#577 Russell Gray: Language Evolution, Big Gods and Rituals, and Animal Cognition
RECORDED ON OCTOBER 6th 2021.
Dr. Russell Gray is the director to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He also holds an adjunct position in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. Dr. Gray’s research spans the areas of cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy of biology. He helped pioneer the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. His work has shed new insights on the 200 year-old debate on the origin of Indo-European languages.
In this episode, we talk about linguistics, cultural evolution, and animal cognition. We start with linguistics, and discuss if language is innate or acquired and Universal Grammar; approaches to the study of the evolution of languages, like Bayesian phylolinguistics; constraints in linguistic variation; the evolution of languages in the Pacific and the timing of peopling there; and what we know about the Indo-European language(s). We then talk about religion: how notions of god vary with ecology; the relationship between Big Gods and social complexity; and ritual human sacrifice and the evolution of stratified societies. We discuss D-PLACE, and the difficulties in building comparative cultural databases. Finally, we discuss animal cognition, with a focus on the cognition of New Caledonian crows and their tool use. We talk about tool use in animals, the relationship between brain size and cognitive ability, and the problems with talking about a generally “smart” species and “one cognition”.
Time Links:
Intro
About Universal Grammar
Bayesian phylolinguistics, and the evolution of languages
Language evolution as a tree
Constraining linguistic variation
Language evolution, human migration, and genetics
What we know about the Indo-European language(s)
Notions of god vary with ecology
Big Gods and social complexity
Ritual human sacrifice and stratified societies
D-PLACE, and building comparative cultural databases
The cognition of New Caledonian crows, tool use, and brain size and cognitive ability
Does it make sense to talk about a generally “smart” species?
Follow Dr. Gray’s work!
Follow Dr. Gray’s work:
University page http://bit.ly/3nu6HKe
ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/3gYEgBO