now admit… that in the earlier editions of my ‘Origin of Species’ I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest. I __**have altered the fifth edition of the “Origin’ so as to confine my remarks to adaptive changes of structure;**__ but I am convinced, from the light gained during even the last few years that very many structures which now appear to us useless, will hereafter be proved to be useful, and will therefore come within the range of natural selection.… __**I did not formerly consider sufficiently the existence of structures, which, as far as we can at present judge, are neither beneficial nor injurious and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work.**__

There is the debate on whether language is from natural selection or brain size. Chomsky debates it may be molecular biology.

__**THE ROLE OF NATURAL SELECTION IN EVOLUTIION (All)**__ definiton of Adaptive Complexity - are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are dynamic networks of interactions and relationships not aggregations of static entities. They are adaptive in that their individual and collective behaviour changes as a result of experience.

__**DESIGN IN LANGUAGE (Team 1)**__ 1. What is the function (if any) of language? 2. What are the engineering demands on a system that must carry out such a function? 3. And are the mechanisms of language tailored to meet those demands?
 * 3 Questions Posed: (p. 11)**

Language gives us the advantage of acquiring second hand information about the world. This saves time and energy and allows us to avoid the dangers of trial and error. We also use it to adapt to changes in the environment over a lifetime as opposed to other species that must wait for evolution. It is a “relational structure whose symbols pertain to people, objects, and events, the categories they belong to, their distribution over space and time, and their causal relations to one another.”
 * 3.1. An Argument for Design in Language**

The vocal auditory system is useful for communication because it does not require light, face-face encounters, proximity and allows free use of hands. In addition the tone or intensity can be modified to conceal voice or to extend sound over long distances.

Some universal traits of language are as follows: 1. Contain major and minor categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. 2. Phrasal categories use words to describe things, events, states, locations and properties and thus are able to be used in an infinite way with finite number of lexical items. 3. Phrase structure rules 4. Rules of linear order 5. Case affixes link nouns with predicate 6. Verb affixes to signal temporal distribution and time of event 7. Auxiliaries occurring as either verb affixes or in one of three sentence-peripheral positions (first, second, Last) 8. Phonetically reducible morphemes And lots more!!

A critique on language design theory
 * 3.2. Is the Argument for Language Design a Just-So Story?**

-Not a unquie idea as it remains consistent with common clams for substantive universals and their semantic functions. -Both speical design and adaptationist origins can exsist once looked at from an engineering point of view -The argument that language was designed for communication isent logical as it pre supposes there is a listener -The existence of grammer make it more diffuclt to communicate emotion and facial experessions and tone of voice are more informative.


 * 3.3. Language Design and Language Diversity**

One question raised in this section is "why is there more than one language at all?" There is no direct answer, however we are given a few speculations as to why we don't all share a common language. First it is suggested that "speakers need a learning mechanism for labels for cultural innovations". This learning device can be used for everything that falls under that category. The second speculation is that "it may be difficult to evolve a huge innate code". A code or collection of words, sounds, and/or phrases would quickly grow to be too large for a person to retain, much less use to communicate.


 * 3.4. Language Design and Arbitrariness**

__**4. ARGUMENTS FOR LANGUAGE BEING A SPANDREL (Team 2)**__

__**4.1.**__

"Gould's specific suggestion that language is a spandrel is his frequently-stated position that the mind is a single general-purpose computer." I would be surprised if this was the extend of his argument regarding the single general-purpose computer. It seems so nonsensical to say a computer could perform tasks not already programmed into it. Obviously Gould would understand this, there must be more to this statement.

"Once you build a complex machine, it can perform so many unanticipated tasks. Build a computer "for" processing monthly checks at the plant, and it can also perform factor analysis on human skeletal measures, play Rogerian analyst, and whip anyone's ass (or at least tie them perpetually) in tic-tac-toe."

Pinker and Bloom debunk this by pointing out that a computer would first need to be reprogrammed to perform all these different functions, and that "Language learning is not programming: parents provide children with sentences of English, not rules of English. We suggest that natural selection was the programmer."

