Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell - The Importance of Communication and Culture to the African Elephant
2007-04-16 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell: Stanford University Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck SurgeryThe structure of African elephant society is primarily matriarchal in nature, where dominant female elephants make decisions for the herd as a whole with regard to safety, movements, resource choices and affiliations. Culture is often influenced by local environmental and social pressures, as well as the character of individual herd members. Aspects of elephant society that contribute to survival will be discussed in the context of mechanisms that elephants employ to communicate over long distances. In addition, new findings about elephant bull society will be reviewed, highlighting the importance of bonding and mentoring adolescent delinquent males.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/OConnellRodwell_4.16.07.pdf

Joan Silk - Sex Ratio: Local Resource Competition and Local Resource Enhancement
2007-04-23 00:00
Joan Silk: UCLA Department of Anthropology

Nicola S. Clayton - Memories of Tomorrow: Do Animals Remember the Past and Plan for the Future?
2007-04-25 00:00
Nicola S. Clayton: University of Cambridge Department of Experimental PsychologyAccording to the mental time travel hypothesis only humans can mentally dissociate themselves from the present, travelling backwards in time to recollect specific past events about what happened where and when (episodic memory) and travelling forwards in time to anticipate future needs (future planning). Studies on the behaviour of food-caching western scrub-jays question this assumption. In terms of retrospective cognition, these birds remember the ‘what, where and when’ of specific past caching episodes, they keep track of how long ago they cached different types of perishable foods that decay at different rates, and also remember whether another individual was present at the time of caching, and if so, which bird was watching when. Recent work demonstrates that the jays also make provision for a future need, caching more food in places in which they will not be given breakfast the next morning than in places where they will be receive breakfast the next morning even though there is plenty of food available to them when they cache the food. Taken together these results challenge the mental time travel hypothesis by showing that some elements of both retrospective and prospective mental time travel appear not to be uniquely human.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Clayton_4.25.07a.pdf

James Roney - Preliminary data testing an alternative explanation for menstrual phase effects on women's mate preferences
2007-04-30 00:00
James Roney: UC Santa Barbara Department of PsychologyMenstrual cycle shifts in women’s mate preferences have generally been interpreted as products of adaptations designed to alter behavior during the fertile window relative to other times in the cycle. I will discuss an alternative theory that posits that such shifts may be produced by mechanisms designed to use ovarian hormone concentrations to calibrate behaviors across different menstrual cycles. I will then present preliminary data showing that women’s estradiol concentrations correlate positively with their preferences for facial cues of men’s testosterone concentrations, and that this relationship holds during times of the cycle that are outside the fertile window. These data do not argue definitively for either position but do at least suggest the plausibility of the between-cycle alternative explanation.

Janet Sinsheimer - Family Feuds: Maternal-Fetal Genotype Incompatibility
2007-05-07 00:00
Janet Sinsheimer: UCLA Departments of Human Genetics, Biomathematics and BiostatisticsBiological mechanisms involving a combination of genetic and environmental factors have been hypothesized to explain susceptibility to complex familial
disease. I will present our efforts to detect interactions between mother’s and child’s genes that may create adverse prenatal environments and increase susceptibility to diseases such as schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Sinsheimer_5.7.07a.pdf

Carl Lipo - Resolution of the Cultural Phylogenies of Monumental Statues on Easter Island
2007-05-14 00:00
Carl Lipo: CSU Long Beach Department of AnthropologyThe monumental statues (moai) of Easter Island represent substantial investment in cultural elaboration by the prehistoric islanders. Constructing explanations of these features requires generating measurements of temporal and spatial statue variability. Using a method based in cultural transmission, cladistics and occurrence seriation I present the results of analysis that potentially reflects a phylogeny of the monumental statues. This work enables the evaluation of models of statue change in which diversity of styles and materials produces patterns of lineages and the general form of an explanatory model for the evolution of culture elaboration on this famous island.

