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.

Call for Papers: Protolang 7

Protolang Image


The 7th International Conference “Ways to Protolanguage” (http://www.protolang7.org/) is going to take place at the University of Düsseldorf and online from Sept 6 to Sept 8, 2021.

The thematic focus of Protolang is on delineating the socio-cultural, semiotic, symbolic, ecological, genetic, anatomical and neuro-cognitive requirements for evolving (proto)language. Sign use, tools, cooperative breeding, pointing, vocalisation, intersubjectivity, bodily mimesis, planning and navigation are among many examples of such possible factors through which hominins have gained a degree of specificity that is not found in other forms of animal communication and cognition. We aim at identifying the proximate and ultimate causes as well as the mechanisms by which these requirements evolved; evaluating the methodologies, research tools and simulation techniques; and enabling extended and vigorous exchange of ideas across disciplinary borders.

Keynote speakers of Protolang 7 and their main research areas:

  • Michel DeGraff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
    Linguistic theory, creole studies, language and education
  • Katja Liebal (Leipzig University)
    Human biology and primate cognition
  • Asifa Majid (University of York)
    Psychology of language and communication
  • Albert Newen (Ruhr University Bochum)
    Philosophy of mind
  • Cailin O’Connor (University of California Irvine)
    Philosophy of science and evolutionary game theory
  • Asli Ozyurek (Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen)
    Multimodal language processing

We invite scholars from linguistics, behavioral science, cognitive science and related disciplines to contribute experimental and theoretical research. Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words, excl. references, via easychair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=protolang7). There are no speficic formatting guidelines for abstracts at this point, except that they should be fully anonymous.

  • Deadline for submission: February 28th 2021
  • Notification: March 2021

Multiple submissions: Any individual may submit up to two single-authored or first-authored abstracts. There are no limits for co-authored abstracts.

Note on Covid-19:
We are very much aware that it is currently far from clear whether Protolang 7 can take place as a physical conference. The current plan is a hybrid format with an online track and an on-site track, but we are prepared to make it a fully virtual conference if necessary.

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:

Continue reading “Survey on researcher’s estimations of translatability of different semantic domains”

A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists

I’m currently working on a long article in which I review two recent critiques of computational criticism (one by Nan Z. Da and the other by Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk). Moretti and Sobchuk introduce cultural evolution into their discussion, but don’t say much about it, and I’m suspect that their audience, and mine, is unfamiliar with current work in the area. Accordingly I’ve decided to prepare a brief appendix to serve as a guide. Since I will be citing my own work in my article, and further developing my views, I do not mention it in this guide.


Much of the recent work on cultural evolution is empirical; researchers count things and see how they behave over time. This work requires minimal commitment to a specific theory or model of how cultural evolution works. That is perhaps wise, as there is no consensus on how to relate the relevant biological concepts to cultural entities and processes. These questions can help you organize and sort through the different conceptualizations.

1. What is the target/beneficiary of the evolutionary dynamic?

Is it a human or collection of humans that benefits directly or is it the cultural entity itself. “Directly” is the key word, as humans must ultimately benefit, otherwise cultural evolution is just a waste of biological resources. To the extent that there is a “mainstream” approach it is something called “gene-culture coevolution” or “dual inheritance theory.” In this approach humans are the direct beneficiaries of cultural success.

When Richard Dawkins proposed the meme as a cultural replicator in The Selfish Gene (1976) he proposed that the meme itself was the direct beneficiary of evolution. This allows for a potential conflict between cultural and biological evolution. A cultural trait like celibacy among the religious, for example, would seem to conflict with a biological ‘imperative’ to reproduce.

2. Replication (copying) or (re)construction.

Independently of the first question, how is the cultural entity transmitted from one person to another? Is it a process of imitation or reconstruction? Genes replicate through a process of copying, hence Dawkins’ choice of a term, “meme”, to suggest that. He sees genes as cultural replicators, and many researchers agree with this.

In 1996 Dan Sperber published Explaining Culture in which he argued that, no, cultural entities aren’t copied. Rather they’re reconstructed. Hence instances will differ from one another.

3. Is there a meaningful distinction comparable to the biological distinction between phenotype and genotype?

As far as I can tell, this distinction has little meaning for those focusing on empirical work. They count what they can count. And it doesn’t seem to have much purchase among adherents of gene-cultural coevolution or dual-inheritance theory. For these investigators we have populations of humans on the one hand, and cultural entities on the other. At this level of abstraction those cultural entities are all of the same kind.

