Karl Pribram, the James Arthur Lectures, and What Makes Us Human

BACKGROUND: The annual James Arthur lecture series on the Evolution of the Human Brain was inaugurated at the American Museum of Natural History in 1932, through a bequest from a successful manufacturer with a particular interest in mechanisms. Karl Pribram's thirty-ninth lecture of the series, delivered in 1970, was a seminal event that heralded much of the research agenda, since pursued by representatives of diverse disciplines, that touches on the evolution of human uniqueness. DISCUSSION: In his James Arthur lecture Pribram raised questions about the coding of information in the brain and about the complex association between language, symbol, and the unique human cognitive system. These questions are as pertinent today as in 1970. The emergence of modern human symbolic cognition is often viewed as a gradual, incremental process, governed by inexorable natural selection and propelled by the apparent advantages of increasing intelligence. However, there are numerous theoretical considerations that render such a scenario implausible, and an examination of the pattern of acquisition of behavioral and anatomical novelties in human evolution indicates that, throughout, major change was both sporadic and rare. What is more, modern bony anatomy and brain size were apparently both achieved well before we have any evidence for symbolic behavior patterns. This suggests that the biological substrate underlying the symbolic thought that is so distinctive of Homo sapiens today was exaptively achieved, long before its potential was actually put to use. In which case we need to look for the agent, perforce a cultural one, that stimulated the adoption of symbolic thought patterns. That stimulus may well have been the spontaneous invention of articulate language

History and reality of the genus 'Homo' : what is it and why do we think so?

Paleoanthropologists who worry about how nature is organized into species, and about what we should call them, are very often accused by their peers of «just arguing about names». This implies that basic taxonomy is a boring clerical operation that should be dispensed with as quickly as possible or even ignored, so that we can get to the really interesting questions about human evolution. Yet the reality is that we shall never understand the events of the intricate human evolutionary play if we cannot accurately identify the actors who participated in that drama. This article looks briefly at how our current supremely woolly concept of the genus Homo has come about, as background for urging a more rational approach to defining it

A mandible of Indraloris (Primates, Lorisidae) from the Miocene of India

A partial mandible of a large lorisid primate is described. The specimen (YPM 19134) comes from probable late Miocene deposits in northeastern India and consists of a fragment of a left mandibular ramus containing M3, the roots of M2 and the posterior root of M1. The third molar resembles the M3 of modern Nycticebus coucang borneanus; the specimen is referred to Indraloris cf. lulli. Unfotunately, because of its specialized nature, YPM 19134 affords no clue as to lorisid ancestry

The Minimalist Program and the Origin of Language: A View From Paleoanthropology

In arguing that articulate language is underpinned by an algorithmically simple neural operation, the Minimalist Program (MP) retrodicts that language emerged in a short-term event. Because spoken language leaves no physical traces, its ancient use must be inferred from archeological proxies. These strongly suggest that modern symbolic human behavior patterns – and, by extension, cognition – emerged both abruptly and late in time (subsequent to the appearance of Homo sapiens as an anatomical entity some 200 thousand years kyr ago). Because the evidence is compelling that language is an integral component of modern symbolic thought, the archeological evidence clearly supports the basic tenet of the MP. But the associated proposition, that language was externalized in an independent event that followed its initial appearance as a conduit to internal thought, is much more debatable

Ampasambazimba

6 p. : 2 maps ; 24 cm.Includes bibliographical references (p. 6)."A radiocarbon age determination of 1035 [+ or =] 50 years B.P. is given for a lemuroid bone from the prolific subfossil site at Ampasambazimba, Miarinarivo Province, Malagasy Republic. This is the first absolute date to have been obtained for a central plateau site, and, it is suggested, the most recent yet acquired for the subfossil lemuroids"--P. [1]

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language “phenotype.” According to the “Strong Minimalist Thesis,” the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}

Language: UG or Not to Be, That Is the Question

Lieberman’s commentary [1] nicely illustrates our original argument [2] that analysis of language evolution is complicated by a lack of agreement about the concepts of both “language” and “evolution.” Here we address each in turn. First, Lieberman argues against the existence of a language faculty in the sense in which we defined it: a domain- and species-specific computational cognitive system that can generate arbitrarily complex hierarchical syntactic structure. In contrast, Lieberman defines language functionally, as a means of “communication,” with human speech as a “key attribute.” However, as we originally argued [2], while externalized language may be used for communication, the two cannot be equated. Language is a computational operation occurring in the mind of an individual, independent of its possible communicative use, while speech is one possible externalization of language (among others such as sign) and is not an essential aspect of it. Lieberman’s arguments are a prime example of fallaciously confounding the function(s) of a trait with its mechanism [3,4]