__**4.2**__ "changes of brain quantity could lead to changes in brain quality. But mere largeness of brain is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for language...Nor is there reason to think that if you simply pile more and more neurons into a circuit or more and more circuits into a brain that computationally interesting abilities would just emerge."

__**5. GENETIC VARIATION (Team 3)**__ There can be comprehension without grammatical knowledge. "language abilities consist of not just formal grammar but also nonlinguistic congitive processes as analogy, remote memory and Haigspeak."

There is always genetic variation for traits, and within the bounds of 'normal grammar abilities' there are gradations of ability.
 * 5.1** "..there is no reason to think that every aspect of grammar that has a genetic basis must be controlled by a single gene" (p.30)

"Not all linguistic innovations need begin wih a genetic change in the linguistic abilities of speakers."(p31) Mutations affecting language-type skills were more likely to be shared by genetically related individuals who would protect each other as well as understand each other and make it easier for the mutation to become useful to the society at large.
 * 5.2** Comprehension and production aren't always parallel. Comprehension can pick up on novel language sequences both above and below the level of production.


 * 5.3** Changes of ability as small as 1% can confer advantages and make a difference in just a short evolutionary time. Phenologic changes can happen due to selection pressure without being observed/measured. Single generational changes can be inconsequential on their own but select towards a larger change over generations.(p35)


 * 5.4** Phyletic continuity - while it's harder to prove, while apes don't naturally have language that doesn't mean our common ancestor didn't.

__**6. CONCLUSION (All)**__

The main argument throughout the article is that "human language, like other specialized biological systems, evolved by natural selection."

This conclusion was based on two facts -- 1. "Language shows signs of complex design for the communication of propositional structures." <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">2. "The only explanation for the origin of organs with complex design is the process of natural selection. "

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">Language competence has been wrongly equated with cognitive development. When studying the relationship between the two, many ignore the most recent structure of grammar that has been discovered during the past 30 years.

Many questions concerning the evolution of language will never be answered, but much insight is to be gained if problems and questions are posed properly.

Are we asking the right questions about where language came from?

_ __**DEFINITIONS OF TERMS:**__

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; cursor: default; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">p. 5
 * Allometric -** <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; cursor: default; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">growth <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">of a part of an <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; cursor: default; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">organism <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">in <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; cursor: default; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">relation <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">to __<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">[|the] __<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;"> <span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">growth of the <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; cursor: default; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.25em; margin: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: static;">whole organism or some part of it.

p.30 []
 * Anaphor** - a word (such as a pronoun) used to avoid repetition; the referent of an anaphor is determined by its antecedent

(p.2). []
 * Echolocation** - A method of sensing surrounding objects that employs pulses of high-frequency sound. The resulting echoes bounce back from any objects surfaces and enables the organism that released the high-frequency sound to construct a three dimensional image of its surroundings. Echolocation is used by some mammals (including many of the 1,000 known species of bats) and a small number of cave-dwelling birds.

<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">p. 39 <span style="color: #0000cc; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">[|en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocast]
 * Endocast - **<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"> or endocranial cast is a cast made of the mold formed by the impression the brain makes on the inside of the neurocranium (braincase), providing a replica of the brain with most of the details of its outer surface.

<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">**Epiphenomenon** - is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon. <span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">p. 7 <span style="color: #0000cc; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">[|en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenal]

<span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">p. 10 <span style="color: #0000cc; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">[|www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v4/n8/glossary/nrg1127_glossary.html]
 * Homeotic ** - <span style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">A mutation that causes one member of a repetitive series to assume the identity of another member, for example, the transformation of sepals into petals.

p. 33 []
 * Saltation** - an abrupt variation in the appearance of an organism, species, etc., usually caused by genetic mutation

(p.2). []
 * Stereopsis** - The ability to determine distance to objects by comparing the difference between the "image" reported by each eye. Also called "stereoscopic" or "3D" vision.

2. Lying at a lower level but not directly beneath. p.30 []
 * Subjacancy** - 1. Located beneath or below; underlying.


 * Baldwin Effect** - "The process whereby environmentally-induced responses set up selection pressures for such presponses to become innate, triggering conventional Darwinian evolution that superficially mimics a Lamarckian sequence." (p31)