HENRY

I’ve been rather swamped this week, off to the NZ Phylogenetics Meeting in a few hours, and have to finish writing my talk. So - just a quick round-up of interesting links to keep you all occupied!

• Music reliably evokes common colors - a fascinating demo by cognitive daily.
• The great blog, Shared Symbolic Storage has a nice post on the influence of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s 1990 paper “Natural Language and Natural Selection”:
  

  The paper had a tremendous impact. In the open peer commentary, Jim Hurford (1990) hailed it as a “Liberation!” and saw it as the crucial step “Beyond the roadblock in linguistic evolution studies” most clearly represented by the 1866 ban on papers about language origin by the Linguistic Society of Paris and the rumored “Gentleman’s Agreement” with a similar notion by the Linguistic Society of America (Indeed, no paper about the topic appeared in the society’s journal, ‘Language’ until 2000 (Newmeyer 2003)), while Philip Lieberman (1990) (rightly) argued that he was making the same claim for years. To others, however, for example Richard Lewontin (Lewontin 1990: 740) and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Piattelli-Palmarini 1990: 754), language still appeared as “a system of such complexity that its selective value [still was] difficult to imagine” (Studdert-Kennedy/Knight/Hurford 1998: 3)

• A promising tool-use paper: Setting tool use within the context of animal construction behaviour:

  Tool use and manufacture are given prominence by their rarity and suggested relation to human lineage. Here, we question the view that tool use is rare because cognitive abilities act as an evolutionary constraint and suggest that tools are actually seldom very useful compared with anatomical adaptations. Furthermore, we argue that focussing on animal tool use primarily in terms of human evolution can lead to important insights regarding the ecological and cognitive abilities of non-human tool users being overlooked. We argue that such oversight can best be avoided by examining tools within the wider context of construction behaviours by animals (such as nest building and trap construction).

Posted on February 10th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill