Terrence Deacon -- Language and complexity: Evolution inside out

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, Deacon explains the extravagant complexity of the human language and our competence to acquire it has long posed challenges for natural selection theory. To answer his critics, Darwin turned to sexual selection to account for the extreme development of language. Many contemporary evolutionary theorists have invoked incredibly lucky mutation or some variant of the assimilation of acquired behaviors to innate predispositions in an effort to explain it. Recent evodevo approaches have identified developmental processes that help to explain how complex functional synergies can evolve by Darwinian means. Interestingly, many of these developmental mechanisms bear a resemblance to aspects of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, often differing only in one respect (e.g. form of duplication, kind of variation, competition/cooperation). A common feature is an interplay between processes of stabilizing selection and processes of relaxed selection at different levels of organism function. These may play important roles in the many levels of evolutionary process contributing to language. Surprisingly, the relaxation of selection at the organism level may have been a source of many complex synergistic features of the human language capacity, and may help explain why so much language

Min. 51- on birds learning to sing, "They listen to themselves." Interestingly, this feedback process in birds singing was noted by George Herbert Mead, in his book "Mind, Self, and Society". Self-interaction is also a major concept in his theory of consciousness; it's good to see that genetic and neurological developments are confirming his insights.

[@ArtVandelay99]

Really powerful content Deacon is giving us here - and his televangelist-style delivery somehow makes it hit home even more :-D

[@stevenhines5550]

I think of it like "higher-order sentience". We are the most complex expressions of consciousness around on this speck of dust but, as Chomsky says, we are STILL constrained by our genetic endowment.

[@vilniuslu13]

extraordinary ...please more lecture on linguistics...and please let's share other informations as well.

[@musskytussk]

this is awesome, thanks for posting!!

[@olly3700]

great lecture.worth spreading...

[@LuigiSimoncini]

Great lecture! thanks!

[@MinGWDownload]

Great presentation on evolution, thank you.

[@insightfool]

Very nice. Thanks for posting that.

[@gregmattson2238]

ok, I think I'd shell out good money to watch a pay-per-view cage match between him and chomsky.

[@thrasherrrr]

Eye opening! I am buying symbolic species for sure

[@Aluminata]

Evolution does not proceed in the linear fashion logic would suggest; rather it gathers various components to its self for prolonged periods and then bursts forth in sudden surges of innovation, progress and change.

[@GodlessPhilosopher]

That was incredible.

[@KeystoneFlow]

I thought what he was saying was very germane. The beginning was interesting insomuch as he speculation motivated forward-thinking, but most of the lecture could have been narrowed to the one slide with the comparison between motor-based song and cognitive/social song. Notice how everyone's questions are general to the topic, rather than dealing with the material that was pushed through slide-by-slide.

[@nyworker]

1:17:00 Pictorial Language Discussion...I believe the Asian language symbols are pictorial or not phonetic like Western languages.

[@yolbermad]

thanks for this.......

[@yayme28]

awesome!

[@rewtnode]

This was very interesting and convincing. Yet I still don’t understand what his gripe is with Chomsky. He’s turns Chomsky into a straw man by picking on the weaker point that imo Chomsky did care too much about trying to explain except in trying to dismiss the clean slate hypothesis of behaviourism. I wonder if there was ever a debate between them?

[@stevenhines5550]

I don't think the social component of language acquisition is incompatible AT ALL with evolution. Maybe we have evolved to social function? I mean everyone knows that bees and ants and termites are. Would a bee kept in isolation understand how to hive or waggle?

[@susanburns1089]

Could the symbolic ecosystem (beaver dam) be religion?

[@yomerolo]

Reading Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning makes you assume so....

[@worldpeace8299]

"Darwin himself fell prey to this idea and actually moved much more towards a Lamarckian view..."

[@deselby9448]

Comparing a peacock's tail to the formation of the first language is ridiculous to the point of either seeming incompetent or an extreme example of researcher bias. If language developed as a natural part of evolution then it would had to have been created by people. So who were those people? Why doesn't Terrence Deacon, or anyone else that discusses the evolution of language, ever discuss the maturational constraints or the effect those constraints would have had on peoples ability to create a language? Is Terrence unaware of the maturational constraints? If so, then why is he wasting everyone's time by giving speeches about the "evolution of language" when he doesn't even understand constraints that would significantly affect such a proposal?

[@coreyspink6513]

He mentions those in his talk briefly, and in greater detail in the book he mentions "The Symbolic Species". The maturational constraints are actually fairly important to part of his hypothesis, although perhaps turned on its head compared to what you might be thinking. This also connects nicely with connectionist modelling of cognitive processes out of the late 80s and 90s.