The distinction comes into play when you take the position that cultural entities themselves are the direct beneficiaries of the evolutionary process. Dawkins sometimes talks of memes as though they are comparable to biological genes, implying that there are phenotypic entities as well. Other times, however, he talks of memes as viruses, in which case there is no phenotypic entity. As far as I can tell, Sperber doesn’t make this distinction either.

4. Are the genetic elements of culture inside people’s heads or are they in the external environment?

Dawkins was ambiguous on this point in The Selfish Gene. There is a strong tendency to conceptualize culture’s genetic entities, if you will, as being inside people’s heads. Most meme advocates do, and I believe that Sperber and his followers do as well. But one can take another position, that the culture’s genetic entities are in the external world in one form or another. That’s the position I take.

What to read?

I would recommend that humanists with no background in evolutionary thought start with Gary Taylor’s Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive The Test Of Time And Others Don’t (Basic Books: 1996). It side-steps the theoretical mess around and about those four questions and discusses a lot of examples. I read it years ago and so don’t recall any specifics, but this publisher’s blurb seems reasonable:

[Taylor] argues that culture is not what was done, but what is remembered and that the social competition among different memories is as dynamic as the biological struggle for survival. Taylor builds his argument on a broad base of cultural achievements, from Michelangelo to Frankenstein, from Shakespeare to Casablanca, from Freud to Invisible Man. He spans the continents to draw upon Japanese literature, Native American history, ancient Greek philosophy, and modern American architecture.

What’s next? I would suggest: Laland, K. M. and G. R. Brown, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior, (Oxford University Press: 2002). That’s the edition I read, but there is a second edition published in 2011. Laland and Brown cover not only cultural evolution in its various conceptual forms, but evolution and human behavior more generally, including sociobiology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology. As I recall, the title is apt, sense and nonsense.

Then you might want to look at a relatively short document (37 pp.) giving summaries and positions articulated in a workshop Daniel Dennett convened in 2010. It was held at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Participants: Dan Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Rob Boyd, Nicolas Cladière, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Joseph Henrich, Olivier Morin, Peter Richerson, Dan Sperber, and Kim Sterelny. They run through various issues centered on the second question above. The document is published by the International Cognition & Culture Institute (founded by Dan Sperber) as Cultural Evolution Workshop (2010) at this link, http://cognitionandculture.net/ebooks/. You can download it as a PDF or iBook.

For gene-culture coevolution and/or dual inheritance I would recommend Alexander Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences (University of Chicago Press: 2011). This is only moderately technical.

If you want to further investigate memetics, you should start with Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. It’s been reissued several times; any edition will do. Read the whole thing, not just the memetics chapter; that will give you a better understanding of what was on his mind when he posited the existence of memes. Once you’ve read that you should read this paper, Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976-1999, Perspectives on Science 2012, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 75-104. Burman explains how the concept went from a relatively informal and ambiguous idea to the popular concept of a viral agent moving from mind to mind. Also look at Derek Gatherer, Why the ‘Thought Contagion’ Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics, Journal of Memetics-Evolutionary Models of Transmission, vol. 2, 1998, pp. 1-21, http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/gatherer_d.html. Gatherer argues against the idea that culture’s genetic elements are entities in the brain/mind.

Dan Sperber’s book – Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Wiley: 1996) – is relatively short and quite readable. He talks of an epidemiology of representations and adopts the term “attractor” from complex dynamics. A cultural attractor is a bit like a Platonic Ideal (though I suspect Sperber would reject the comparison); it is a form toward which cultural entities evolve according to factors of attraction. These factors might be some psychological preferences and/or environmental features that favor a cultural entity. This approach has come to be known as cultural attraction theory (CAT).

For a different take on the subject you can read Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York, Pantheon Books: 1999). Wright is working outside the nexus of the four questions I’ve listed above. He takes a long view of human history, from origins up to the present, and argues that we are moving toward ever more sophisticated modes of cooperative interaction. His title, NonZero, is a term from game theory. A zero sum game is one where one party’s gain is necessarily another party’s loss. A nonzero sum game, in contrast, is one where all parties can come out better than they were before entering into the interaction. Wright’s other point of departure is an empirical literature in anthropology and archaeology that dates mostly to the third quarter of the previous century. These scholars were interested in measuring the cultural complexity of existing, but also historical, societies and developed sophisticated statistical tools for doing so. Wright then argues that culture evolves toward more complex forms with more cooperative interactions between people.

As a bonus, you might want to look through the archives of the listserve associated with the Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, which was published from 1997 to 2005. It was an online journal, here: http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/. The list is archived here: http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/about.html#archives.

