Clik here to view.
On the Evolution of Language
Both Nature and PNAS have put out two fascinating papers on the evolution of language. Nature‘s “Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language,” studies how grammatical rules change over time, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Neandertals have the same mutations in FOXP2, the language gene, as modern...
FOXP2 is thought to be a language gene. It is highly conserved in most mammals but in humans there are two unique mutations in the protein caused by nucleotide substitutions at positions 911 and 977 of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Punctuated Equilibrium drives Language Evolution
Fellow blogger, Simon Greenhill of HENRY, and co-authors published a cool paper evaluating language evolution that just came out in today’s issue of Science. The premise behind the paper, “Languages...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Improvisation in Music is Independent of Central Brain Functions
Charles Limb and Allen Braun at Johns Hopkins have recently published a study on the internal characteristics and functions of improvisation in music. The study, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Science covers some news from this year’s meeting of the American Association...
In brief, Science has published three news pieces that you maybe interested. They are all reports of what was presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting a couple weeks...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Simulated Linguistic Evolution In The Laboratory
About a week ago, I read and posted on a summary piece on cultural evolution research in PLoS Biology. The reviewer introduced me to Simon Kirby‘s work, which I found remarkable. Kirby and colleagues...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Linking Early Human Language & Cave Art
Human language is thought to emerge around 100,000 years ago as an abstract symbolic system. It is very likely that humans spoke long before it they wrote. Because the nature of language is largely...
View Article