Experts appear confused about language evolution

According to some famous folk:

Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved. We show that, to date, 1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity; 2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved; 3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon; 4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language’s origins unverifiable. Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.

This seems like a statement of confusion. The story of language evolution is primarily a story of cultural evolution. Languages evolved by adapting themselves to the human mind and human physiology. Expects should be looking primarily to memetics - not genetics - for their understanding of this topic. Human genes will have changed in response to the culture - but the usual story with cultural evolution is that the memes race on ahead and host genes are dragged along behind. We do, in fact, know quite a lot about how languages evolve - since we can see them doing it in real time, from pidgins through creoles to mature languages.

The paper starts out by saying:

In this paper, we are interested in biological as opposed to cultural evolution.

Alas, that's simply not a permissible move when studying language evolution. Memes and genes coevolve, with the memes leading and the genes following. If you don't start from there, you've dismissed all the correct solutions to this issue. Also, cultural evolution is biological. No wonder these experts appear to be confused: they are doing things all wrong.

H/T to Replicated Typo for this one.

Wilkins vs Tegmark and Dawkins

John Wilkins takes on Max Tegmark and Richard Dawkins - for claiming that their subject matter is informational - in his recent article Information is the new Aristotelianism.

As a fan and proponent informational views of heredity, I take exception to this sort of material.

Wilkins writes:

When physicists or philosophers say that we are living in the Matrix, or equivalent statements like the properties of atomic and subatomic objects are merely mathematical, they make a classical mistake, even worse than getting involved in a land war in Asia. They are mistaking the representation of a thing for the thing. The late medieval scholastics like Lombard knew this error and named it long before Saussure: the sign is not the thing signified. The word is not the world. If we are living in the Matrix, what does the Matrix live in? We know of no information processing system that is not, itself, physical.

I am sceptical. I don't think any physicist is making this mistake.

Wilkins also claims that Dawkins' informational views of heredity arose as a misunderstanding of a quote from Francis Crick. Really? This is wild speculation, IMO. I see little sign of supporting evidence.

Massimo Pigliucci picked Max Tegmark up on the same issue as Wilkins:

Could it be that theories like [Mathematical Universe Hypothesis] are actually based on a category mistake? Obviously, I’m not suggesting that people like Tegmark make the elementary mistake of confusing the normal meaning of words like “objects” and “properties,” or of “physical” and “mathematical.” But perhaps they are making precisely that mistake in a metaphysical sense?

I find this sort of thing tedious. It is pretty-much part of the physicist's remit that the universe is isomorphic to some mathematical object. Their job is to find out which one. Philosophers might worry that mathematics only exists inside intelligent agents - and worry that the physicists are implicitly invoking god. The physicists will just shrug at this, though: it's not what they meant - and who cares what the philosophers think anyway?

Merging and joining

One of the things which I associate with the symbiology revolution of the 1960s and 1980s is a much bigger emphasis on the significance of merging and joining in evolution. If you look at the modern synthesis of the 1930/40s, merging and joining were missing pieces of the puzzle back then.

Symbiology brought with it a flood of understanding of the significance of evolution via aggregation. Now we know that merging and joining are large and important aspects of organic and cultural evolution. Merging and joining are fundamental in sexual recombination and parasitism - both of which are extremely widespread in both the organic and cultural realms.

Merging and joining between species are not evolutionary phenomena which are confined to microorganisms. Current estimates are that around 8% of human DNA comes from viruses - rather than from our ancestors. This gives some indication of how significant between-species joining is in the evolution of multicellular eucaryotes.

The idea of splitting-only evolution still persists in some areas - like an hangover. Evolution is still sometimes characterised as "descent with modification". Or people say that evolution consists of "inheritance with variation and selection". These are splitting-only descriptions of evolution. The idea of a "tree of life" is common, but not very accurate. Life is web-like - much more so than most trees are.

It's true that splitting is more common than merging and joining. However, merging and joining are pretty significant. They are how living things combine their solutions to environmental problems.

