Simon Kirby - How humans got language: learning, culture & evolution

Abstract

Our species has a super power. We can take any thought and cause someone else to think it too, even if it has never been thought before. If we use a spoken language, we do this by breathing out slowly while moving our lips, tongue, and jaw around at incredible speed, or if we use a signed language, by moving our hands, arms, faces and bodies in an intricate choreography. We learn how to do this in the first years of life just by observing others in our community using language. Despite the widespread ubiquity of communication across nature, no other species can transfer an unlimited range of thoughts like this. More so than any other trait, the emergence of language has completely transformed our species and, ultimately, the planet on which we live.

In this talk, Simon will explain the simple structural properties of language that makes this open-endedness possible, and how they arise from the fact that language is transmitted culturally over time through repeated learning and use. To do so, he will survey a range of experiments that aim to recreate language evolution in miniature in the experiment lab in humans and other species. Languages evolve culturally to better be able to survive from one generation to the next in their hosts: us. Equally, humans appear to have evolved a unique propensity to support this cultural transmission.

About the speaker

Simon Kirby is Professor of Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh and elected Fellow of the British Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Cognitive Science Society, and a member of the Academy of Europe. He works in parallel on scientific and artistic investigations of cultural evolution and the origins of human uniqueness, particularly the evolution of language. Simon founded the Centre for Language Evolution, which has pioneered techniques for growing languages in the experiment lab and exploring language evolution using computer simulations. His artistic work includes Cybraphon, which won a BAFTA in 2009 and is now part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Scotland.

About the Pip Pattison Oration

The Pip Pattison Oration is named after Professor Pip Pattison AO, a quantitative psychologist who pioneered the use of mathematical and statistical models for social networks and network processes. Pip became a lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Department of Psychology in 1977 while she was completing her PhD, and later held many leadership roles including President of the Academic Board, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Teaching) and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic). Most importantly Pip has had an enormously positive influence upon her colleagues and students throughout her career and is without question one of the most respected and most loved psychologists, mathematical or otherwise. Pip is known for making her niche area of mathematical psychology relevant to many outside the field who previously didn’t even know it existed. Speakers invited to deliver an oration are chosen with this broad appeal in mind.

Register to attend either in person at the or online via zoom. The oration will be followed by light refreshments.

Host or Publisher Complex Human Data Hub