Finally, the Cultural Evolution Society was founded a couple of years ago: https://culturalevolutionsociety.org/.

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.

Call for Contributions: Public Engagement in Language Evolution session

Next year at EvoLang, I’m doing a short session on public engagement in Language Evolution. As part of this, I have been given a small part of the poster session to have a little exhibition/discussion corner about public engagement initiatives. As such, I am now recruiting contributions that outline existing initiatives. Contributions will use the 2-page EvoLang template (available here: https://www.evolang.org/submissions). Contributions should outline the initiative and make clear:

  • The objective(s) for the public engagement initiative
  • Reflections on success and areas for improvement
  • Good practice to be learnt from these reflections

Contributions will be reviewed in relation to space constraints, but I hope to have a good diversity of examples. Please email contributions to hannah.little@uwe.ac.uk before January 3rd 2020. Questions to the same address.

More context of the session is below:

Public engagement has always been an important aspect of academia. Breaking the barrier between research and the public can foster knowledge, equality, trust and accountability. On a more pragmatic level, funders increasingly require impact statements and plans for public dissemination. However, language evolution as a field has unique difficulties meeting these demands but with the help of professional translation services from Espresso Translations, every needs are meet at ease and efficiently.

Evolutionary linguistics is difficult to explain to those outside the field. Much research presented at EvoLang has implications for our knowledge of human origins, but the implications for current and future humans often remain unclear, creating a “relevance gap”. Further, the abstractness of research based on models (computational or experimental) and not referring to concrete artefacts, fossils or living examples, creates another barrier for explanation. Since EvoLang started, many researchers have undertaken public engagement initiatives that address this relevance gap in different ways. 

In this session, we will explore existing and future objectives for public engagement with language evolution research. We will discuss ways to frame language evolution to make it accessible to the public, and present examples of good practice, as well as lessons to be learnt, from previous and ongoing public engagement initiatives.

Initiatives will be split into 2 sections, mirroring two (non comprehensive) models for public engagement: deficit and participation (Trench, 2008).

The deficit model sees the public as having a knowledge deficit and seeks to fix that through one-way communication. Typical examples are documentaries (e.g. Through the Wormhole episode “How do Aliens Think”, Sayenga, 2013) and science journalism (e.g. Babel Magazine, Little, 2018). Discussion within the session will focus on good practice around creating relevant and intuitive explanations for concepts within language evolution.

The participation model works on the principle that all participants in a public engagement initiative can contribute, and that all have a stake in the outcome. Many public engagement initiatives in language evolution have recruited members of the public as participants in data-collection exercises at public events including festivals (e.g. Verhoef et al., 2015), science centres and museums (e.g. Cluskley, 2018; Raviv & Arnon, 2018), or as games (e.g. The Color Game, Morin et al., 2018). While involvement as an experimental participant is a contribution, it does not necessarily create a sense of having a stake in the outcome, or even understanding the outcome. Therefore one of the key aspects of the session will be discussing good practice for increasing public understanding around these initiatives.

As a result of the submissions, a collaborative review paper of initiatives and best practice for public engagement in language evolution may be produced for submission to the Journal of Language Evolution. If you’d like to contribute to this, but cannot contribute to the session, please email me on hannah.little@uwe.ac.uk

References

Cuskley, C. (2018). Alien symbols for alien language: iterated learning in a unique, novel signal space. In The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference (EVOLANGXII). Ed. by C. Cuskley et al. NCU Press. doi (Vol. 10, No. 12775, pp. 3991-1).

Kirby, S., Perman, T. & St John, R. (2017) Sing the Gloaming. Galloway Dark Sky Park, Scotland.

Little, H. (2018) “Babel on 5”. Babel: The Language Magazine, Issue 23. Page 42-44.

Morin, O., Winters, J., Müller, T. F., Morisseau, T., Etter, C., & Greenhill, S. J. (2018). What smartphone apps may contribute to language evolution research. Journal of Language Evolution, 3(2), 91-93.

Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2018). Systematicity, but not compositionality: Examining the emergence of linguistic structure in children and adults using iterated learning. Cognition, 181, 160-173.

Sayenga, K. (Producer). (2013). Through the Wormhole [Television series]. Revelations Entertainment.

Trench, B. (2008). Towards an analytical framework of science communication models. In Communicating science in social contexts (pp. 119-135). Springer, Dordrecht.

Verhoef, T., Roberts, S. G., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Emergence of systematic iconicity: transmission, interaction and analogy.