The issue relates to cultural evolution. Krobner (1948) argued that organic evolution was tree-like while cultural evolution was web-like. He used the diagram associated with this post to illustrate his point.

However, we now know that both the organic and cultural realms exhibit web-like evolution. The picture of organic evolution as consisting of splitting without merging or joining has proved to be a mistaken one. Instead, merging and joining have turned out to be ubiquitous evolutionary phenomena - present in both realms.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2013) On Lewontin's Principles
• Tyler, Tim (2014) Reticulation in phylomemetics

Reticulation in phylomemetics

Practically every phylomemetic tree I have ever seen has illustrated branching - but not joining. However, it is well known that cultural evolution shows a considerable amount of joining. The result is part tree, part reticulated network - rather like the image associated with this post.

Should we be concerned that most phylomemetic trees paint an inaccurate picture of how cultural evolution operates? That most phylomemetic trees are inaccurate - through inheriting this systematic distortion?

On one hand, the fact that most evolution involves joining as well as splitting is an important issue which is poorly understood - and most phylomemetic trees reinforce the idea that evolution equals splitting - when they could be combating it. On the other hand, splitting-only trees are simpler than partially-reticulated ones - and this simplification is often a permissible one.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2011) Phylomemetics
• Tyler, Tim (2013) On Lewontin's Principles

The YouTube trends team on memes

One of YouTube's 2014 April fools jokes involved memes. Their associated article comes with the title:

Analysis Shows 2014 Could Be Huge Year for New Memes

I've attached the associated humorous video:

Seth Godin: How to get your ideas to spread

This is a Seth Godin video from 2007 titled: "How to get your ideas to spread".

Seth Godin wrote the well-known book "Unleashing the Ideavirus".

Epic phylomemetic tree of world religions

Impressive work:

Version 2.0.

Version 1.0.

For the full-size image I recommend that you click here for version 1 and here for version 2.

I've included both versions to illustrate the point that not only are the worlds' religons evolving, but even the diagram of the worlds' relgions is evolving.

I was pleased to see that the second version included some horizontal meme transfer - something that was largely missing fro the first version.

For the source, visit the Human Odyssey site on Facebook.

Thanks to Alexander Kruel for bringing this one to my attention.

For a (possibly) even more epic effort along similar lines, see the zoomable phylomemetic tree here.

Memetics on slashdot

I looked at what memetics-related stories have made slashdot in 2014. There's:

• Algorithm Distinguishes Memes from Ordinary Information

• First Study of the Evolution of Memes On Facebook

It's nice to see that memes are making it into the tech news once again. These articles - and the studies they refer to - seem likely to be a side effect of the 2011 internet meme explosion.

On Darwinian paranoia

Critics of memetics have characterised it as a type of "Darwinian paranoia".

Here's Peter Godfrey Smith:

How did the gene’s eye view acquire such apparent power as a foundational description? I conjecture that this is because the gene’s eye view of evolution is a special kind of agential narrative.

Two explanatory schemata can be distinguished, within the general agent-positing category, which have a special psychological potency. The first is a paternalist schema. Here we posit a large, benevolent agent, who intends that all is ultimately for the best. This category includes various gods, includes the Hegelian “World Spirit” in philosophy, and includes stronger forms of the “Gala” hypothesis, according to which the whole earth is a living organism. The second schema is a paranoid one. Now we posit a hidden collection of agents pursuing agendas that cross—cut or oppose our interests. Examples include demonic possession narratives, the sub-personal creatures of Freud's psychology (super-ego, ego, id}, and selfish genes and memes.

Like me, Godfrey Smith links memetics to demonology and posession. However, while I see this link as validating some aspects of early superstitious thought, Godfrey Smith plainly intends it as a criticism of memetics.

Darwinian paranoia is a conceptual waste of space. It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you. In the case of selfish genes and selfish memes there are plenty of cases where they are plainly out to get you. Should you give that AIDS virus the benefit of the doubt? What about that malaria protozoan? Or perhaps you would like to adopt some misunderstood smoking memes? Or maybe some memes from fast-food vendors, or memes from suicide bombers?