Stacey Rucas - Allies and Rivals: The Complex world of women's social dynamics among the Tsimane of Bolivia
2007-05-21 00:00
Stacey Rucas: California Polytechnic State University Department of Social SciencesThis research examines the complexity of women’s social behaviors with other women through various modes of evolutionary inquiry and methods. Results indicate that women engage in alternating forms of competitive and cooperative behaviors across the lifecourse in their quest for reproductively limiting resources. Data presented will highlight several avenues of research conducted with the Tsimane that attempt to identify contested resources, track their exchanges, and understand the use of social aggression to secure status and compete (or cooperate) for friends, mates and food within female social networks.

Alison Gopnik - Causal maps and Bayes nets: Causal inference and theory formation in children, scientists and computers
2007-06-04 00:00
Alison Gopnik: UC Berkeley Department of PsychologyHow do we accurately infer the causal structure of the world around us? Thirty years of developmental research has shown that human children form and revise intuitive theories of everyday physics, biology and psychology. These theories are similar to the formal theories of science. Recent work in philosophy of science, computer science and statistics has developed formal computational models of this kind of theory formation, particularly in the framework of causal graphical models or Bayes nets. Iâ€™ll argue that we can think of intuitive theories as causal maps, analogous to the spatial maps animals use in navigation. These maps allow us to consider counterfactual alternatives, design complex plans and act to change our environments, and they may be uniquely human. I will present evidence showing that preschool children construct such maps in ways that accord with the Bayes net formalism.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Gopnik_4.6.07.pdf

Hanna Kokko - Love and hatred in a world of feedback
2007-08-07 00:00
Hanna Kokko: University of Helsinki Department of Biological and Environmental SciencesI will present results on both `loveÂ´ (sexual selection) and `hatredÂ´ (territorial conflict). In both cases I will investigate the role of `feedbackÂ´, that is, ask the question how strongly individual behaviour influences population dynamics, which then feeds back to influence what is adaptive at the individual level. We know that selection does not favour what is good for a group (or species), but do we ask often enough how `badÂ´ it can get? For example, are sexually selected species expected to be particularly prone to extinction? And, does territoriality in the Seychelles magpie robin (that only this year got its status lifted from critically endangered to endangered) increase its vulnerability to environmental change?http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Kokko_1.29.07.pdf

Mark Kleiman - Maximizing cooperation while minimizing punishment
2007-10-01 00:00
Mark Kleiman: UCLA Department of Public PolicyThe threat of punishment can facilitate cooperation by discouraging defection and aggression. Because punishment is scarce, costly, and painful, optimal enforcement strategies will minimize the amount of actual punishment required to effectuate deterrence. If potential offenders are deterrable, increasing the conditional probability of punishment (given violation) can reduce the amount of punishment actually inflicted, by “tipping” a situation from its high-violation equilibrium to its low-violation equilibrium. Compared to random or “equal opportunity” enforcement, dynamically concentrated sanctions can reduce the punishment level necessary to tip the system.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/kleimanpaper.doc

Mary Towner - Investigating cultural macroevolution and trait transmission in the Western North American Indian database
2007-10-08 00:00
Mary Towner: UC Davis Department of AnthropologyCultural traits are distributed across human societies in a patterned way. Study of the mechanisms whereby
cultural traits persist and change over time is key to understanding human cultural diversity. For more than a
century, a central question has engaged anthropologists interested in the study of cultural trait variationâ€”what
is the source of cultural variation? More precisely, are cultural traits transmitted primarily from ancestral to
descendant populations (through vertical transmission or inheritance) or between contemporary, typically
neighboring, populations (through horizontal transmission or diffusion), or do they emerge as independent
innovations? In addition, do traits in different domains, such as kinship and family, subsistence and
settlement, or material culture, show different transmission patterns? Addressing such questions has proven
to be methodologically challenging. Drawing on a research collaboration with Dr. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder
and Dr. Mark N. Grote, I will show how autologistic models can overcome some of the limitations of previous
approaches by placing the different transmission mechanisms on a more equal analytical footing. These
models can explicitly incorporate the structural links between societies, with geographical proximity being
used as a proxy for horizontal transmission, and linguistic classification being used as a proxy for vertical
transmission. I illustrate the method with an application to cross-cultural data from the Western North
American Indian database, a sample of 172 societies for which detailed ethnographic surveys were
conducted in the early 20th century. Alternative autologistic models are estimated through MCMC simulations
and then compared based on Akaike Information Criterion. The results suggest that the best models will
almost always incorporate both vertical and horizontal processes.

