I Am Evolution We Are All Evolution

I Am Evolution via NPR Series: This I Believe back on 5/11/08

Listener Holly Dunsworth says she doesn't need faith or hope to believe evolution. The Penn State paleoanthropologist says evolution "just is" — and helps her understand how she came to be and how humans are connected to all living things.

A Complex Pathway For Our Evolution

One topic that I have had a novice interest in is complexity theory and how it integrates with other fields such as biology and evolution. Wired Science from Wired.com had on article on Complexity Theory Takes Evolution to Another Level by Brandon Keim, posted on February 12, 2008. Wired Science also provided an updated post on the subject..

One hundred and ninety-nine years after Charles Darwin was born, and 149 years after he published On the Origin of Species, some scientists say that the theory of evolution is due for a revision.

It's heady stuff, and a lot of the hard science that Woese explained didn't come out well enough in transcription to make sense here. To understand him more completely I highly recommend reading "A New Biology for a New Century," published in 2004 in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. It's a visionary blend of history and microbiology, and shows that Woese is that rarest of all organisms: a brilliant scientist who can really write.

Update: a follow-up post, "Evolution as Biological Thermodynamics"

Another related Wired article provides some basic background on evolution and biology, as well as additional information on Carl R. Woese, whose work has been such an important part of this field. Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin -- Way Beyond Annotated diigo tags: biologists, evolution, complexity,

Darwin described how changes in an organism are passed from generation to generation, dwindling or spreading through populations depending on their contribution to survival. Biologists later combined this with genetics, which had yet to be discovered in Darwin's time. The fusion -- called the modern evolutionary synthesis, or neo-Darwinian evolution -- describes evolution as we now know it: Genetic mutations produce changes that sometimes become part of a species' heritage and, when enough changes accumulate, produce new species.

A recent international symposium at MIT looked at the second law of thermodynamics. One of the lectures also involved biology, the Second Law and Biophysics with Kenneth Dill, Professor of Biophysics; Associate Dean of Research, University of California, San Francisco.

Language Programming The Human Decision System

The following links are from a MIT symposium, Where Does Syntax Come From? Have We All Been Wrong?. To be honest, it is a laundry list but if one is into computers and cognitive psychology it's a pretty good one.

A number of this weblog's posts have been dealing with issues of marketing and communications, all of which involve language. The analogy of the human mind being like a computer is standard, but with concepts such as crowd-sourcing and social networking through Web 2.0 environs the extension of computer coding being analogous to language becomes all the more interesting. One area of particular interest would be human group decision making or interaction between groups with different language structures. The following MIT departments were involved in the symposium.

LIDS: Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Annotated

This is an Overview of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems/LIDS Annotated

The Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is an interdepartmental research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It began in 1939 as the Servomechanisms Laboratory, an offshoot of the Department of Electrical Engineering. Its early work, during World War II, focused on gunfire and guided missile control, radar, and flight trainer technology. Over the years, the scope of its research broadened.

MIT : Brain and Cognitive Sciences Annotated

MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences stands at the nexus of neuroscience, biology and psychology. We combine these disciplines to study specific aspects of the brain and mind including: vision, movement systems, learning and memory, neural and cognitive development, language and reasoning. Working collaboratively, we apply our expertise, tools, and techniques to address and answer both fundamental and universal questions about how the brain and mind work.

MIT Computational Cognitive Science Group Annotated

We study the computational basis of human learning and inference. Through a combination of mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments, we try to uncover the logic behind our everyday inductive leaps: constructing perceptual representations, separating "style" and "content" in perception, learning concepts and words, judging similarity or representativeness, inferring causal connections, noticing coincidences, predicting the future.

Other talks will be added when the become available. A bit of web-trekking resulted in discovering this site at the University of Pennsylvania.

