Winners of the Language Evolves competition

Today we announced the results of our short story competition Language Evolves. Over the last year we’ve worked with over 70 sci-fi authors to help them write stories inspired by our research into the evolution of language. The competition was judged by Mary Doria Russell and Gwyneth Lewis, and the winning stories are published today in the New Welsh Review. Find out more about the project at the Language Evolves website.

Aroma Therapy by Sue Dawes is the winner of the English Language competition! An alien visitor attempts to comprehend human life through their highly evolved sense of smell. Read it in the new issue of the New Welsh Review. https://newwelshreview.com/new-welsh-reader

Runner up: The Precious Space by Tim Byrne Inspired by the work of Vinicius Macuch Silva, Yasamin Motamedi and others, a mysterious cave offers two researchers a golden opportunity to create a new way to communicate. Read it at https://newwelshreview.com/new-welsh-reader

Runner up: Artifact of the Anti-Verbal Era by Iulia Teodorescu. Future anthropologists find scraps of evidence from a long forgotten past where talking was prohibited. Read it online here.

Runner up: A Star on the Tongue by Rayn Epremian. Visitors to a hostile world try to communicate with an alien species, and get more than they bargained for. Read it soon in @FusionFragment magazine.

The Winner of our Welsh Language competition is Rhyngwyneb by Ian Richards. A brain-interface programmer gets the chance to change the destiny of her language forever. Read it in Y Stamp.

We’re delighted with our winners and with all the stories we received. It’s been a very exciting project, and we hope to run another competition within the next two years!

In the meantime: Are you a sci-fi author who would like to write about the evolution of language? Check out our Language Evolves website for a crash-course in language evolution, video resources and ways to get in touch with us about your ideas.

Survey on researcher’s estimations of translatability of different semantic domains

Last week, Bill Thompson, Gary Lupyan and I published a paper using word embeddings to look at semantic similarity between languages (copy of paper here). We showed that some semantic domains are more closely aligned (i.e., are more translatable) than other domains.

But what would linguists actually predict? Before the paper was released, Bill and Gary ran a survey of linguists, asking them to predict our results. Gary tweeted the results, and I’ve collected them here (text and graphs by Gary).

Survey results

Prior to the paper being published, we conducted a survey asking people to indicate what they thought were the most and least translatable domains:

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Language Evolution at the UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference

The UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference will be hosted at the University of Birmingham next year, July 27 to 30. This interdisciplinary conference is focused on the intersection between language and cognition, and it accepts submissions from all areas of linguistics, including experimental and computational research on language evolution, language origins, iconicity, and cognitive and functional approaches to historical linguistics.
The plenary speakers for this conference include Adele Goldberg (Princeton University), Caroline Rowland (MPI Nijmegen), Mark Dingemanse (Radboud University) and Gabriella Vigliocco (University College London).

The call for papers is online, with a December 30 deadline for 500 word abstracts.

Besides submitting to the main session, the conference organizers welcome proposals for pre-conference workshops, which can be skills-based workshops lead by single researchers or teams of researchers, as well as series of talks by different researchers on specific topics.

Evolution: Is sex really even sexual?

This is a guest post by Angarika Deb.

Sexual Selection theory, though much celebrated, has faced criticism since its inception. A new model now proposes sexual reproduction and reproductive social behaviour to be cooperative instead of competitive, as was initially advocated earlier by Darwin.

After the sensational theory of natural selection, Darwin outlined the theory of sexual selection in his book, The Origin of Species (Darwin, 1869) and developed it in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Darwin, 1871). This was in an effort to explain the structural and behavioural peculiarities in animals that did not make complete sense under the light of natural selection, for example ornamented plumage, mate signalling under predation risk etc. Natural selection is dependent on a struggle for enhancing individual survival; whereas sexual selection advocates a struggle between the sexes (intersexual competition) and amongst them (intrasexual competition) for rearing maximum progeny. ‘The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring’, as explained by Darwin (1871). Heritable traits that are deemed detrimental to survival, were explained by sexual selection as conferring an advantage in intrasexual competition for finding mates and intersexual competition between mates to increase their own future reproductive fitness.