These "agents with agendas that cross—cut or oppose our interests" are not a paranoid fantasy. They are perfectly real - and perfectly hostile. It's public misinformation to brand negative reactions to them as "Darwinian paranoia". The associated threats are real, and people are perfectly correct to be concerned about them.

What's the opposite of paranoia? Foolhardiness. Humans are naturally on the paranoid end of the spectrum - and that's because natural selection built us that way. As Andy Grove put it "Only the paranoid survive". Foolhardiness is foolishness - and it's relatively rare in the world - for good survivalist reasons. My council is to avoid being foolhardy on this topic.

Gateway memes

It was once claimed that Marijuana was a "gateway drug".

Scientists seem to have mixed feelings about this claim - but there are certainly cases of a "gateway" effect in the world of drugs - where associations with drug dealers tend to make a range of illegal drugs more accessible.

Memes tend to pack-hunt - and it is quite common for acceptance of one meme to be followed by the assimilation of a range of associated memes. For example:

• If you accept the virgin birth meme, that tends to open you up to christian memes about resurrection, the afterlife, the garden of eden and original sin.

• Similarly, those who assimilate Linux memes are subsequently more likely to adopt memes related to vi, grep, gimp and git.

The term "gateway meme" can be used in cases where one meme commonly leads to exposure to a range of other associated memes.

The term works best when it's often the same meme that acts as a hook. For example, it is often Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" song that acts as a gateway to her back catalog.

The term also works best when the memes in question are undesirable or addictive. The association is with gateway drugs - which is a negative term used by opponents of drug use.

Cultural opportunistic infections

Until recently I had considered the obesity epidemic to be primarily a cultural epidemic - an epidemic of memes. Fast food companies spread their obesity-promoting memes throughout the population using advertising (which consists of more memes) - and so manipulate people into eating more of their food, thus making the companies richer and financing the production of more obesity-promoting memes.

Obesity isn't just down to memes. Genes in foods are also involved - and humans are breeding fatter, tastier and sweeter produce to better cater to the human palate.

However, it is becoming clear that another source of genes is also involved - genes inside microbes in our intestinal flora. A variety of microbes have been fingered as obesity-promoting strains. One famous one is Candida albicans.

This suggests the disturbing picture of obese individuals as folks whose bodies have been hijacked by malevolvent microbes and turned into production factories that leave a trail of infection behind them. The microbes eat their hosts' food for them and in return pump hunger-promoting substances into their bloodstream.

This more complex picture of a swarm of obesity-promoting memes and genes makes it harder to blame the obesity epidemic on memes. However, it creates an interesting and unusual situation - where humans are being manipulated both by a swarm of memes and by a swarm of genes inside microorganisms. Can scientists learn anything from this simultaneous attempt to manipulate the same trait by both memes and microbial genes?

It may provide an interesting opportunity to compare organic and cultural evolution. For example, consider the question of whether genes or memes adapt faster. Most previous attempts to study this question have compared memes with human genes. However human genes reproduce at a very slow rate - and this is obviously an unfair comparison and a walk-over for the memes. Comparing memes and gut bacteria seems like a fairer comparison between the organic and the cultural.

Another related topic is cultural opportunistic infections when a host is infected by one parasite, that sometimes opens the door to other parasites. A classic example is Hepatitis D - which only attacks those already infected with Hepatitis B. In general, it is common for an overworked immune system to divert resources from one area to concentrate on an existing attacking force - leaving some areas less well protected. Learened immune deficiency can result if invaders attack the immune system.

In the case of obesity, it is easy to imagine fast food memes promoting Candida infections. Probably hungry Candida sufferers are also more susceptible to fast food memes. Cross-domain opportunistic infections seem likely to be a real thing - but memeticists need to study this topic to better understand it.

Learned immune deficiency

One approach for parasites seeking to evade the host's immune system is to attack it and disable it. This approach is famously taken by the HIV virus - the virus which produces AIDS. However the result is typically a weakened immune system, and a collection of opportunistic infections that take advantage of the breaches in the host's defenses.