Gian Gonzaga - Is there an "I" in "We"?
2007-10-15 00:00
Gian Gonzaga: eHarmony.comRelationships are often studied through one of two questions. How does the relationship benefit the individual and/or how does the relationship benefit the dyad? This talk will address the challenges of balancing what is good for me, what is good for my partner, and what is good for the relationship. It will then review a series of studies that shows that self-interest is sometimes best served by promoting the success of the relationship, even at the momentary expense of the self.

Andrew Shaner - Age at onset of schizophrenia: Evidence of a latitudinal gradient
2007-10-22 00:00
Andrew Shaner: UCLA VA HospitalVariation in the age at onset of a multifactorial disease often reflects variation in cause. In this talk, I show a linear latitudinal gradient in the mean age at onset of schizophrenia in 13 northern-hemisphere cities, ranging from 25 years old in Cali, Columbia (at 4 degrees north) to 35 years old in Moscow, Russia (at 56 degrees north). This striking association has not been previously reported. I consider several explanations, including the effects of pathogen stress, natural selection, sexual selection, migration, life-history profiles, or some combination of these factors, and I propose a test of competing causal hypotheses.http://bec.ucla.edu/papers/Shaner07.pdf

Rob Kurzban - Morality is (at least) a Three-Player Game
2007-10-29 00:00
Rob Kurzban: Penn PsychologySubstantial debate remains about the ultimate and proximate explanations for why people choose to punish
third parties, individuals involved in interactions that have had and will have no direct effect on the punisher.
Here, one particular type of third-party punishment is explored, moralistic punishment, enduring a cost to inflict
costs on an individual who has violated a perceived moral norm. Results from a series of experiments
suggest that 1) third-party punishment, at least in these cases, is considerably less frequent and smaller in
magnitude than would be expected from existing models, 2) knowing that one will be observed in meting out
moralistic punishment increases individualsâ€™ willingness to do so, and 3) inducing emotions such as
empathy has systematic effects on both moralistic punishment and compensating victims of moral wrongs.
These findings are discussed in the context of possible evolved functions of moral psychology, focusing on
the centrality of moralistic punishment for understanding the nature of the moral game being played.

Kerri Johnson - Gender Counts: Why perceptions of masculinity and femininity are as important as the cues that convey them
2007-11-05 00:00
Kerri Johnson: UCLA Communication StudiesIn the 1950s, Doris Troy famously sang, â€œJust one look…thatâ€™s all it took,â€ implying that attraction can begin
with little more than a glance. Contemporary research in person construal generally corroborates this
observation, but debate continues about precisely how physical cues come to convey attractiveness. One
unresolved question centers on whether objective indices of masculinity and femininity predict perceived
attractiveness. Attempts to answer this question have been frustrated by contradictory results. In this talk, I
will argue that masculinity and femininity are better defined as subjective judgments of the gender-typicality of
a trait, not as objective indices of sexual dimorphism. I will present data suggesting that once sex
categorization has occurred, sexually dimorphic traits are interpreted to be either masculine or feminine, the
typicality of which strongly predicts perceptions of attractiveness. Masculine men and feminine women are
perceived as attractive; feminine men and masculine women are not. This perspective has several important
implications. First, this perspective implies that the accuracy or error in the cognitive representations of sexual
dimorphism will systematically skew gender judgments and thereby affect perceived attractiveness. At times,
this may result in preferences that appear quite extreme by objective standards. At other times, this may even
yield preferences for traits that are gender atypical by objective standards. Second, this perspective
acknowledges the importance of cultural and ecological factors as moderators of the relation between cues
and attractiveness. Perceptions of masculinity/femininity are likely to vary systematically with culture and
ecology, and perceived attractiveness should vary accordingly. In sum, my talk will describe how perceptions
of masculinity and femininity provide the evaluative interpretation of biologically relevant cues – engendering
rapid and ready judgments of attractiveness from â€œjust one look.â€http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Johnson&Tassinary(2007).pdf

