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Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species | john hawks weblog - 0 views

  • the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities.
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
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  • The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
  • when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
  • innate features of the brain
  • grammatical organization
  • symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
  • But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
  • What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
  • Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
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    Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
Rudy Garns

Evolution of Adaptive Behaviour in Robots by Means of Darwinian Selection - 0 views

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    These examples of experimental evolution with robots verify the power of evolution by mutation, recombination, and natural selection. In all cases, robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behaviour because their genomes had random values. However, a few hundreds of generations of random mutations and selective reproduction were sufficient to promote the evolution of efficient behaviours in a wide range of environmental conditions. The ability of robots to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate is particularly remarkable given that they had deliberately simple genotypes directly mapped into the connection weights of neural networks comprising only a few dozen neurons. PLoS Biology
Rudy Garns

Steven Pinker: Evolution of the Mind (PBS) - 0 views

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    "Well, there was six million years in which our brains expanded and got rewired in ways that allow us to do completely different things. We can exchange information by making noise as we exhale -- the gift that we call language. We figure out how the world works, we make many different kinds of tools, we coordinate our behavior and exchange information. And all of these changes in cognitive evolution, in the evolution of the powers of the brain, account for why humans are making a film in which they can talk about chimpanzees rather than vice versa."
Rudy Garns

Merlin Donald on the evolution of human consciousness - 0 views

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    Canadian psychologist, Merlin Donald, explains the evolution of humans' uniquely collective mind as he outlines his theory of the evolution of human consciousness:
Rudy Garns

Evolution of the Cerebellar Cortex: The selective expansion of prefrontal-projecting ce... - 0 views

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    It has been suggested that interconnected brain areas evolve in tandem because evolutionary pressures act on complete functional systems rather than individual brain areas. The cerebellar cortex has reciprocal connections with both the prefrontal cortex and motor cortex, forming independent loops with each. Specifically, in capuchin monkeys cerebellar cortical lobules CrusI and CrusII connect with prefrontal cortex, whereas the primary motor cortex connects with cerebellar lobules V,VI,VIIb, and VIIIa. Comparisons of extant primate species suggest that the prefrontal cortex has expanded more than cortical motor areas in human evolution. Given the enlargement of the prefrontal cortex relative to motor cortex in humans, our hypothesis would predict corresponding volumetric increases in the parts of the cerebellum connected to the prefrontal cortex, relative to cerebellar lobules connected to the motor cortex. We tested the hypothesis by comparing the volumes of cerebellar lobules in structural MRI scans in capuchins, chimpanzees and humans. The fractions of cerebellar volume occupied by CrusI and CrusII were significantly larger in humans compared to chimpanzees and capuchins. Our results therefore support the hypothesis that in the cortico-cerebellar system, functionally related structures evolve in concert with each other. The evolutionary expansion of these prefrontal-projecting cerebellar territories might contribute to the evolution of the higher cognitive functions of humans.
Rudy Garns

Evolution of the Human Mind - 0 views

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    "Is the human mind a relatively inflexible program bequeathed to us by evolution, and culture just a veneer that gives age-old urges a respectable cover? Or our minds largely the product of language, culture, and civilization, with evolution having supplied only the most basic hardware and operating system? John and Ken welcome Leda Cosmides to shed some light on the human mind."
Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon on the symbolic species - 0 views

  • language is not merely a mode of communication, it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought—symbolic representation
  • [In] indexical association, [t]he word (iconically associated with past occurrences of similar utterances) and the object (iconically associated with past occurrences of similar utterances) and the object (iconically associated with similar objects from past experiences) and their past correlations enable the word to bring the object to mind .
  • [T]he major structural and functional innovations that make human brains capable of unprecedented mental feats evolved in response to the use of something as abstract and virtual as the use of words ... [T]he first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changed how natural selection processes have affected hominid brain evolution ever since.
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  • [S]ymbolic reference itself must have been the prime mover for the prefrontalization of the brain in hominid evolution. Language has given rise to a brain which is strongly biased to employ the one mode of associative learning that is most critical to it.
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    Neuroscientist Terence Deacon argues that the emergence of symbolic capacities unique to language were a key factor in the evolution of the human brain, and are a key to distinguishing human from animal forms of communication, ways of learning and brain s
Rudy Garns