The nearest cultural equivalent to these types of parasite are probably beliefs that compromise critical thinking faculties. Probably the most famous of these is the belief that faith is a virtue. Faith - in the sense of belief without evidence - allows a variety of religious memes to thrive which would ordinarily be eliminated by critical faculties. Such memes benefit by association with the "faith" meme. However, the host of a "faith" infection is left with a weakened memetic immune system. This creates an environment in which a wide variety of other counter-factual beliefs can flourish.

In short, faith is the AIDS of the mind.

Gillian Crozier: Simulating Bird Songs To Study Cultural Evolution

Gillian Crozier at TEDx on cultural evolution. She explicitly discusses memes at 02:55.

Gillian starts out with big questions about cultural evolution, but then doesn't really offer answers to them - and closes with a "stay tuned" message.

Gillian contrasts the gene-meme analogy, the meme-parasite analogy and the idea that cultural traits are analogous to adaptations - saying that maybe one of these analogies will prove more fruitful than the others, or maybe they'll all turn out to be be wrong. I think the correct answer is that all of them are right: memes are cultural genes; some of those cultural genes are in parasites (while others are in cultural mutualists or cultural commensals), and many cultural traits are indeed cultural adaptations.

While some workers still seem to have some confusion associated with the gene-meme analogy, I don't see any sensible way of looking at cultural evolution that answers these questions differently. Workers should surely treat these as basic facts and move on.

Joint phenotypes

Joint phenotypes arise when multple individuals contribute to a trait. For example, an oak apple (see photograph on right) is the joint phenotype of an oak tree and a gall wasp. Similarly, a placenta as the joint phenotype of a mother and their offspring. The idea of a joint phenotype is an important concept in symbiology.

The idea of a joint phenotype is an important one in human cultural evolution - where most traits are phenotypes of both particular human hosts and cultural creatures.

For example, when someone sings "happy birthday to you" the resulting performance is the produce of both host genes and song memes.

A recent paper by David Queller discusses the idea of joint phenotypes observing that most cases of conflict between organisms over how local regions of space should be organized can be phrased in terms of relative contributions to joint phenotypes.

With joint phenotypes it is often possible to quantify the contribution of each host by asking what proportion of the observed variation in the trait each is responsible for. Of course to do this, you have to be able to measure the trait in question, and often there are multiple ways of doing this that can potentially provide different results. For example, in the case of the "happy birthday to you" song, the average pitch of the notes in the song is likely be mostly the product of host genes, while the relative pitch of each consecutive pair of notes is mostly the product of song memes.

Nonetheless, the idea of measuring joint phenotypes in this way represents a powerful tool for students of cultural evolution seeking to quantify the relative influences of genes and memes on particular traits.

Memetic metamorphosis

In the organic realm some creatures undergo radical metamorphosis during their own lifetimes. Probably the most famous example is the way that caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Tadpoles turning into frogs represents another example of animal metamorphosis.

In the cultural realm we also see some extreme transformations that deserve to be referred to as cases of "metamorphosis". In particular memes typically change the substrate in which their genetic material resides during their lifecycle. That's one of the most extreme transformations an organism can undergo. Many memes spend part of their time inside human brains, and part of their time in artifacts. Others divide their time between the human brain and sound waves.

There are transformations in the organic realm that involve shifting heritable information between different media. Information in DNA is copied into RNA, and then into proteins. Sometimes, the RNA themselves are copied - and even patterns in proteins are sometimes copied - in certain types of prion. However these transformations only rarely go around in a circle and wind up back where they started - due to the central dogma of molecular biology.

In cultural evolution, the central dogma of molecular biology does not apply, and radical transformations of genetic information between media are the norm.

Addictive memes

Memes - on average - have historically been good for their human hosts.

We can be fairly sure of that because of the evidence that the capacity for cultural transmission has a genetic basis.

However, memetics originally distinguished itself as a theory of cultural evolution by proposing that bad memes are out there as well - and that we should be cautious in dealing with them.

On type of meme that is often bad are addictive memes. Addictions aren't always negative - but they often are.

There's a recent book that deals with engineering addictive memes - Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products.