Richard Lippa - Sex Differences in Sexuality, Personality, and Cognitive Abilities across 53 Nations: Probing Evolutionary and Sociocultural Explanations
2007-11-19 00:00
Richard Lippa: Cal State University, Fullerton Department of PsychologyBBC data from 53 nations and from more than 200,000 participants provide new insights into sex differences
in: (1) sexual traits (e.g., sex drive and sociosexuality), (2) mate preferences (e.g., the value assigned to
physical attractiveness, intelligence, honesty in a mate), (3) personality traits (e.g., extraversion,
agreeableness, neuroticism, people-versus-thing orientation), and (4) cognitive abilities (mental rotation
ability, line angle judgment ability). Predictions that follow from social role theoryâ€”e.g., that sex differences
will be larger in countries with stronger gender rolesâ€”received little support in the BBC data. In contrast,
predictions that follow from evolutionary theoriesâ€”e.g., that there will be consistent sex differences across
nations, which do not covary with nationsâ€™ levels of gender equalityâ€”received support for many of the
assessed sex differences. Results for sociosexuality (sex differences were larger in patriarchal than in
gender-egalitarian nations, and womenâ€™s sociosexuality varied more across nations than menâ€™s did) were
consistent with a hybrid modelâ€”that cultural factors influence womenâ€™s sociosexuality more than menâ€™s and
are superimposed on biologically-based sex differences. Results for sex differences in trait SDs (e.g., across
nations, women varied more than men did in sex drive and extraversion; men varied more than women did in
agreeableness and mental rotation scores) also tended to support biological theories over social structural
theories, except in the case of sociosexuality, where results were consistent with a hybrid model that
assumed cultural influences superimposed on biological predispositions: for sociosexuality, men were more
variable than women in patriarchal countries, but the reverse was true in gender-egalitarian countries.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Lippa_sex_drive_and_sociosexuality_UCLA%5B1%5D.doc

Russ Poldrack - How, and what, can neuroimaging tell us about the mind?
2007-11-26 00:00
Russ Poldrack: UCLA PsychologyIt has become common practice amongst neuroimaging researchers to infer the presence of mental
processes from activation in particular parts of the brain. The validity of this practice, which I refer to as
“reverse inference”, depends upon how selectively specific brain regions are associated with specific mental
processes. I will present evidence suggesting that these associations are often weak, providing little
evidence in favor of the reverse inference. I will also discuss general strategies by which one can use
neuroimaging to inform theories of mental processes.

Michael Arbib - New Sign Languages and Language Evolution
2007-12-03 00:00
Michael Arbib: USC NeuroscienceHuman language is far more than speech and its derivatives such as writing. Human signed languages like
American Sign Language are fully expressive human languages, and speakers normally accompany their
speech with facial and manual gestures. Thus any theory of language evolution must address these integral
roles that manual signs and gestures play today. What are the capabilities of the human brain that make it
possible for humans to learn language while other creatures can not? How much structure must the social
environment offer a child to acquire language? We probe these questions by studying two sign languages of
recent vintage. Nicaraguan Sign anguage developed in just 25 years while Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
developed over at most 70 years, and are still developing. We examine the emergence and dynamics of these
languages to advance discussion of what supports society offered to allow these communities to exploit the
human brainâ€™s readiness for language in novel ways.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/ArbibPaper.doc