Schizophrenia: Costly By-product Of Human Brain Evolution? - 0 views

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    Metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of our unique cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities. Research published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology adds weight to the theory that schizophrenia is a costly by-product of human brain evolution.
Rudy Garns

Ardipithecus ramidus - 0 views

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    In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.
Rudy Garns

Meet the Family: Human Evolution - 0 views

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    YouTube video on human evolution. « Neuroanthropology
Rudy Garns

Comparative Mammalian Brain Collections: Brain Evolution - 0 views

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    "Evidence of brain evolution can be seen in various fields of biology, such as paleontology, ethology, behavioral biology, cognitive psychology, molecular biology and genetics."
Rudy Garns

Neuroscience: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain w/ Terrence Deacon - 0 views

  • We suspected that the areas in human brains where we find language connections would be quite different in monkey brains. The surprise was that, as far as we could tell, the plan was the same plan. The way these areas were connected, even areas that we identified as language areas, or the correspondent areas in monkeys, had the same kinds of connections.
  • embryology changes over the course of evolution and that changes the resultant
  • self organization. A lot of the information that goes into building brains is not actually there in the genes. It’s sort of cooked up or whipped up on the fly as brains develop. So, if one is to explain how a very complicated organ like the brain actually evolved, changed it’s function to be able to do something like language, one has to understand it through this very complicated prism of self organization and a kind of mini-evolution process that goes on as brains develop in which cells essentially compete with each other for nutrients.
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  • Language has changed the environments in which brains have evolved.
  • I think that the connections are different because the brain is bigger and because not all parts expanded at the same rate.
  • We undoubtedly passed through not maybe one stage of what you might call a proto language but probably many proto languages, many forms of this linguistic symbolic communication system over the course of our evolution, all of them leaving somewhat of a trace.
  • I think clearly early language-like behavior had to involve much less vocalization because the brains that preceded us, mammal brains, are not well suited to organizing sound in precise, discrete and rapidly produced learned sequences.
  • I look at us as an African ape that’s been tweaked just enough to be able to do this radically unnatural kind of activity: language.
  • It turns out that very likely our ancestors, the australopithecines, and of course before them, had, like other mammals, a relatively disconnected control of the larynx and even of the tongue, to some extent. By that I mean that there was probably not much voluntary control over vocalization and certainly not at the level at which you could stop and start it on a dime, so to speak, with very little effort associated with it. 
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    The following interview with Dr. Terrence Deacon was conducted at the studios of KCSM (PBS) Television in San Mateo, California on September 5, 2003.
Rudy Garns

Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution - 0 views

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    Hawks J, Wang E. T., Cochran G. M., Harpending H. C., and Moyzis R. K., Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, PNAS (early online) doi:10.1073/pnas.0707650104
Rudy Garns

What the small-brained hobbit reveals about primate evolution - 0 views

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    Is bigger always better? When it comes to brain size, that has long been the prevailing theory-at least among big-brained humans. But a new analysis shows that in the course of primate evolution, brains and brawn haven't always been on the rise.
Rudy Garns

The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain - 0 views

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    The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain: A Review of two contrastive views (Pinker & Deacon). (Printed 2001 in Grazer Linguistische Studien GLS 55, 1-20) Ken Ramshøj Christensen Department of English, University of Aarhus
Rudy Garns

Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature (pdf) - 0 views

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    Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature. Philosophy of Science Monographs, Morris Foundation, Little Rock, Arkansas, 2000, 31pp.
Rudy Garns

Study traces the evolution of the human brain - 0 views

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    "The research in the journal Nature Neuroscience by Professor Seth Grant, Head of the Genes to Cognition Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power. Instead, he found that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses - notably by providing more connections in the brain - allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours. " (Telegraph)
Rudy Garns

What's wrong with evolutionary psychology? - 0 views

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    Those of us who are critical of evolutionary psychology (EP) are often accused of being anti-evolution and/or anti-psychology. Many of us are neither. That's because evolutionary psychology isn't really evolution and it isn't really psychology.
Rudy Garns

The Evolution of the Human Capacity for Killing at a Distance (Podcast) - 0 views

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    Duke University anthropologist Steven Churchill presents his research on the evolutionary origins of projectile weaponry, and how weapon use changed interactions between humans and other species-including, perhaps, the Neandertals. (October 20, 2009) » American Scientist
Rudy Garns

The Evolution of Language - 0 views

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    Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years-an eye-blink of evolution.
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