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
JOHN HEWITT HUMOUR its Origins, Nature and Educational Significance John A. Hewitt MA PhD (Cantab.) Address for Correspondence 33 Hillyfields Dunstable LU6 3NS UK Paper presented at the BERA conference Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh September 11, 2003 Abstract This paper presents the bioepistemic interpretation of humour. It argues that our liking for incongruity arose as a mechanism for attributing relevance to different sections of a sensory data flow. Such a mechanism seems to exist in many animal species giving rise to phenomena such as movement detectors in vision. The functional role of incongruity selection is discussed and it is argued that, in higher animals, incongruity selection has been coopted as an individual learning mechanism. In humans, the linkage between incongruity and learning seems to have become adapted to create humour which, in combination with laughter, has acquired social roles. Humour has become a means of synchronizing group learning and, thus, a means of forming social groups; it came to serve as a broadcast social glue that enables and rewards group formation. Most characteristically, humour can be treated as an IFF, an Identification, Friend or Foe system that probes group allegiance to ascertain whether other people should be treated as friend or as foe. Introduction General Comments With The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin planted roots from which has grown almost all modern biological knowledge - and his plant is still growing today. Almost all aspects of the human animal are clearer when seen in the light modern biology sheds upon it but, despite its ubiquity and importance, humour is an exception. Studies of humour as a phenomenon date back to Darwin himself, who devotes considerable space to it in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin (1872)). Remarkably, his work on humour remains read and relevant to this day because the subsequent years of debate, discussion and experimentation have not seen humour succumb to scientific investigation. It remains a puzzle - a phenomenon that stands alone, with no obvious place in the scientific understanding of our species. The extent of its isolation can be gauged from the way many of today’s large, university, psychology texts contain no mention of humour or laughter. Even works specializing in cognitive psychology fail to mention it remarkable given that many theories for the origins of humour suggest that it comes from the process of learning. Nonetheless, humour probably does arise as some kind of cognitive mechanism, a belief supported by the widespread use of humour in educational materials and educational broadcasting. There are two reasons for this absence of humour from the, scientific view of humanity. The first is that science is a “serious” activity and seriousness tends to conflict with humour, making the design of experimental protocols difficult. The second reason is the lack of any grand theory that brings humour into the general framework of evolutionary biology - neither of Darwin’s selective mechanisms, natural selection and sexual selection, lead to humour as an obvious consequence. The result is that, in essence, scientists have simply lacked experimental or theoretical handles with which to grasp the problems that humour presents. However, this author recently published his book The Architecture of Thought. which introduced bioepistemic evolution, a generalized form of the evolutionary theory usually presented and it does suggest an origin for humour. Bioepistemic Evolution Bioepistemic evolution regards data, information and knowledge as the most fundamental evolutionary concepts. Genes are treated simply as holders for the data and knowledge involved in biological evolution. In bioepistemic evolution, the workings of evolution involves three basic stages (data, information and knowledge) and two basic processes (interpretation and selection) that interconvert them; a cycle of evolution can then be summarized as “data is interpreted into information which is selected from to produce knowledge.” Data is interpreted into Information which is selected from to produce Knowledge The output knowledge from each generation is stored and used as input data for the trials of another generation. Bioepistemic evolution identifies the presence of these stages and processes in each of four ranks of evolution, a picture that is adapted and extended from Plotkin (1994). The four ranks are :Rank1 Evolution Rank1 evolution is biological evolution, or evolution by natural selection, during which data in genes is interpreted into information in proteins and organisms. Evolution then selects from this information to produce knowledge in the form of the reproductively fit genes that are passed on to the next generation. Rank1 evolution produces level1 knowledge or genetic knowledge. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 0 Rank2 Evolution Rank2 evolution occurs in the brain. Sensory data is transmitted to the brain from sense organs where it is interpreted into sensory information. The brain then selects from the various possible interpretations to produce level2 knowledge, or sensory knowledge. Level2 knowledge is sensory knowledge and involves modes of interpretation and selection that are confined to the receiving brain. As these modes of interpretation and selection have improved, the brain has become a Darwinian machine - a machine that mimics evolution as a process but works much faster. This idea that a form of evolution occurs in the brain began with the American scientist Gerald Edelman and is now widely accepted. It implies that the brain produces knowledge that will never enter genes. Level2 knowledge is sensory knowledge that accumulates in one brain and dies with the organism possessing it. Importantly, bioepistemic evolution suggests that one modality by which the brain attaches relevance to level2 knowledge is incongruity selection. This previously unrecognized form of selection produces such things as visual movement detectors, which detect incongruities between successive visual fields, or the brain’s ability to detect changes in background noise patterns. Bioepistemic evolution suggests that incongruity selection is implemented by causing animals to “enjoy,” and therefore focus on, those aspects of their environment they do not presently “understand.” In this way, incongruity selection, becomes the starting point for the evolutionary adaptations that have produced humour in humans. Rank3 Evolution Level2 knowledge is sensory knowledge, selected entirely in a brain attached to sense organs. Level2 knowledge can be passed from one generation to the next by mimicry, where one animal copies the actions of another. However, advanced animals, especially mammals, also select knowledge to transmit from one individual to another, maternal teaching of young being a striking example. The inheritance of deliberately transmitted knowledge is different from inheritance by mimicry. In mimicry it is the initially ignorant receiver who selects a behaviour to copy; with deliberate transmission it is the initially knowledgeable transmitter who selects knowledge worth transmitting. Bioepistemic evolution uses this shift in the point of selection to distinguish rank2 evolution from rank3. So, selection of knowledge by transmitters gives rise to level3 knowledge, otherwise known as social knowledge or culture. Animals select information to transmit with one of two related motives. They may want to educate their young, e.g., by teaching them hunting and feeding techniques, or they may want to control the actions of other animals. In social animals, a desire for control will most often mean a desire to control the actions of other group members - that is, to exercise social power. Hence, level3 knowledge accumulates to serve two underlying purpose, those purposes being :Educational and Political Level3 knowledge is social knowledge and therefore intimately associated with social groups. The education of young consists of adults teaching group norms to their offspring. Human children are born with an instinctive desire to learn such norms, a fact clearly demonstrated by the language instinct, the drive children have to learn language. (See Pinker (1994)). The attachment of incongruity to speech is common feature of language learning - “What’s this? It’s a heffalump.” More developed incongruities, in more obviously humorous forms, are a major force in adult group formation. Both phenomena indicate that the incongruity-based learning of rank2 evolution has become adapted to the needs of level3 knowledge and that, in humans, that adaptation manifests as humour. Rank4 Evolution J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 1 Bioepistemic evolution identifies another social rank of evolution, rank4 evolution. Rank4 evolution is the ethical evolution that creates the level4 knowledge, which is the subcultural or professional knowledge that distinguishes subcultures from the greater culture. Rank4 evolution arises in the structuration of societies, when systems of rules or codes of ethics are either agreed between partners or mandated by social authority. When followed, these codes govern the selection of the knowledge transmitted between members of that subculture and so unite them into it. Rank4 evolution produces level4 knowledge, which is ethically, subculturally or professionally validated knowledge. Humour plays no direct, general role in rank4 evolution though it will be a part of some ethical codes. Humour will often be a practical determinant of group membership without being formally specified as such. Nonetheless, this paper will not consider the relationships between ethics and humour. It is concerned with the origins of humour and its role in social groups. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 2 Incongruity and Relevance This work will not further explore general bioepistemic evolution. Instead it will move forward through the evolutionary record to a time when organisms already possess primitive brains connected to sense organs from which to gain an image of their surroundings. This image is a model, a representation, of the world outside that is stored in some kind of temporary memory in the brain - in RAM, if one wishes to use computer parlance. The sense organ, which might be an eye, passes a continuous stream of sensory data to the brain. However advanced this brain might be, it rapidly becomes overloaded by information from this copious data stream. The brain has a problem; it must select those interpretations that seem relevant to its life and discard those parts that seem unimportant. Remember that the eye views the world through reflected light and none of the objects under observation choose to send these reflections. For the most part, the world does nothing to control the way light is reflected. The whole burden of interpreting the data flowing into the brain and selecting the interpretation that seems important falls on the receiving brain. So, the input data stream must be interpreted on the fly and relevant parts of that interpretation selected for closer examination. The question is, “What general criterion can a data receiver use to select for relevance?” One answer, and the answer that is important for this view of humour, is that the most relevant interpretations are those that are incompatible with, which can be rephrased to incongruous with, the brain’s pre-existing representation of the world. This is the starting point for the way bioepistemic evolution interprets the origins of humour. An animal’s visual data stream is used to create a model, a representation of the world. Provided all visible objects remain still, the animal’s representation of the world remains constant. If an external object begins to move, the corresponding region of the animal’s representation will develop incongruities in moving from one frame to the next. Whether the animal is prey or predator, these incongruities mark parts of its visual field that are relevant and on which the animal needs to focus its attention. In general, to identify relevance, a receiving brain needs to select interpretational incongruities from its input sensory data stream. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 3 Minimum Features of an Incongruity Selector Incongruity selection has implications for how sense organs and the brain work together. In particular, an incongruity cannot be detected unless an existing representation is stored in such a way that it can be compared with ongoing interpretations. So, data coming from the eye must be interpreted and the resulting interpretation compared with the preexisting representation. When incongruities, incompatibilities between the stored representation and the ongoing interpretation, are detected they must become the target for additional attention and the results used to update the existing stored representation. A processing device able to do this needs to have certain minimum features, which may be described by the following picture. Visual data must be passed first to an interpreter that converts the data stream into a stream of interpretations. These are passed to a region that will be called the I-module. The I-module is a short term storage that maintains these on-the-fly interpretations for the fraction of a second needed to produce the next interpretation. This I-module is connected to an R-module, which is a longer term memory storage area where ongoing representations are maintained. These may, or may not, be separate areas of the brain but, since they need to hold and compare separate descriptions of the world, it seems likely that corresponding regions of each will be connected in parallel. The R-module also receives an input from a desire, or self-interest module that provides political direction and an indication of how this organism would like the world to be. The self-interest module is a long term region of storage or instinct where the self-interest and desires of an individual are maintained. The I-module and R-module communicate with one another and so provide inputs to one another. The Imodule also has input from the data interpreter and the R-module from the self-interest module. Therefore, both I-module and R-module have two inputs and those two inputs can contradict one another, be incongruous with one another, in either module. This situation is represented in the figure, which is the I/R model (Interpretation/Representation model) for learning and humour. In this model, incongruities in the I-module trigger pleasure, which causes the creature concerned to focus its attention on the corresponding part