Roger Sullivan - Revealing the paradox of drug reward in human evolution
2008-01-07 00:00
Roger Sullivan: CSU Sacramento, Anthropology, and UC Davis School of Medicine,
Psychiatry and Behavioral SciencesNeurobiological models of drug abuse propose that drug use is initiated and maintained by
rewarding feedback mechanisms. However, most commonly used drugs are plant neurotoxins
that evolved to punish, not reward, consumption by animal herbivores. Reward models therefore
implicitly assume an evolutionary mismatch between recent drug-profligate environments
and a relatively drug-free past in which a reward center, incidentally vulnerable to neurotoxins,
could evolve. In contrast, emerging insights from plant evolutionary ecology and the genetics
of hepatic enzymes, particularly cytochrome P450, indicate that animal and hominid taxa have
been exposed to plant toxins throughout their evolution. Specifically, evidence of conserved
function, stabilizing selection, and population-specific selection of human cytochrome P450
genes indicate recent evolutionary exposure to plant toxins, including those that affect animal
nervous systems. Thus, the human propensity to seek out and consume plant neurotoxins
is a paradox with far-reaching implications for current drug-reward theory. We sketch some
potential resolutions of the paradox, including the possibility that humans may have evolved
to counter-exploit plant neurotoxins. Resolving the paradox of drug reward will require a
synthesis of ecological and neurobiological perspectives of drug seeking and use.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Sullivan.pdf

Afzal Upal - Do we have religion because evolution favors opportunistic learners?
2008-01-14 00:00
Afzal Upal: OccidentalCognitive anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer have argued that religious concepts are minimally
counterintuitive and that this gives them mnemic advantages. I will ague that people have the memory
architecture that results in such concepts being more memorable because it makes them better learners
which gives them an evolutionary edge over their competitors. I will show how such benefits emerge in the
real-time processing of comprehending narratives such as folk tales. This model suggests that memorability
is not an inherent property of a concept as Boyer appears to assume; rather it is a property of the concept, the
context in which the concept is presented, and the background knowledge that the comprehendor possesses
about the concept. The model predicts how memorability of a concept should change if the context containing
the concept were changed. I will also present the results of experiments carried out to test these predictions.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Upal_Paper.pdf

Mark Collard - Risk and technological innovation in small-scale societies
2008-01-28 00:00
Mark Collard: Simon Fraser University Archaeology

Aaron Blaisdell - Intervention and Causal Inferences in Rats
2008-02-04 00:00
Aaron Blaisdell: UCLA Psychology and Brain Research InstituteI report a series of experiments showing that rats appear to make causal inferences in a basic task that taps
into core features of causal reasoning. (1) They derived predictions of the outcomes of interventions after
passive observational learning of different kinds of causal models. After learning through Pavlovian
observation that Event A was a common cause of Events X and Food (XÃŸAÃ Food), rats predicted Food when
presented with Event X as a cue but discounted the alternative cause A when they generated X by means of a
lever press. (2) Rats showed evidence of reality monitoring. After learning an XÃ AÃ Food causal chain where
X was a tone and A was a light, when tested on X rats expected A to occur. But when A did not occur during
testing, rats did not expect food. By hiding the light during testing on X, however, rats showed no disruption of
food expectancy, suggesting that rats understood that A was unobservable. (3) Finally, we present evidence
that rats treated their actions as special in causal learning. Discounting of a previous cause was only
observed with interventions but not with other observable events; rats were capable of flexibly switching
between observational and interventional predictions; and discounting occurred on the very first test trial.
These results confirm causal-model theory but refute associative theories.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Blaisdell_Paper.pdf