Four positions at the School of Collective Intelligence

Recently I was fortunate enough to go out to Morocco for the launch of a brand new school of Collective Intelligence:

If the launch was anything to go by, it’s going to be a pretty awesome to place to live and work, which brings me to four exciting opportunities for potential professors in data science, social computing, developmental psychology, and cognitive science:

The University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (Ben Guerir, Morocco) is recruiting one to three professors of cognitive sciences for October 2019 (at the earliest) […]

The recruited professors will divide their time between teaching (max. 3 courses per year), basic research, and applied research, in varying proportions depending on the position. Teaching will be in English or French.

Below are links to each of the positions (.docx) with more information.

Call for Papers 7th UK Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference

The University of Birmingham and the Department of English Language and Linguisticsare proud to host the 7th UK Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference from 28 – 30 July 2020 at the University of Birmingham.

The conference welcomes contributions from all fields of cognitive linguistics, as well as from related fields more broadly concerned with language and cognition. We aim to cover a wide range of research including, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Functional and usage-based approaches to language
  • Cognitive grammar and construction grammar
  • Cognitive/constructionist approaches to linguistic diversity and typology
  • Metaphor, metonymy, blends and other forms of figurative language
  • Cognitive semantics and frame semantics
  • Prototypes and categorization
  • Cognitive discourse analysis
  • Cognitive pragmatics
  • Cognitive semiotics
  • Cognitive approaches to historical linguistics
  • Language evolution
  • Language acquisition
  • Experimental semantics and pragmatics
  • Sign language research
  • Linguistic relativity
  • Language and space
  • Language and perception
  • Gesture and multimodality
  • Iconicity
  • Embodied cognition and situated cognition

Cognitive linguistics is by definition highly interdisciplinary, and so in addition to primarily linguistic research, we also invite language related submissions that are based on disciplines such as (cognitive and social) psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology, biology, artificial intelligence, and discourse and communication studies.

Talks will be 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions and discussion. There will also be a poster session.

The language of the conference is English.

Participants will be allowed to present at most one talk (as a single or first author) and one poster. However, there is no restriction on the number of co-authored papers. Upon submission, you will be asked to indicate if you intend the submission for a talk or a poster

Abstracts of no more than 500 words (excluding references) should be submitted using EasyChair. The link will be communicated in due course. 

The Call for Papers will be open from September 2019 until December 30, 2019

If you require a BSL interpreter, please get in contact with the organisers

All abstracts will be subject to double-blind peer review by an international scientific committee (and should therefore not contain author names).

More info on the website here: https://www.ukclc2020.com/

Post-doc position at the Mint lab (Max Planck for the Science of Human History)

A new post-doc position has opened up at the Minds and Traditions research group in Jena, Germany (deadline: September 10th 2019). There are two possible projects (see links for more detailed descriptions):

  • How to value cultural diversity cultural diversity (link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eqfd9hmekoq0nav/AABWk1LCd_xkUh4mSE-8BTKqa?dl=0&preview=MintCultDivPostodc.pdf)
  • Measuring the distinctiveness of graphic symbols (link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eqfd9hmekoq0nav/AABWk1LCd_xkUh4mSE-8BTKqa?dl=0&preview=MintSymbolsPostDoc.pdf)

Having been here for the past four years I can vouch that the Mint is a pretty awesome place to work at.

New positions (PhD and Postdoc) at VUB AI Lab

Bart de Boer at the VUB A.I. Lab is looking for a new PhD student to work on agent based models:

The PhD work will consist of building an agent-based simulation in which we can investigate emergence of behavior in a cognitively realistic setting. This means that the agents are not fully rational and that they show behavior similar to that of humans, and that interests of agents are not necessarily always aligned. The modeling will primarily focus on emergence of speech, but the simulation should be general enough that it can be easily adapted to other areas, such as traffic or economic interactions.

More details and how to apply here: https://ai.vub.ac.be/node/1688

He’s also recruiting a visiting post-doc:

The work should consist of agent-based simulation, or of experiments to investigate emergence of behavior in a cognitively realistic setting. This means that in a computer simulation, the agents are not fully rational and that they show behavior similar to that of humans, and that interests of agents are not necessarily always aligned. Experiments should focus on factors that are typical for human settings, but that are generally idealized away, such as altruism, conflicts of interests and other “non-rational” behaviors. We are most interested in modeling emergence of speech, but we welcome applications proposing other areas, such as traffic or economic interactions.

More details here: https://ai.vub.ac.be/node/1689