Enginnering addiction illustrates the dark side of memetics - rather like propaganda, indoctrination and brainwashing.

While a few work on engineering addiction we must all deal with the consequences of their work. We need strong and selective memetic immune systems. As part of this, resisting memetic addictions is a topic we should all be studying.

Memes in machine intelligence

For decades, machine intelligence researchers have considered the human brain to be their target - the thing whose functionality they need to inexpensively duplicate in order to automate much human labour and compete with human beings in the marketplace.

This is a reasonable perspective - but individual human brains are less significant today than they once were. The competition for machines these days mostly consists of networks of humans - and they are competing with them using networks of machines.

This means that cultural evolution is intimately relevant to the work associated with constructing machine intelligence. It is really cumulative cultural evolution which researchers are trying to produce in machines.

This perspective typically leads to a shift of emphasis. Rather than attempting to copy human intelligence, engineers should consider trying to copy human social skills. Today, networks of social machines are proving very useful - even though the individual machines are not very smart - by comparison with the brain of an adult human.

It looks as though ape imitation is very cognitively demanding - requiring the complex ability to put yourself in another person's shoes. However, with machines, transmission of ideas from one machine to another can be done without advanced cognitive faculties - for example by directly copying the relevant area of the machine's brain. It may be easier to produce social machines than smart machines. In other words, a memetics-based approach could well represent a short-cut to producing intelligent networks.

It is sometimes useful to consider the brain as a social network - with the neurons as individual agents and axons and dendrites as their communications network. It's a great proof of the concept that you can make a lot of stupid agents into a larger smart agent - if you have a social network with the correct topology and rules.

This link between cultural evolution and machine intelligence part of why the study of cultural evolution is so important. Not only does cultural evolution underpin most modern human evolution, it is also one of the key subjects for constructing and understanding the intelligent, social machines which will be so important to our future.

Related posts:

• Tyler, Tim (2014) Collective intelligence meets universal Darwinism
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Complexity through socialization
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Memetic algorithms
• Tyler, Tim (2013) Memetic engineering

Attraction, repulsion, and the red queen of genes

At the level of individual organisms, mutual attraction, mutual repulsion and the type of "one-sided" attraction - where A is attracted to B but B is repelled from A - are familiar phenomena.

This post is about these kinds of attraction and repulsion between pairs of genes at a genetic level.

• Mutual attraction: it has long been appreciated by geneticists that interdependent traits have some tendency to cluster together on chromosomes. The reason for this seems fairly obvious. If:
  • Two traits are functionally interdependent;
  • They are coded for by separate genes;
  • The genes are on the same chromosome;
  • The associated organism is sexual;
  • Neither gene is close to fixation;
  ...then mutations that reduce the distance between them - and so increase their linkage - will be selectively favoured. This reduces the chance of the genes being divided during meiosis.

• Mutual repulsion: this is likely to happen when two genes benefit from not being linked together. This might happen if the genes code for traits involved in disease resistance - for example. There are cases where you want your offspring to have a different genotype from you - in order to avoid parasites traveling from parent to child. If you have two genes that code for a blood-group trait, you probably want to give your offspring different blood group from yourself - and minimizing linkage does that. Repulsion is the opposite of attraction.

• Mutual indifference: this is a "dustbin" category, representing the absence of attraction and repulsion.

Attraction, repulsion and indifference need not be mutual. In parasite-host relationships the parasite is attracted to the host, but the host expressed repulsion towards the parasite. The same dynamics apply to genes - in the case of selfish genetic elements. These are like parasites that are part of their host's genome. They will be attracted to - and seek linkage with - useful host genes. However the useful host genes would prefer not to be linked to the selfish genes. This produces red-queen like dynamics at the genetic level - where parasitic selfish genes chase host genes around.

Motion histories can't be used to conclusively infer attraction. For example, if A migrates towards B, it may not be because A and B are attracted, but rather because both are attracted to C.

These kinds of effect also apply to cultural phenomena. For example, hammer memes tend to be attracted to nail memes - whereas Catholic and Islamic memes tend to repel each other.