Science need not be dull and bogged down by jargon, as Richard Dawkins proves in this entertaining look at evolution. The themes he takes up are the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinship theory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences. Readership: general; students of biology, zoology, animal behaviour, psychology.

The Selfish Gene

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with oth- ers and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The develop- mental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.

/pdf/understanding-and-sharing-intentions-the-origins-of-cultural-4ndpnm3ov3.pdf

Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

http://www.biolinguagem.com/ling_cog_cult/pinker_bloom_1990_naturallanguage_naturalselection.pdf

Natural language and natural selection

That all events are equally associable and obey common laws is a central assumption of general process learning theory. A continuum of preparedness is denned which holds that organisms are prepared to associate certain events, unprepared for some, and contraprepared for others. A review of data from the traditional learning paradigms shows that the assumption of equivalent associability is false: in classical conditioning, rats are prepared to associate tastes with illness even over very long delays of reinforcement, but are contraprepared to associate tastes with footshock. In instrumental training, pigeons acquire key pecking in the absence of a contingency between pecking and grain (prepared), while cats, on the other hand, have trouble learning to lick themselves to escape, and dogs do not yawn for food (contraprepared). In discriminatio n, dogs are contraprepared to learn that different locations of discriminativ e stimuli control go-no go responding, and to learn that different qualities control directional responding. In avoidance, responses from the natural defensive repertoire are prepared for avoiding shock, while those from the appetitive repertoire are contraprepared. Language acquisition and the functional autonomy of motives are also viewed using the preparedness continuum. Finally, it is speculated that the laws of learning themselves may vary with the preparedness of the organism for the association and that different physiological and cognitive mechanisms may covary with the dimension. Sometimes we forget why psychologists ever trained white rats to press bars for little pellets of flour or sounded metronomes followed by meat powder for domestic dogs. After all, when in the real world do rats encounter levers which they learn to press in order to eat, and when do our pet dogs ever come across metronomes whose clicking signals meat powder ? It may be useful now to remind ourselves about a basic premise which gave rise to such bizarre endeavors, and to see if we still have reason to believe this premise.

On the generality of the laws of learning

Prologue PART 1: The Need for a Theory of Cognitive Evolution Mental Architecture as an Emergent Phenomenon Culture as Evidence for Cognitive Structure The Organization of This Book PART 2:

Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition

Speciation often involves the evolution of incompatible gene interactions that cause sterility or lethality in hybrids between populations. These so-called hybrid incompatibilities occur between two or more functionally divergent loci. We show that the nucleoporin 160kDa (Nup160) gene of the fruitfly Drosophila simulans is incompatible with one or more factors on the D. melanogaster X chromosome, causing hybrid lethality. Nup160 encodes a nuclear pore complex protein and shows evidence of adaptive evolution. Furthermore, the protein encoded by Nup160 directly interacts with that of another hybrid lethality gene, Nup96, indicating that at least two lethal hybrid incompatibility genes have evolved as byproducts of divergent coevolution among interacting components of the Drosophila nuclear pore complex.

Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee

A science of psychology must assume that behavior is lawful. We recognize diversity, but we assume that both similarity and difference are products of the same fundamental laws that combine and recombine in unique ways to yield the rich diversity of behavior that we observe between and within species. The proper analysis of behavior is not in terms of simpler behavior and more complex behavior or in terms of simpler organisms and more complex organisms, but rather in terms of general functions such as perception and learning that are found in all forms of behavior. We avoid the invention of new laws of behavior for each newly discovered level of complexity in favor of the formulation of more powerful generalizations.

Comparative psychology and language acquisition

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses two-way communication with an infant chimpanzee. Language is the most important result of the evolutionary developments that distinguish human beings from other species. It is difficult to study language on the same objective terms as other types of behavior. The study of language has come to lose much of the mystique that it once had. If an animal, such as a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) is capable of developing a system of two-way communication of its own, the place to observe this can be in well-established wild bands. In choosing an appropriate medium for communication with a chimpanzee, one must first consider carefully why a medium based on vocalization cannot be appropriate. A chimpanzee can never communicate by speech because of anatomical defects in its vocal apparatus. Many human tools and mechanical devices are designed for the human hand, yet chimpanzees can learn to use these with great skill. To some extent, chimpanzees should be able to use a medium of communication designed for human vocal anatomy. Intelligible speech can be produced by human beings with the pathological defects of the vocal apparatus, and there are human languages that substitute whistles or clicks for speech.

Two-Way Communication with an Infant Chimpanzee

Chimpanzees can communicate in American Sign Language (ASL) to independent human observers whose only source of information is the ASL signs of the chimpanzees. A vocabulary test was presented to 4 cross-fostered chimpanzees (4-6 years old). Thirty-five-millimeter color slides were projected on a screen that could be seen by the chimpanzee subject but not by the human observers. There were two observers: O1 was the questioner in the testing room with the subject; O2 was in a different room. Neither observer could see the other, or the responses of the other observer. O1 and O2 agreed in their readings of both correct and incorrect signs, and most of the signs were the correct ASL names of the slides. In order to show that the chimpanzees were naming natural language categories--that the sign DOG could refer to any dog, FLOWER to any flower, SHOE to any shoe--each test trial was a first trial in that test slides were presented only once. Analysis of errors showed that two aspects of the signs, gestural form and conceptual category, governed the distribution of errors.

R. Allen Gardner

Papers

Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee

Comparative psychology and language acquisition

Two-Way Communication with an Infant Chimpanzee

A vocabulary test for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Evidence for sentence constitutents in the early utterances of child and chimpanzee