Neuroethics Publications Annotated

'Neuroethics' is the ethics of neuroscience, analogous to the term 'bioethics' which denotes the ethics of biomedical science more generally. It encompasses a wide array of ethical issues emerging from different branches of clinical neuroscience (neurology, psychiatry, psychopharmacology) and basic neuroscience (cognitive neuroscience, affective neuroscience). These include ethical problems raised by advances in functional neuroimaging, brain implants and brain-machine interfaces and psychopharmacology as well as by our growing understanding of the neural bases of behavior, personality, consciousness, and states of spiritual transcendence. This collection brings together the work of a growing number of Penn researchers from across the academic disciplines who are contributing to the neuroethics literature.

diigo tags: brain, decisionsystem, language, mit learning psychology science video
neuroethics

MIT World » : Human Simulations of Language Learning Annotated

This workshop, explains Michael Coen, is an effort to engender temperate, collaborative discussion of a matter that inspires hot dispute: whether machine learning helps explain how humans acquire language. In particular, says Coen, machine learning advocates believe they have evidence against Noam Chomsky’s “poverty of stimulus argument,” which in essence states that language is built into us, that “children don’t receive enough linguistic inputs to explain linguistic outputs.”

MIT World » : Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child-directed Speech Annotated

How do kids manage to figure out that the word “dog” applies to a whole category of animals, not just one creature? Joshua Tenenbaum wants to understand how children and adults manage to solve such classic problems of induction. Throughout cognition, wherever you look, he says “we see places where we know more than we have a reasonable right to know about the world, places where we come to abstractions, generalizations, models of the world that go beyond our sparse, noisy, limited experience.” Tenenbaum’s goal is to come up with “general purpose computational tools for understanding how people solve these problems so successfully.”

Past posts in my blog also dealt with the evolution of language. I am wondering how this plays out in larger organizational and social systems and the interaction of different systems i.e. Americans in Iraq or other situations. Especially with the web accelerating communications even when it is not directly connected to everybody within a culture. - diigo post by brianddrpm

MIT World » : The Computational Nature of Language Learning Annotated

Niyogi believes that an “evolutionary trajectory” links how acquisition happens at an individual level, and how variation in language springs up from one generation to the next. But rather than inheriting the grammar of your parents, you have to learn it. Examining language variation over time as if it were genetic variation, “you get a different mathematical structure…and probabilities start playing an important role.” Small differences “can have very subtle consequences giving rise to bifurcation in nonlinear dynamics of evolution.” For instance, 1000 years ago, the English were speaking a language that’s unrecognizable to us today. How has it come to be that “we have moved so far from that point through learning which is mimicking the previous generation?”

Niyogi explains that within a single population two varying languages may be in competition (say, a German and an English-type grammar). While a majority may speak the dominant variant, some children will likely be exposed to a mixture of the two. There’s a “drift” in language use, “and suddenly, what was stable becomes unstable.”

MIT World » : Machine Learning of Language from Distributional Evidence Annotated

Christopher Manning thinks linguistics went astray in the 20th century when it searched “for homogeneity in language, under the misguided assumption that only homogeneous systems can be structured.” In the face of human creativity with language, rigid categories of linguistic use just don’t help explain how people actually talk and what they choose to say. For every hard and fast rule linguists find, other linguists can determine an exception. Categorical constraints rise, then come crashing down.

Nature Is Better At Balancing Complex Systems Than We Are

"When Removing One Predator Harms the Prey" - New York Times: By HENRY FOUNTAIN Published: December 11, 2007

This article makes a good point regarding thinking about long term impact and the complexity of interrelated systems.

"The predator-prey relationship is simple, right? If a predator is around, that is bad for the prey, and if the predator is removed, that is good for the prey."

"Ecological theory, however, suggests that isn’t always the case, particularly if there is more than one predator species around and they share the same prey. In that case, elimination of the top predator may allow the midlevel predator to thrive, and a result may actually be worse for the prey."