of its input data stream. That attention continues until a new interpretation is established in the R-module and the creature “understands” the incongruity. Once this new interpretation is established in the R-module, incongruity can occur there if it is in conflict with input from the self-interest module - if, for example, a moving object in the visual field is interpreted as possessing sharp teeth. The I/R model is a simplified picture of animal learning but has characteristics that might be useful in our understanding of humour. It depends upon incongruity, which is a pivotal and little understood aspect of humour in humans and it indicates that some incongruities should induce pleasure, again an important aspect of humour whose purpose has not been altogether clear. The I/R model does not describe human humour in all its complexity but does offer a foundation from which such descriptions might be developed. Note on I/R model and neural networks From the point of view of artificial intelligence simulations, the I/R model implies that incongruity, and thus humour, seem to be switching between the “use” and “self- J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 4 training” or “learning” modes characteristic of neural networks. (I am indebted to my son for this insight.) On this basis, incongruity detection might be used to switch between “normal use,” “pleasure/learning” and “distress” modes in the actual brain. It is unclear how many other such modes, or switches between them, real brains may possess. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 5 From Rank2 to Rank3 (From sensory knowledge to social knowledge.) Humans, like other animals, use incongruity selection as a learning mechanism; for example, we have motion detectors that focus our attention on moving objects. Also, like other animals and especially while children, we are curious, want to understand everything and minutely examine everything we do not currently understand. To this end, we watch other people at work and mimic the things they do. Such learning mechanisms help individuals but they do not amount to the uniquely human sense of humour. Humour is not an individual trait, it is a social, group directed phenomenon whose evolutionary pathway must be traced through further adaptation of these individual learning mechanisms to social roles. Knowing the evolutionary origins or neurobiological mechanisms of incongruity selection in individuals will not tell us about the social role of humour or the adaptive benefits it offers under group selection. Those insights demand that we look at social structures. We need now to make a point that conventional evolutionary theorists may contest because it concerns the holistic properties of evolution. Holistic arguments have a rather chequered history and, because it may be contentious, this one will be approached by analogy with the human hand - though any other organ could serve. The hand is made from skin, bone, tendons, muscle, nerves and nails etc. Each tissue has its own, individual a role in the hand’s function but also has its own, separate evolutionary and developmental history. Human adaptation has merged their roles to create a whole, integrated function in the hand. Evolution has holistically assembled them around the performance of such roles as gripping and holding etc. Each of the hand’s component tissues cooperate to enable these roles to be performed. Thus it is with humour. As time has passed, evolution has assembled its components from various starting points and caused them to cooperate to produce an integrated “organ” of humour that functions at a social level. Humour is an identifiable, integrated feature in human social behaviour. Whatever the evolutionary origin of its component parts or its neurobiological mechanism, humour cannot be comprehended merely in the context of these component parts or mechanisms. It must be understood in terms of the functions humour performs in social evolution, that is the functions these components cooperate to perform once they are assembled into the integrated whole that is humour. Further analogies could be drawn here with the way between different protein molecules cooperate to produce cells or with the way, in multicellular species, differently developed cells cooperate to produce an organism. Such things arise by holistic assembly through the processes of evolution. (The relationship between evolutionary competition and cooperation is discussed in Hewitt (2002)) As animals form social groups and become subject to group selection, they begin to cooperate with one another. Then their brains, the locus of rank2 evolution, must change to create concern for the group as well as for self. Under pressure from group selection, social groups are assembled from solitary, individual animals. As group formation proceeds the self-directed intellectual processes that characterize the brains of solitary animals, are adapted by group selection to serve the needs of social knowledge. These group directed processes must encourage social animals to do for their group’s endowment of social knowledge what all organisms do for their genetic inheritance - protect and propagate it. As a social phenomenon humour must help to do this. Here are some of the roles it is suggested humour plays in social knowledge :· Provides a physiological pleasure reward to individuals who unite into a group defined by the same social knowledge. That is, humour is a social glue. · Protects social knowledge by enabling its possessors to identify those who do not share it. In other words, function as an IFF system. · Taken together, humour and laughter help to synchronize the group knowledge and attacking those who do not share it. · Perpetuate social knowledge by encouraging its transmission down the generations. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 6 Humour seems to do all these things but the least recognized and, in many ways, most pivotal aspect of its social function seems to be as an IFF system. This note will largely consider the implications of the IFF description but first we must consider some physiological aspects of humour. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 7 Smiling and Laughter Humour is felt as a state of being amused and is identifiable by two responses, laughter and smiling - laughter being the more characteristic of the two and confined to humans (apart from traces in some higher primates.) Without laughter we might not identify humour as distinguishable from simple enjoyment. Nonetheless, humourous situations do not necessarily produce laughter, and laughter may occur in non-humourous situations. Smiling and laughter are communicative acts and both are, in different ways, gestures of submission. Smiling Smiling is a common act. People smile so often they develop wrinkles on their faces because of it - for example, the ‘smile lines’ around the eyes. Smiles are silent, transient, directed signals - characteristics that make them narrowcast rather than broadcast messages. Thus, fundamentally, smiles are acts of one to one communication. A smile involves a drawing back of the gums to expose the teeth. A similar gesture is a common act of submission among primates, such as might be directed to an α-male. Hence smiling seems an act of submission, a fact that explains why we like to be smiled at - we are, essentially, being