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Why are we standing naked?

This is a guest post by Angarika Deb.

In a lineage of ancestors, humans are the only species left without a coat of body hair. Keeping in mind thermoregulation of bare skin, we speculate conditions for evolution of nakedness. Can it be coupled with bipedality?

The modifiers of evolution itself, are we Homo sapiens any closer to understanding our own emergence yet?

One of the salient features of the Mammals group is possession of body hair. Well, most of them at least. But we stand living proof against that. How, where and why did our body hair disappear and nakedness evolve? While Darwin argued that nakedness evolved for sexual ornamental purposes, Andersson[3] disagrees on the premise that, if sexual traits like a shiny plumage are indicative of good health, skin devoid of hair would convey poor health and won’t attract mates. It is important to determine the initial step of this denudation. This useful source states that a coat of body hair prevents too much heat reaching the body in daytime as well as shielding from cold at night. Protection from wind, wounds, bites, and UV radiation also feature in the advantages. Why then, did Homo sapiens end up losing one great layer of protection? If one believes in ‘Survival of the Fittest’, the benefits stemming from near disappearance of human body hair must surely be great enough to outweigh the costs of these protective functions. The repository of hypotheses trying to explain this step of evolution is still growing.

Continue reading “Why are we standing naked?”

The EvoLang Causal Graph Challenge

This year at EvoLang, I’m releasing CHIELD: The Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database.  It’s a collection of theories about the evolution of language, expressed as causal graphs.  The aim of CHIELD is to build a comprehensive overview of evolutionary approaches to language.  Hopefully it’ll help us find competing and supporting evidence, link hypotheses together into bigger theories and generally help make our ideas more transparent. You can access CHIELD right now, but hang around for details of the challenges.

The first thing that CHIELD can help express is the (sometimes unexpected) causal complexity of theories.  For example, Dunbar (2004) suggests that gossip replaced physical grooming in humans to support increasingly complicated social interactions in larger groups.  However, the whole theory is actually composed of 29 links, involving predation risk, endorphins and resource density:

The graph above might seem very complicated, but it was actually constructed just by going through the text of Dunbar (2004) and recording each claim about variables that were causally linked.  By dividing the theory into individual links it becomes easier to think about each part.

Second, CHIELD also helps find other theories that intersect with this one through variables like theory of mind, population size or the problem of freeriders, so you can also use CHIELD to explore multiple documents at once.  For example, here are all the connections that link population size and morphological complexity (9 papers so far in the database):

The first thing to notice is that there are multiple hypotheses about how population size and morphological complexity are linked.  We can also see at a glance that there are different types of evidence for each link.  Some are supported from multiple studies and methods, while others are currently just hypotheses without direct evidence.

However, CHIELD won’t work without your help!  CHIELD has built-in tools for you – yes YOU – to contribute.  You can edit data, discuss problems and add your own hypotheses.  It’s far from perfect and of course there will be disagreements.  But hopefully it will lead to productive discussions and a more cohesive field.

Which brings us to the challenges …

The EvoLang Causal Graph challenge: Contribute your own hypotheses

You can add data to CHIELD using the web interface.  The challenge is to draw your EvoLang paper as a causal graph.  It’s fun!  The first two papers to be contributed will become part of my poster at EvoLang.

Here are some tips:

  • Break down your hypothesis into individual causal links.
  • Try to use existing variable names, so that your hypothesis connects to other work.  You can find a list of variables here, or the web interface will suggest some.  But don’t be afraid to add new variables.
  • Try to add direct quotes from the paper to the “Notes” field to support the link.
  • If your paper is already included, do you agree about the interpretation? If not, you can raise an issue or edit the data yourself.

More help is available here.  Click here to add data now!  Your data will become available on CHIELD, and your name will be added to the list of contributors.

Bonus Challenge: Contribute 5 papers, become a co-author!