Steve Gangestad - Human Estrus: Function and Phylogeny
2008-02-11 00:00
Steve Gangestad: University of New Mexico PsychologyBroad, ambitious conceptualizations of the evolution of human sexuality (and accompanying unique social,
developmental, and intellectual adaptations) offered by anthropologists and biologists over the last half
century have been, almost universally, rooted in a foundational assumption: That women evolutionarily â€œlostâ€
estrusâ€”a distinct fertile-phase sexualityâ€”and instead evolved â€œcontinuousâ€ sexuality across the reproductive
cycle, which functioned to â€œconcealâ€ ovulation. Recent research suggests that this assumption is wrong;
women clearly do exhibit a distinct â€œfertile-phaseâ€ sexuality. This talk addresses a number of questions about
the conceptual significance and theoretical meaning of these recent findings: (a) Is this fertile phase sexuality
appropriately referred to as human â€œestrus,â€ and, if so, on what basis?; (b) What selection pressures shaped
fertile-phase sexuality; was it shaped through direct selection or through indirect selection (i.e., as
byproduct)?; (c) Recent evidence also suggests that men respond differently to women as a function of their
phase (typically, being more attracted to women in their fertile phases than women in their luteal phases); is
womenâ€™s fertility in fact not concealed? A general reinterpretation of womenâ€™s purported â€œlost estrus,â€
continuous sexuality, and concealment of fertility will be offered. The theme that a proper understanding of
human sexuality requires a broader comparative perspective than is often brought to bear in evolutionary
psychology is stressed.

John Mitani - Cooperation in wild chimpanzees
2008-02-25 00:00
John Mitani: University of Michigan Anthropology

Jelmer Eerkens - Material culture evolution: an archaeological perspective on forces and rates of change
2008-03-03 00:00
Jelmer Eerkens: UC Davis AnthropologyLaboratory experiments and ethnographic studies show that many aspects of human culture, particularly
information, can change quickly in the course of transmission. The archaeological record indicates much
more conservative rates of change, at least for material culture. Is there common theoretical ground between
the micro- and macro- scales? This paper considers some of the factors that affect culture change and the
rate at which material culture, and variation therein, might change in the archaeological record. As well, it
explores the micro-macro perspectives.

Becky Frank - The role of contingent reciprocity and market exchange in the lives of female olive baboons
2008-03-10 00:00
Becky Frank: UCLA AnthropologyThe goal of this project was to examine the dynamics of exchange among female baboons and test
predictions derived from a biological market model of grooming. Evolutionary theory predicts that cooperation
among nonkin will be limited to reciprocating partners who monitor the balance of trade within their
relationships in order to prevent cheating. But primates may be cognitively limited to negotiating balanced
reciprocity over very short time scales. If so, then trade might be regulated in a biological market, where
supply and demand determines the value of an exchange, and individuals choose to trade with the partner
offering the highest value. Individuals maximize their immediate benefits without having to monitor the
balance of their exchanges over time. When demand for a partner or commodity is greater than the supply,
individuals compete for access to the preferred partner by raising the price they are willing to pay. Applied to
primate grooming exchanges, a market model predicts that females will balance the amount of grooming they
trade within single bouts when all partners offer similar value. In some cases, partners can offer other
valuable benefits and will trade those with who ever offers the most grooming in return. Thus, females are
predicted to trade grooming for access to resources when feeding competition is elevated and rank
differences translate to differential foraging success. Females are also predicted to trade grooming with
mothers of young infants in exchange for access to the infant. I tested these predictions in a group of 16 adult
female olive baboons in Chololo, Kenya. In this troop, females only reciprocated within the same grooming
bout 34% of the time and balanced their grooming more evenly over many bouts than within single bouts.
Non-mothers preferentially groomed mothers of young infants, but did not compete for access to infants by
raising their grooming offers to mothers as the availability of infants declined. When feeding conflict within
dyads was high, females provided additional grooming to their higher ranking partners, but they do not spend
more time co-feeding in return. These results suggest that female baboons are capable of monitoring their
exchanges over time and can trade across some currencies, but it is not clear that market pricing explains the
observed patterning of exchange.

Carel van Schaik - Dominance styles and male-male coalitions among nonhuman primates and humans
2008-03-31 00:00
Carel van Schaik: Anthropological Institute & Museum, University of ZurichNaturalistic data on nonhuman primates show that the degree of despotism among males in primate groups
is predicted by the degree to which mating access to females can be monopolized. Degree of despotism
should affect other aspects of male behavioral strategies, such as how long top-dominantsâ€™ tenure is, how
top-dominance is achieved and which groups are targeted for dispersal, as well as the feasibility and
profitability of different kinds of male-male coalitions. Primate data support these predictions. This primate
model is then applied to human foragers. A fundamental difference is caused by the presence of weaponry.
When opportunities for despotism increase, violent coalitionary takeovers of top dominance and the formation
of elites emerge.