submitted to. When people smile at one another they are, effectively, submitting to one another, a mutual submission that may be thought of as submission to the group ‘we’ of which both are a part. Mutual smiling is, therefore, a group directed behaviour, an act that recognizes the person to whom the smile is directed as a fellow group member and, sometimes, recognizes their hierarchical status. The act of smiling is largely voluntary - all the necessary facial changes can be made on command by actors or workers who are so instructed, such as airline hostesses or supermarket checkout assistants. Nonetheless, some aspects of smiling are very subtle and difficult to perform at will, allowing observers to sense the differences between false and natural smiles. Hence it is fairly difficult, though not impossible, to produce convincing, natural smiles on demand. Laughter Laughter is largely confined to humans, though some higher apes exhibit similar responses. Laughter is quite different from smiling and actually bears striking similarities to crying - a very ancient gesture present in many species. Both laughter and crying are involuntary, both involve rapid exhalations of air that produce recognizable sounds, both can involve tears, though tears are more normal in crying, and both are induced by experiences or observations that are incongruous with expectation. Crying is induced by events that are incongruous with desire or self-interest and which may be a serious threat. By contrast, laughter is induced by events that are incongruous with existing perception but which seem to pose no threat. Given these similarities, and its relative youth, laughter may best be seen as a modified form of crying. Unlike smiling, laughter produces a sound and is involuntary. Hence laughter acts as a broadcast signal and its involuntary nature suggests that the information laughter broadcasts is of a type that must be transmitted. This fact, that laughter is an involuntary reaction producing a broadcast signal, is one of the main reasons for identifying humour as an IFF. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 8 The Adaptive Significance of Humour Before discussing humour as an IFF, earlier suggestions for its functions need to be considered and Vaid (1999) briefly reviews these. For present purposes we will lay aside her ‘psychological’ and ‘metaphysical’ categories and reorder the remainder under headings designed to fit this work namely :Origins of attraction to incongruity. Adaptive benefits to the individual. Adaptive benefits to the group. Origins of attraction to incongruity There seem to be few suggestions as to why we find incongruity with existing ideas, rather than some other feature of a data stream, attractive. Hence, so far as the author knows, the suggestion that incongruity can be used as an indicator of relevance seems to be original and the only proposal in this area. Adaptive benefits to the individual Humour is undoubtedly a social phenomenon and most theories about humour recognize this social role. However, humour could not have evolved if its component parts played only a social role. The traits from which humour evolved must already have been common in the population, and therefore providing adaptive benefits to individuals, when the first social benefits began to emerge. Were things otherwise, the first humourous mutants would have enjoyed no social advantage over their humourless peers. This work proposes that attraction to incongruity is part of a learning mechanism, arising from the need to ascribe relevance to different parts of a data flow. This automatically provides an individual benefit that would make attraction to incongruity common. Koestler, discussed humour in The Act of Creation (Koestler (1964)) and suggested that humour achieved a ‘bisociation’ of ideas that enabled the creation of new concepts by forming links and associations between existing thoughts. It is true that the ability to develop new ideas this way might give an adaptive advantage to individuals. However, the meaning of the term ‘bisociation’ is not altogether clear, neither is it obvious where, in evolutionary history, this capability might have arisen. Chafe (1987) has suggested that laughter arose to disable individuals and prevent them pursuing unwise avenues but this proposal seems implausible. It is not obvious that disablement would be an evolutionary advantage in any circumstances. Moreover, the idea implies that one function of the brain is ‘wise’ and gifted with the foresight needed to detect and overrule ‘unwise’ policies conceived elsewhere in the same brain. It is hard to see how this organ of wisdom would work or arise and especially hard to see why evolution, after creating it, would render it unable to intervene except by disabling the entire creature. It is also unclear why this faculty, if it exists, might be confined to higher primates. Social adaptations of humour It is clear that, in humans, humour plays a social role and most suggestions about its adaptive value reflect this. Weisfeld (1993) suggests that humour supplies a social stimulation that motivates us to obtain fitnessenhancing inputs in the social, sexual or aggressive domains. This seems close to saying that humour is a social glue. Alexander (1986) writes supporting the case that humans are a group selected species. In so doing, he suggests that humour is a means of status manipulation, at times a means of excluding certain parties from a group and at other times of reinforcing the group’s cohesiveness by showing that they all share the same joke. Alexander’s work seems very consistent with the picture to be presented here. Dunbar (1996), in a work on the evolution of language, suggests that humour arose during physical intimacies such as grooming, gossip etc. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 9 All these suggestions seem highly plausible and they must all contain large elements of validity, if only because they are the commonplace of human experience. However, the fact that they all seem to have validity indicates that no one of them can offer a complete analysis. One cannot reject any of them and so, to go further, they must be integrated into a single, larger picture. That picture needs to identify the greater social structures of which humour forms a part and the general role humour plays in those greater structures. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 10 Group Selection and the Idea of an IFF Humour’s social roles indicate that it has been shaped by group selection, in many ways a synonym for group combat. Hence, it will help to consider the nature of group combat, which can most easily do by analogy with a modern example namely aerial warfare. Modern warplanes do not fight as individuals but as groups and they communicate extensively with one another as they do so. These aircraft have weapons systems, to attack their enemies, radar sensors with which to scan the field of combat for targets and radio communications systems through which to exchange information with allied planes. Just as important, and linked up to weapons, sensors and communications, modern planes have IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) systems. IFF systems would serve no purpose for solitary combat aircraft but they are vital for planes fighting alongside allies. An IFF consists of two electronic devices, an interrogator that sends coded signals to aircraft detected by radar and a transponder, that receives and understands coded signals from friendly aircraft or radars and automatically broadcasts its own coded signal in reply. When a radar detects an unknown aircraft, the operator needs to know whether this blip is a friendly plane or an enemy. To find out, the radar’s IFF transmits a coded interrogation signal to which a friendly aircraft’s IFF replies with another code that will be read as “friend.” Failure to respond with the proper code leads to identification as “foe” and possibly to attack with a missile. Hence, it is very important that interrogated, friendly aircraft positively respond with the correct code and IFF systems are automatic - pilots do not hear the interrogation signal or decide whether to reply. The name and initials IFF are a modern terminology to describe the electronic systems installed on both military aircraft and, increasingly, on military ground vehicles but these electronic devices are recent innovations. Less sophisticated IFF systems have been part of warfare for centuries and are used in all team games. The hails and passwords used by sentries are an IFF system - the traditional cry being, “Halt, who goes there, friend or foe?” which is followed by a demand for the current password. Easily recognizable uniforms are an IFF system that tell everyone on the battlefield the side on which a soldier fights (and his rank), as do the quickly identifiable colours worn by members of football teams etc. During world war II, the crosses and roundels carried by opposing aircraft were also an IFF system. In most of these cases, IFF devices signal their group attachment automatically. Hence, an IFF system seems essential for any group that hopes to emerge victorious from team ‘games,’ and war is, for these purposes, a serious, team game. The IFF system can be thought of as sitting between sensors, communications systems and weapons systems. The IFF decides the group allegiance of other aircraft and hence whether weapons, or help and information, should be directed at other planes. Recent aircraft are equipped with very powerful computers and groups of combat planes actually form computer networks. These may be peer to peer networks, if all planes have equal roles, or they may be clientserver networks if one aircraft has a command and control role. (The American AWACS is an aircraft with such a command role.) Most systems seem to be some hybrid of the two types but the client server architecture is notable because, like human groups, it contains a small hierarchy. The server is at the top with client aircraft below, non-friendly but neutral aircraft lower still and enemy planes at the bottom. In these networked combat groups, the IFF system decides the nature of communications with other planes. Aircraft identified as friend are joined to the network and allowed to upload sensor information about the battle zone, either directly or via the control aircraft. In return, the network ‘teaches’ all its members about the battlefield, which means that the network synchronizes the way its members ‘learn’ about their world. Aircraft that are not identified as friend will, at the very least, not be drawn into this learning network. They will be assessed for any potential threat they may pose and labeled accordingly. Depending on that assessment and label, non-friendly aircraft may, or may not, be attacked and destroyed. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 11 In short, an IFF system determines group membership and the targets for aggression but, and here is where education comes in, it also comes to synchronize the learning of the group whose membership it controls. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 12 The Functions of Humour in Humans Incongruity, it has been argued, can be used as a marker of relevance in different sections of a data flow and hence, attraction to incongruity will improve the efficiency of sensory learning and such attractions exist in many animals. Humans, it is argued passed through a period of group selection that gave incongruity selection uniquely human features. In humans the incongruity-based learning mechanism has become adapted to social roles which are probably best indicated by the properties of laughter, the most obviously unique marker of the way humour has developed in humans. It is suggested here that humour plays several social roles in human, rank3 evolution. This section will mention three of them. · Humour is a social glue, a source of pleasure and satisfaction through group membership that is otherwise unavailable. · In adults and children, humour serves to aid communication and individual learning and to synchronize group learning. · Humour serves as an IFF system, a way to distinguish friend from foe by their social knowledge set. It is humour as an IFF that seems best to summarize its observed properties but the biological and military situations are different in several ways. · Military IFFs did not evolve. Rather, they were designed by aircraft engineers and military planners. Humour is an IFF only so far as evolution adapted it to that role and it will have evolutionary forebears whose other roles may still be visible. · Military planes do not fight for status in a hierarchy but humans do fight for status in their groups. Hence humour, as a biological IFF, would be expected to look for targets within its own group, something a military IFF would never do. · Military aircraft are machines and simply do their job. Humans are not machines and need to be motivated. The need for motivation is answered by the a social glue properties of humour - by the way humourous activities are a source of pleasure obtainable only within community. This motivates people to form the social groups needed for social knowledge to grow. Humour as aid to communication and individual learning “Beware the jabberwock my son, the claws that scratch, the teeth that bite.” This is a funny sentence. We know it is funny because many people find Lear’s nonsense verse so and their reaction is the only criterion. Lear’s sentence is a communication, ostensibly from father to son. It is the word “jabberwock” that creates the humour and on which the reader’s attention becomes focused. Replace “jabberwock” with “dog” and the sentence loses its humourous content, becoming neither funny nor interesting. One can imagine a teenager’s response if his father so advised him to fear a dog, “Yes dad, I already know that dogs have claws and teeth that scratch and bite.” But what is a jabberwock? It is something to be feared because it has claws and teeth with which it scratches and bites and dad says I should fear it. But what is a jabberwock? The focus on ‘jabberwock’ arises from incongruity selection. The nonsense word, the incongruity with existing understanding, attracts attention and causes readers to think twice. The implication is that the incongruity selection mechanism from rank2 has become adapted to processing social knowledge at rank3. At rank2 incongruity selection is a means of attributing relevance, directing attention to different sections of a data flow. It has a similar role at rank3, engaging attention to a communications and saying, in effect, “pay attention, there is something here you do not understand.” And it does more; as a reward for paying attention and learning the new things this sentence contains, the incongruity selector engages the pleasure centres of the brain. Not only does the individual learn, he or she enjoys doing so. The pleasure causes the recipient to smile or laugh, subordinating gestures that please the transmitter and encourage the two to form a single social group. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 13 For evidence of pleasure in learning, observe many young mammals playing near their den but note that this is an individual learning process, not a social adaptation. Observe also the enjoyment exhibited by children as they learn language and other social norms from their carers - this is social learning, with level3 knowledge being transmitted from carer to child. Also, the social knowledge these children learn makes them part of their group and ensures that, in due course, their laughing response to jokes within will identify them as a group friend not foe. Humour and laughter as a way of synchronizing group learning Rank3 evolution is about communication but words alone do not induce pleasure in the recipient of a communication. The insertion of an incongruity into the message does. A submissive gesture by the recipient returns that pleasure and is a way of signifying that the recipient has learned the content of the message. Submission is also appropriate as a learned message will control the learner. Smiling is an apt response to communication within a social pair because a smile is a narrowcast communication, one smiles at one person but not, generally, at a group of people. Sending a message of amused learning to a group requires a broadcast communication, another submissive communication but one that involves sound. In humans, evolution seems to have achieved this broadcast communication by modifying that other ancient gesture of submission, the cry, to create laughter. Children laugh incessantly while they are playing and their laughter sends signals to anyone within earshot. To any caring adults in the vicinity laughter says, “I’m OK; I’m happy and not worried.” Generally speaking, the adult will not intervene. The laughter says to other children in the group, “This is interesting. I get pleasure from it and from thinking about it. You too may get pleasure from it.” So, other children come and investigate and learn from the same observation. In the end, the whole group learn the same things and derive shared pleasure while doing so. The net effect is a pattern of humour, attention and laughter that synchronizes group learning. Incongruitybased learning means that children who grow together laugh together and, even though they may be genetically unrelated, come to share the same social knowledge set. Humour and laughter drive and synchronize their group’s learning. The evolutionary point of this synchronization is group selection. The group that grew together shares the same level3, social knowledge. As a result, they become allies in competition with other groups possessed of different level3 knowledge sets and, in that competition, humour will help these groups decide who are their friends and who their enemies. Biological IFF systems Many social, group-selected animals have IFF systems based on scent, each group developing its own characteristic odour. For example, badgers that occupy the same set urinate on one another and come to share the same, rather pungent smell. Group members are recognized by smell and fights occur with other badgers who intrude onto a territory. Canines likewise recognize pack members by their smell and, so it is said, the reason dogs dislike taking a bath is that they fear being attacked if other group members cannot recognize their smell. (The author is not aware of the term IFF being previously used for these behaviours.) For animals living in small groups and with a keen sense of smell, odour works well as an IFF system. Scent would work less well as an IFF for any animal living in larger groups and possessed of a worse sense of smell, such as humans. We cannot even identify friends by sniffing them or signal recognition by tail-wagging. Nonetheless, any IFF system must have certain properties:1. It must send signals to interrogate the group allegiance of other individuals. 2. The signal must be group specific and not easily replicable so that intruders will be able neither to respond positively nor elicit positive responses from existing group members. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 14 3. The responses should be automatic - individuals should be unable to control whether the positive response is transmitted. (Odour is a signal, not a response, but canine tail-wagging may be the automatic, positive response needed to signal that a doggie friend has been recognized.) 4. The response must be broadcast and detectable by all individuals in the vicinity. Nonetheless, like any group selected species, our evolutionary games are played in teams. We need an IFF but our lives revolve around vision and our communications use speech. A human IFF will use one or more of these faculties. Vision plays a role because we can simply recognize group members and are physically heterogeneous to make this recognition easier. Also, humour can be visual but it is mostly based on verbal communication. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 15 Properties of Humour Suitable for an IFF Many aspects of humour can be judged from laughter, its most characteristic manifestation. Three important laughter inducers are tickling, childhood play and humourous communications, jokes being the most distinctive of the latter. Tickling and ticklishness are thought linked to the grooming behaviour that serves as a social glue in many primates . These clearly induce pleasure and, presumably, humour stimulates the same pleasure centres. Childhood play has already been discussed and the laughter it induces seems likely to be an early, broadcast reaction to pleasure from incongruity and a means of synchronizing group learning. These can now be laid aside to consider jokes as laughter inducers. All the following properties are familiar aspects of jokes and of our response to them. · Jokes are communications. Only communicated jokes are funny. We rarely laugh at our own jokes because they cannot be incongruous with our own knowledge set. · Jokes are specific to a social knowledge set, so that jokes like puns and logical incongruities cannot be translated from one language to another. Laughter is only induced in recipients possessed the social knowledge needed for incongruity. Thus jokes are like coded signals that interrogate a recipient's group membership through their social knowledge. To ‘get’ a joke a receiver must share group knowledge with the joker and that shared knowledge is, effectively, a code. · When we ‘get’ a joke we laugh audibly, thus broadcasting the fact that the responder and joker are in the same social group. · Laughter is involuntarily, or at least hard to control. In other words, we are automatically amused and our automatic laughter broadcasts the fact of our amusement, and thus of our group allegiance, to everyone within earshot. Together, these properties of humour, are those of an IFF system that selects friend from foe according to their social knowledge set. Laughter, the positive response to jokes, identifies the amused person as sharing the linked knowledge set and as friend to the joker. The negative response of failing to laugh identifies the unamused person as not sharing that knowledge set, not a group member and, therefore, as foe to the joker. