Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Language, Memetics, & Gene-Culture Coevolution Understanding Culture from a Selectionist View The Language Debate Darwin thought human language was instinctual Behaviourist perspective Skinner & operant conditioning Cognitivist perspective Chomsky & Language Acquisition Device Importance & Acquisition Why study human language at all? Cognitive revolution “Go-ed” vs. “went” Culturalist vs. nativist extremism How many words does the “Eskimo” language have for snow? 2, 9, 48, 100, or 200? Pidgins & creoles The Origins of Human Language Noam Chomsky Innate but not necessarily adaptive Steven Pinker Adapted for sharing information Merlin Donald Outcome of “mimesis” & neural plasticity Geoffrey Miller Verbal courtship as a sexual display Memetics (1) Dawkins introduced the concept in the final chapter of his text The Selfish Gene: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.” Memetics (2) What is a meme? Analogous to a gene, a meme is a replicator subject to selection Information or instructions for behaviour Living structure (not metaphorically) Longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity May spread “parasitically” by a variety of processes, particularly imitation Issues with Memetics Memes have fuzzy boundaries So do genes Memes often merge together So do genes (through introgression or horizontal transfer via viruses) Memetic selection is nonrandom So is artificial selection (e.g., research on Drosophila) Little empirical work has been performed Gene-Culture Coevolution (1) Classic memetic theory assumes independence of the meme from the host Hence, memes do not need to have a relationship with the fitness of the host However, extending the meme analogy to viruses (infectiousness, host susceptibility, and social environment) converges on the same position as gene-culture coevolutionists Gene-Culture Coevolution (2) Coevolutionary theory is highly mathematical in nature, based on theoretical population genetics From this perspective, genetical and cultural evolution have mutual effects on each other Mode of cultural transmission may be vertical, oblique, or horizontal Moreover, transmission is nonrandom: pay-off biased or conformist Future Directions The evolution and adaptive significance of language is still being hotly debated Memetics and gene-culture coevolutionary theory may provide new avenues for research Human diversity Unique place of humans in the animal kingdom The Wrap-Up Debate over the acquisition of language Origins of language Memetics Gene-culture coevolution Things to Come Sexual Orientation The debate over sexual orientation Neurological evidence Genetic Factors Elder brother effect