I’ll be writing an article about the database and some initial findings for the Journal of Language Evolution.  If you contribute 5 papers or more, then you’ll be added as a co-author.  As an incentive to contribute further, co-authors will be ordered by the number of papers they contribute.  This offer is open to anyone studying evolutionary linguistics, not just people presenting at EvoLang.  You should check first whether the paper you want to add has already been included.

Bonus Challenge: Contribute some code, become a co-author!

CHIELD is open source.  The GitHub repository for CHIELD has some outstanding issues. If you contribute some programming to address them, you’ll become a co-author on the journal article.

Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

We live in an age where we have more data on more languages than ever before, and more data to link it with from other domains. This should make it easier to test hypotheses involving adaptation, and also to spot new patterns that might be explained by adaptation.  For example, the proposed link between climate and tone languages could never have been investigated without massive global databases.  However, there is not much discussion of the overall approach to research in this area.

This week I published a paper in a special issue on the Adaptive Value of Langauges, outlining the maximum robustness approach to these problems.  I then try to apply this approach to the debate about the link between tones and climate.

In a nutshell, I suggest that research should be:

Robust

Instead of aiming for the most valid test for a hypothesis, we should consider as many sources of data and as many processes as possible.  Agreement between them supports a theory, but differences can also highlight which parts of a theory are weak.

Causal

Researchers should be more explicit about the causal effects in their hypotheses.  Formal tools from causal graph theory can help formulate tests, recognise weaknesses and avoid talking past each other.

Incremental

Realistically, a single paper can’t be the final word on a topic, and shouldn’t aim to.  Statistical studies of large-scale, cross-cultural data are very complicated, and we should expect small steps to establishing causality.

I applying these ideas to the debate about tone and climate.  Caleb Everett also published a paper in this issue showing that speakers in drier regions use vowels less frequently in their basic vocabulary. I test whether the original link with tone and the new link with vowels holds up when using different data sources and different statistical frameworks.  The correlation with tone is not robust, while the correlation with vowels seems more promising.

https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/327602/fpsyg-09-00166-HTML/image_m/fpsyg-09-00166-g003.jpg

I then suggest some ideas for alternative methodological approaches to this theory that could be tested.  For example:

  • An iterated artificial learning experiment
  • A phonetic study of vowel systems
  • A historical case-study of 5 Bantu languages
  • A corpus study of tone use in Cantonese and conversational repair in Mandarin
  • A corpus study of Larry King’s speech

 

Resister: A sci-fi sequel about cultural evolution and academic funding

In 2016, Casey Hattrey combined literary genres that had long been kept far apart from each other: science fiction, academic funding applications and cultural evolution theory. Space Funding Crisis I: Persister was a story that tried to “put the fun in academic funding application and the itch in hyper-niche”. It was criticised as “unrealistic and too centered on academics to be believable” and “not a very good book”. Dan Dediu’s advice was “better not even start reading it,” and Fiona Jordan’s review was literally a four-letter word. Still, that hasn’t stopped Hattrey from writing the sequel that the title of the first book tried to warn us about.

The badly conceived artwork for Resister

Space Funding Crisis II: Resister continues to follow the career of space linguist Karen Arianne. Just when she thought she’d gotten out of academia, the shadowy Central Academic Funding Council Administration pulls her back in for one more job. Or at least a part-time post-doc. Her mission: solve the mystery of the great convergence. Over thousands of years of space-faring, human linguistic diversity has exploded, but suddenly people have started speaking the same language. What could have caused this sinister twist? Who are the Panini Press? And what exactly is research insurance? Arianne’s latest adventure sees her struggle against ‘splainer bots, the conference mafia and her own inability to think about the future.

To say that this was the “difficult second book” would give too much credit to the first.  Hattrey seems to have learned nothing about writing or science since the last time they ventured into the weird world of self-published online novels. The characters have no distinct voice, the plot doesn’t make much sense and there are eye-watering levels of exposition.  In the appendix there’s even an R script which supports some of the book’s predictions, and even that is badly composed.  Even some of the apparently over-the-top futuristic ideas like insurance for research hypotheses are a bit behind existing ideas like using prediction markets for assessing replicability.