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 16 Comparison of IFFs and humour For ease of comparison, it will be useful to lay out the general properties of IFFs and humour side by side. IFF Humour Interrogation signal Initial interrogation is coded to be readable only by friends Jokes are readable only within a shared social knowledge set or language. Response signal Positive response is coded Positive response is not coded. Positive response is broadcast. (Engineers might like a narrowcast response but that is not feasible.) Positive response is broadcast as the sound of laughter. Response is automatic Response is automatic to the extent that laughter is involuntary. Negative response identifies non-friend. Negative response identifies out-group. Linkage to weapons IFF is linked to weapons systems. Humour has aggressive modes. Linkage to comms. Planes identified as friend take a place in the communications network and share information. Individuals who share humour take a place in the group hierarchy, are informed and listened to. Unidentified targets. Planes identified as foe are excluded from the network and may be attacked. Individuals who do not share humour are excluded from groups and may be mocked, sneered at or attacked. Linkage to hierarchy Planes in client server network “know their place,” do not try to change it and do not attack friends. Humour is strongly linked to the struggle for hierarchical status and thus to intragroup aggression. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 17 Humour, Aggression and Social Status Humour is linked with aggression - as is to be expected given that an IFF’s job is to identify targets for aggression - and many modern missile systems can automatically engage targets identified as foe. Joking and laughter do demonstrate group membership and shared knowledge but human humour must do more than a military IFF; it must help in the struggle for position on a hierarchy. Human groups are headed by dominant α-males (usually males) who exercise political control over the hierarchy below them. The α-male’s word is law and his controlling actions are very influential in establishing the group’s social knowledge set. Hence, a group’s communicative links resemble, but are more complex than, those of a client-server network, with the α-male taking the role of controlling server. Much of human life involves the struggle for status on such hierarchies and aggression is often targeted within them. Any human IFF, be it humour or otherwise, will not just identify members of other groups as targets but will also find targets in its own hierarchy against whom aggression can be directed. Many forms of humour manifest this aggressive struggle for status. So, for example, a bully or group of bullies might comment about aspects of some quarry’s person or personality. The victim does not laugh but the bullies find it funny and their laughter may recruit onlookers to join their efforts. The consequences may be a demotion of the target down the social group or their expulsion from it. The victim may even be identified as a group foe and labeled as a legitimate target for physical attacks. Aggressive humour is usually directed at subordinates or equals. Humour directed at social superiors can be risky and α-males are not usually chosen as targets. Conversely, it is doubtful whether nominal superordinates who lack the power to retaliate for misdirected humour can retain any real superordinate status. Hence, some aspects of humour will be aggressive. When aggression is directed at out-groups, humour’s role will be similar to that of a military IFF. However, as a biological IFF, humour must also find in-group targets as part of the struggle for group status. In directing aggression within the group, humour will display properties that reflect the hierarchical nature of human groups and, in these respects, humour will have few parallels in electronic IFFs. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 18 The Educational Significance of Humour This picture of humour concerns shared group knowledge, something with clear relevance for pedagogic theory. The purpose of this section is to bring out three lines of that relevance. · Incongruity as an individual learning mechanism. · Laughter as a mechanism that synchronizes group learning. · Aggressive humour as a determinant of hierarchy and the direction of group learning. Readers should note that, thus far, the author has found little literature relating educational method and humour. However, he is not only a highly qualified scientist but has spent many years in education. Anyone who has spent time in the classroom knows how important humour is to the relationships that form there, both within the student body, between pupils and teacher and even between the teachers. The comments made in this section are not derived simply from the evolutionary theory developed in The Architecture of Thought - they also attempt to systematize a great deal of educational experience. Enjoyment of incongruity and individual learning According to the theory outlined here, humour originates in the need for an organism with sense organs to attribute relevance to different parts of its sensory data flow. If an animal is to gain maximum benefit from this data flow, it should mark for special attention those sections that are incongruous with existing understanding and be motivated to pay them that special attention. So, animals should have structures in their brains that make them enjoy elements in their sensory data flow that are incongruous with their present understanding, they should pay special attention to those elements and learn from them until the incongruity is resolved. On this basis, incongruity is an ancient, animal learning mechanism that manifests, in humans, as humour. The implication is that educational materials might be more effective if they engaged this learning mechanism and most modern educational books contain humourous illustrations. Educational TV is also peppered with jokes or set in amusing scenarios. Presumably these materials are in some way more effective than humourless equivalents, possibly improving retention, concentration span or class cohesion, but the author has yet to find comparative studies of their advantages. Such studies would be worthwhile. One also notices that those teachers who enjoy good relationships with their learners commonly crack small jokes during their teaching, something that is as true in one to one teaching contexts, such as coaching and mentoring, as it is the classroom. It seems then that good teaching materials, even those written by teachers, might use humour to attract the interest of learners. When possible, that is when good order permits, pedagogic practice should include elements of humour. In so doing, teachers can engage a deep-seated, incongruity-based learning mechanism that causes learners to enjoy learning. Laughter and synchronized group learning Laughter is a communicative act that attracts the attention of other group members, makes them curious about the cause of the laughter and eager to learn its origins. The resulting dialogues ensure that group members come to share any new knowledge that emerges from the humourous event. The result is that groups who play together, share laughter and learning. They become friends and the possessors of a shared, mutual knowledge set which, at some later date, might make them allies who will work well together. This picture, it is argued, describes the pattern of events likely to occur when groups of learners engage in group projects. It implies that the patterns of laughter emerging from group activities are likely to be both a pointer to the joint learning taking place and, potentially, a means of assessing it. This is an area that seems to merit systematic observational investigation. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 19 Humour, hierarchy and the direction of group learning This brings us to the last and, perhaps, the most contentious aspect of humour and its educational implications, one that enables us to consider the role of the teacher in the classroom environment. The classroom situation is a group situation and groups learn in synchrony, following a direction determined by the group leadership. This picture does not support the idea that a school can enable every child to achieve his or her individual educational potential. Rather, it suggests that the school and its performance very largely determine a child’s educational potential. It also indicates that the ideal classroom situation is one in which the teacher is, in a biological sense, also the group leader and able, through that role, to set and synchronize the class’ learning direction. Finally, one argues, the teacher’s leadership position needs to be strong enough that he or she can, without fearing loss of face or class leadership, bring humour into the classroom. This offers a major means of performing the leader’s synchronizing role and linking the group’s learning process to the school’s educational agenda. That, at least, would be the optimum social structure of the classroom but it is very doubtful whether modern schools achieve it or whether teachers are actually perceived as being in charge. Teachers sometimes direct disparaging humour at learners and humourous disparagement, directed at learners, may have an educational role if it reinforces the student’s subordinate status and hence willingness to learn. Even so, the circumstances in which it is appropriate merit discussion, though that is a discussion that will not be pursued here. Most worryingly, today’s teachers are often the target of humour and can be reluctant to crack their own jokes for fear of losing such little classroom authority as they may possess. In a biological sense, teachers often do not seem to be pack leaders and it is very questionable whether, in an organizational sense, modern schools enable them to take that role. Aggressive, disparaging humour is often directed by learners at teachers. Such humour runs counter to the hierarchy that would indicate a willingness to learn from that teacher and, in “one to one” teaching situations, such as tutoring or mentoring, it would justify ending the relationship. The response of removing a teacher from a class is not available in schools, thus making misdirected student humour an even greater concern. Such humour seems to indicate that the wrong kind of hierarchy is forming, that, in the absence of a hierarchy forming under the teacher, other hierarchies are forming around leaders emerging from within the student body. Then it is their power, their humour and their agenda that come to synchronize class learning and the results are likely to be damaging to the educational attainment of every member of the class. J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 20 Summary and Conclusions This essay concerns the evolutionary origin, social functions and educational significance of humour. The problem of evolutionary origin has been addressed by recognizing incongruity selection as part of normal sensory information processing. Humans use their senses and brain for social communication. It is argued that, as these faculties have adapted to social life, incongruity selection has become modified to serve social roles and that, in humans, incongruity based selection has come to be expressed as humour. Pointing this out is original, plausible and, probably, correct but it alone leaves many important questions unanswered. All discussion of humour must recognize its social nature, its pervasiveness and that it plays many, often seemingly contradictory, roles in human communities. This makes it very difficult to give a general description of humour’s social roles but any such description must recognize :1. The underlying use of incongruity for information selection. 2. Humour’s social nature, universality and aggressive content. 3. The physiological properties of laughter. The social description that best summarizes the resulting picture is humour as an IFF, a device whose job is to direct communications or weapons to targets or synchronize learning in a social group. This view is supported by the way the physiological properties of laughter match the signaling processes needed for the IFF role. Humour, it is argued, is a biological IFF that uses incongruity based information selection to determine whether a target does, or does not, subscribe to a given social knowledge set. It is also suggested that observations of the patterns of laughter might provide a data set that could be used to analyze the information selections and learning taking place in social groups. This possibility was briefly explored in the context of classrooms but more studies seem needed of the relationships between, humour, laughter, social dynamics and educational performance to be found in the small social group that is the classroom. Acknowledgments The author is indebted to Prof.Jyotsna Vaid of Texas and to Ann Snowden for correspondence and, especially, to Prof. Willi Ruch of Zurich for advice. A version of this paper was presented at the BERA conference and at the humour workshop, both in Edinburgh, 2003. The paper has benefitted from comments made by other attendees J. A. Hewitt --------- Origins and Nature of Humour Page 21 References and Suggested Further Reading Alexander R. (1986) Ostracism and Indirect Reciprocity. The Reproductive Significance of Humor Ethology and Sociobiology 7 253-270 Chafe W. (1987) Humor as a Disabling Mechanism American Behavioral Scientist 30 16-25 Darwin C. (1872) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Reprinted by Univ. of Chicago Press, (1963), Chicago, Ill. Dunbar R. (1996) Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language Faber and Faber, London. Hewitt J. A. (2002) The Architecture of Thought A New Look at Human Evolution Holmhurst House Press, Bedfordshire. Koestler A. (1964) The Act of Creation Hutchinson, London. Pinker S. (1994) The Language Instinct Allen Lane, London. Plotkin Henry (1994) The Nature of Knowledge: Concerning Adaptations, Instinct and the Evolution of Intelligence Allen Lane, Penguin Books, London. Vaid J. (1999) The Evolution of Humor: Do Those Who Laugh Last? In The Evolution of the Psyche Rosen D. H. and Luebbert M. C. Eds. Praeger, Westport Conn. Weisfeld G. (1993) The Adaptive Value of Humor and Laughter Ethology and Sociobiology 14 141-169 Also, see the author’s website at www.sexandphilosophy.co.uk