culture

From the Guardian: "Google creates a tool to probe 'genome' of English words for cultural trends".

"Interest in computational approaches to the humanities and social sciences dates back to the 1950s," said Michel, a psychologist in Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. "But attempts to introduce quantitative methods into the study of culture have been hampered by the lack of suitable data. We now have a massive dataset, available through an interface that is user-friendly and freely available to anyone."

When I was an undergraduate doing research on Shakespeare, I pored through a concordance that had been constructed by computer in the late 1960's, which had given rise to several kinds of textual analyses (including some of the authorship disputes). There has long been an interest in that kind of quantitative analysis, and the thought that you can do it now for 5 million books is pretty daunting. The patterns of borrowing may be quite analogous to the analysis of reticulation in biological networks, I would imagine.

The article presents some interesting factoids, focusing mainly on the appearance of celebrity names. There's this:

"Science is a poor route to fame. Physicists and biologists eventually reached a similar level of fame as actors but it took them far longer," wrote the researchers. "Alas, even at their peak, mathematicians tend not to be appreciated by the public."

Alas.

I suppose somebody could do much more interesting work on spoken English by analyzing NSA recordings...

Michael Balter writes in Science about a meeting called "Culture Evolves": "Probing Culture's Secrets, From Capuchins to Children."

There appears to have been a deliberate ambiguity in the conference title -- is it the evolution of culture, or the evolution of the cognitive abilities underlying culture? Apparently both. Ignoring the distinction usually leads to confusion. Culture does not evolve in the same way as genes do.

In one group of capuchins, the team's long-term observations have allowed them to witness a rare event: the emergence of a new tradition. In what Perry calls a "bizarre" and "high-risk" ritual, the monkeys poke each other's eyeballs. One monkey will insert his or her long, sharp, dirty fingernail deep into the eye socket of another animal, between the eyelid and the eyeball, up to the first knuckle. In videos Perry played for the meeting, the monkeys on the receiving end of the fingernail, typically social allies, could be seen to grimace and bat their eyelids furiously (as did many members of the audience) but did not attempt to remove the finger or otherwise object to the treatment. Indeed, during these eye-poking sessions, which last up to an hour, monkeys insisted on the finger being reinserted if it popped out of the eye socket.

Why would the monkeys do something potentially dangerous? Perry suggests that capuchins, which, like humans, are highly cooperative and live in large groups, use this apparently pain-inflicting behavior to test the strength of their social bonds.

If this were happening in a zoo, wouldn't we call it a behavioral pathology?

Of course, if it were happening in a fraternity...oh well, never mind.

A new tradition that appears within one group does not need an adaptive explanation.

John Tierney riffs on a short review paper by William McGrew, a brief tour of chimpanzee technology. In a pool of academese, he finds a salacious bubble:

He tactfully waits until the third paragraph — journalists call this “burying the lead” — to deliver the most devastating blow yet to human self-esteem. After noting that chimpanzees’ “tool kits” are now known to include 20 items, Dr. McGrew casually mentions that they’re used for “various functions in daily life, including subsistence, sociality, sex, and self-maintenance.”

Sex? Chimpanzees have tools for sex? No way. If ever there was an intrinsically human behavior, it had to be the manufacture of sex toys.

Needless to say, the reality isn't as provocative as it sounds. Unless you're a chimp.

The review paper itself is rather short and the basic theoretical ideas are not new, but McGrew includes several examples from relatively new field sites. I like the "cleaving" example described here:

Among all animals, only chimpanzees appear to be able to use one type of raw material to make many kinds of tools (e.g., leaf as sponge, napkin, or fishing probe), or make one kind of tool from many raw materials (fishing probe from grass, bark, vine, and twig). Only chimpanzees have been shown to vary in their tool use at a multitude of levels, from individual, family, community, and population to subspecies. Chimpanzees also continue to yield new forms of tool use from continuing study (17, 18): In the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, they "cleave" fibrous, basketball-sized fruits into manageable smaller pieces, using hammers and anvils (19); this is unlike nut-cracking, for example, which cracks open natural containers to get at the goal item inside.

You have to be careful of that "among all animals" -- like the white crow, it's just begging for somebody to find one example to disprove the generalization.

McGrew mentions efforts to find characteristic signs of usewear that would distinguish ancient chimpanzee artifacts from Oldowan-type implements made by hominins. I think this will be more of a problem when we start finding significant Plio-Pleistocene (or earlier) archaeology outside of East and South Africa. In those places so far we have no signs of fossil chimpanzees from prior to the Middle Pleistocene, and rarely then. There's some interesting new work on chimpanzee population structure that may bear on the question of where they used to live -- I'll share that when I get a chance.

References:

McGrew WC. 2010. Chimpanzee technology. Science 328:579-580. doi:10.1126/science.1187921

An article about classical composer David Cope and the AI programs he wrote to make original music. It's not new news, but a nice profile with many "what does it mean to be creative?" moments.

Cope had taken an unconventional approach. Many artificial creativity programs use a more sophisticated version of the method Cope first tried with Bach. It’s called intelligent misuse — they program sets of rules, and then let the computer introduce randomness. Cope, however, had stumbled upon a different way of understanding creativity.

In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.

I'd call it "culture". The long-term direction may look random, but "styles" cohere over time because people take from each other. The article's leitmotif is Cope's near-Quixotic quest to write a truly life-changing piece of music. It's ironic that he discovers how to make music that humans can't tell from yesterday's classics, but tomorrow's classics will be determined by those very same human arbitrers of taste.