Sam Bowles - The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War
2008-04-07 00:00
Sam Bowles: Santa Fe InstituteAltruism — benefiting fellow group members at a cost to oneself — and parochialism â€“ hostility toward
individuals not of oneâ€™s own ethnic, racial or other group — are common human behaviors. The intersection of
the two â€“ which we term parochial altruism — is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because altruistic or
parochial behavior reduces ones payoffs by comparison to what one would gain by eschewing these
behaviors. But parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted inter-group hostilities and the
combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Our game-theoretic
analysis and agent-based simulations show that under conditions likely to have been experienced by late
Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism is viable singly, but by promoting
group conflict, they could have evolved jointly. http://www.bec.ucla.edu/Bowles.pdf

Carol Padden & Mark Aronoff - Embodied cognition in an emerging language: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
2008-04-14 00:00
Carol Padden & Mark Aronoff: UCSD, Stonybrook UWe report here on work we have carried out with colleagues Wendy Sandler and Irit Meir on an emerging sign
language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). ABSL developed de novo in a small closed community
of Bedouins which is now in its third generation of signers. In this talk, we show how a new human language
is assembled over a relatively short period of time. In this language, the body emerges as a primary signifier,
figuring prominently in the form of verbs, particularly in grammatical notion of subject. Broadly, we find that the
iconicity of the body and space around the body interacts with emerging grammatical structures, including
word order and morphology, resulting in a complex story about the deployment of physical, human resources
in the service of natural language grammars.

Gary Marcus - Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
2008-04-21 00:00
Gary Marcus: NYU PsychologyIn fields ranging from reasoning to linguistics, the idea of humans as perfect, rational, optimal creatures is
making a comeback â€“ but should it be? Hamletâ€™s musings that the mind was â€œnoble in reason …infinite in
facultyâ€ have their counterparts in recent scholarly claims that the mind consists of an â€œaccumulation of
superlatively well- engineered designsâ€ shaped by the process of natural selection (Tooby and Cosmides,
1995), and the 2006 suggestions of Bayesian cognitive scientists Chater, Tenenbaum and Yuille that â€œit
seems increasingly plausible that human cognition may be explicable in rational probabilistic terms and that,
in core domains, human cognition approaches an optimal level of performanceâ€, as well as in Chomskyâ€™s
recent suggestions that language is close â€œto what some super-engineer would construct, given the
conditions that the language faculty must satisfyâ€.
In this talk, I will I argue that this resurgent enthusiasm for rationality is misplaced, for three reasons. First, I
will suggest that recent empirical arguments in favor of human rationality rest on a fallacy of composition,
implicitly but mistakenly assuming that evidence of rationality in some (carefully analyzed) aspects of cognition
entails that the broader whole (i.e. the human mind in toto) is rational. In fact, establishing that some particular
aspect of cognition is optimal (or perfect, or near optimal) is not tantamount to showing that the system is a
whole is; current enthusiasm for optimality overlooks the possibility that the mind might be suboptimal even if
some (or even many) of the components of cognition have been optimized. Second, I will argue that there is
considerable empirical evidence (most well-known, but rarely given due attention in the neo-Rationalist
literature) that militates against any strong claim of human cognitive perfection. Finally, I will argue that the
assumption that evolution tends creatures towards rationality or â€œsuperlative adaptationâ€ is itself theoretically
suspect, and ought to be considerably tempered by recognition of what Stephen Jay Gould called â€œremnants of
historyâ€, or what might be termed evolutionary inertia.
I will close by suggesting that mind might be better seen as what engineers call a kluge: clumsy and
inelegant, yet remarkably effective.