The New England Complex Systems Institute, which is one of the web pages saved under del.icio.us and other tagging systems, has a fascinating visualization of a related system model. You will need Quicktime. Spatial Predator-Prey Models and the Evolution of Altruism. The use of such systems will, to my mind, undoubtedly increase, both as a means of understanding challenges in the future as well as overcoming those challenges and mitigating the impacts.

The New England Complex Systems Institute was featured in a previous post and placed under Paradigm Pathways Science Pathways. The researchers had created a mathematical model - based purely on the geographic distribution of ethnic groups - that provided a highly accurate prediction of where violent conflict would occur regarding Inter-ethnic violence using the same rules for prediction that govern chemicals.

It Is Not Knowledge Unless It Reaches Beyond You

The Outsourced Brain - New York Times by By DAVID BROOKS Published: October 26, 2007

Last Friday New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on the outsourcing or externalizing of human intelligence to the external digital world. One senses his willingness to accept this state of affairs is similar to, "I for one welcome our new alien masters".

"Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves."

"I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too."

"I am one with the external mind. Om."

What he failed to appreciate is that this has been going on for the last 6,500 years for the ubiquitous externalization of knowledge we call writing. The storytellers of oral societies have prodigious memories, for myths, but actually keeping detailed and accurate track of crops for the previous 7 years took writing. Even language, internalized as thought, is itself indirectly a form of externalization, by internally objectifying spoken language as thought so that it can be considered in past, present and future terms. More importantly, so that it can be communicated to others. It is this ability, perhaps beyond others, that has moved the human species forward. The primary tool of mass production that defines Mr. Brooks' business, the printing press, is also a means of externalizing knowledge beyond the cloistered walls of monks with quills.

A number of articles have recently reflected on the biological and social evolutionary development of human communication. The Los Angeles Times writer Karen Kaplan looks at the genetic origin of language in Did Neanderthals natter? The human forebears had a key language gene, researchers report on October 22, 2007 (requires free registration).

The Science Blog Developing Intelligence on October 16, 2007 by Chris Chathamasks asks "Why There Aren't Right-Handed Apes, Or: Handedness and The Evolution of Language" and gets in deeper to questioning the genetic, psycho-physiological and social development of language.

Corballis argues the final step was a cultural rather than evolutionary invention - early homo sapiens may have learned to uncouple speech from facial gesture so that speech was communicative on its own. Corballis notes that facial gestures still assume dominance over vocalizations among modern humans (see the McGurk effect), again suggesting our cultural heritage from gestural communication.

In summary, Corballis claims that handedness emerged only after speech, which was itself lateralized due to preexisting dominance of the left-hemisphere for communicative behaviors.

First the externalization of speech and then the internal rewiring of the brain to be lateralized to handedness.

The Los Angles Times had an article Researchers discover that irregular verbs change in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms. By Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer back on October 11, 2007.

Tracing the evolution of English verbs over 1,200 years -- from the Old English of "Beowulf" to the modern English of "The Princess Diaries" -- researchers have found that the majority of irregular verbs are going the way of Grendel, falling to the linguistic equivalent of natural selection.

Cognitive Daily's, Dave Munger, tracking a similar story from the New York Times tells us that the more we use a word, the less likely it is to change. According to the New York Times report frequently-used words evolve more slowly than rarely used ones. Dave Munger thought that this was understandable.

Seems reasonable. In our travels across Europe, we found that "yes" and "no" were very similar in different languages -- until we got to Greece, where their word for yes was pronounced "neh," and the word for no was "ochi." But despite anomalies such as this, overall more frequently used words tend to be more similar across Indo-European languages.

Why might this be? Mr. Munger cites one author of the study who explains,

As to how frequency of word use would affect evolution, Dr. Pagel said a possibility is that if errors are made in speaking common words, they may tend to be corrected, precisely because they are so common and so important for communication.

In other words, the fact that they were made external and subject to scrutiny in the environment decided their communicative importance thereby ensuring their survivability and that of the systems that used them.