If there is a theme between the poorly formatted pages, then it’s emergence: complex patterns arising from simple rules. Arianne has a kind of spiritual belief in just reacting, Breitenberg-like, to the here-and-now rather than planning ahead. Apparently Hattrey intends this to translate into a criticism of the pressures of early-career academic life.  But this never really materialises out of the bland dialogue and insistence on putting lasers everywhere.

Still, where else are you going to find a book that makes fun of the slow science movement, generative linguistics and theories linking the emergence of tone systems to the climate?

Resister is available for free, including in various formats, including for kindle, iPad and nook. The prequel, Persister is also available (epub, kindle, iPad, nook).

Persister: Space Funding Crisis I  Resister: Space Funding Crisis II

CfP: Measuring Language Complexity at EvoLang

This is a guest post from Aleksandrs Berdicevskis about the workshop Measuring Language Complexity.

A lot of evolutionary talks and papers nowadays touch upon language complexity (at least nine papers did this at the Evolang 2016). One of the reasons is probably that complexity is a very convenient testbed for testing hypotheses that establish causal links between linguistic structure and extra-linguistic factors. Do factors such as population size, or social network structure, or proportion of non-native speakers shape language change, making certain structures (for instance, those that are morphologically simpler) more evolutionary advantageous and thus more likely? Or don’t they? If they do, how exactly?

Recently, quite a lot has been published on that topic, including attempts to do rigorous quantitative tests of the existing hypotheses. One problem that all such attempts face is that complexity can be understood in many different ways, and operationalized in yet many more. And unsurprisingly, the outcome of a quantitative study depends on what you choose as your measure! Unfortunately, there currently is little consensus about how measures themselves can be evaluated and compared.

To overcome this, we organize a shared task “Measuring Language Complexity”, a satellite event of Evolang 2018, to take place in Torun on April 15. Shared tasks are widely used in computational linguistics, and we strongly believe they can prove useful in evolutionary linguistics, too. The task is to measure the linguistic complexity of a predefined set of 37 language varieties belonging to 7 families (and then discuss the results, as well as their mutual agreement/disagreement at the workshop). See the detailed CfP and other details here.

So far, the interest from the evolutionary community has been rather weak. But there is still time! We extended the deadline until February 28 and are looking forward to receiving your submissions!

CfP: Applications in Cultural Evolution, June 6-8, Tartu

Guest post by Peeter Tinits and Oleg Sobchuk
As mentioned in this blog before, evolutionary thinking can help the study of various cultural practices, not just language. The perspective of cultural evolution is currently seeing an interesting case of global growth and coordination – the widely featured founding of the Cultural Evolution Society (also on replicatedtypo), the recent inaugural conference and follow-ups are bringing a diverse set of researchers around the same table. If this has gone past you unnoticed – there’s nice resourcesgathered on the society website.
Evolutionary thinking seems useful for various purposes. However does it work the same everywhere, and can research progress in one domain be easily carried over to another?
To make better sense of it, we’re organizing a small conference to discuss the ways that evolutionary thinking can be best applied in different domains. The event “Applications in Cultural Evolution: Arts, Languages, Technologies” is to take place in June 6-8 in Tartu, Estonia. Pleanary speakers include:
We  invite contributions from cultural evolution researchers of various persuasions and interests to talk about their work and how the evolutionary models help with that. Deadline for abstracts on Feb 14.
Discussion of individual contributions will hopefully lead to a better understanding of commonalities and differences in how cultural evolution is applied in different areas, and help build an understanding of how to most productively use evolutionary thinking – what are the prospects and limitations. We aim to allow for building a common ground through plenty of space and opportunities for formal and informal discussion on site.
Both case studies and general perspectives welcome. In addition to original research we encourage participants to think of the following questions:
– What do you get out of cultural evolution research?
– How should we best apply evolutionary thinking to culture?
– What matters when we apply this to different domains or timescales?
Deadline for abstracts: February 14, 2018
Event dates: June 6-8
Location: Tartu University, Estonia
Full call for papers and information on the website. Also available as PDF.