[lingtalks] CHD Seminar: FRIDAY - Bruce Weber

[Katie Wagner]

The Center for Human Development Presents

Bruce Weber
CSU Fullerton
Departments of Biochemistry

Friday, November 21th
12-1pm (discussion 1-1:40pm)
room 003 in the Cognitive Science Building


"On the Origin of Symbolic Species: The Baldwin Effect and Emergent  
Complexity in the Darwin Research Tradition"

  In On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin bracketed off both the  
problem of the origin of life and the issue of human evolution.  While  
he speculated only in private correspondence with Joseph Hooker on how  
life might have arisen, he did publish about human psychology and  
evolution in The Descent of Man and On the Expression of Emotions in  
Man and Animals.  However, Randal Keynes has argued that Darwin’s  
concerns about human evolution were part of his creative thinking  
about evolution from the beginning of his theorizing in the late 1830s.

By the time of Darwin’s death in 1882, there was what Peter Bowler has  
characterized as an “eclipse of Darwin” in which Darwinism came to  
mean any naturalistic explanation of biological phenomena even when  
neo-Lamarckian mechanisms were utilized.  But the demonstration of  
August Weismann’s “barrier” in which the germ-line was unaffected by  
somatic changes precluded such non-Darwinian notions.  Around the turn  
of the twentieth century, the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin  
proposed a way in which organisms with sufficiently complex nervous  
systems could evolve more rapidly than waiting for small, gradual  
heritable variation upon which natural selection could act, that is, a  
way in which behavior and mind could be important factors in  
evolution.  In the “Baldwin effect” organisms that learn a “trick”  
that gives them a selective advantage will be likely to leave more  
offspring.  If the environment is stable enough over generational time  
that such a behavior continues to have selective advantage, then any  
heritable change that stabilizes the behavior or facilitates the  
learning of the behavior will be selected for.

In the early days of the development of the Modern Evolutionary  
Synthesis (or neo-Darwinism) there was an openness to a possible role  
for the Baldwin effect, but by the mid-twentieth century George  
Gaylord Simpson concluded that the Baldwin effect was at most  
trivially true.  This situation began to change late in the twentieth  
century with the rise of work in artificial intelligence in which  
computer simulations, such as those of Hinton and Nowlan, suggested  
the plausibility of Baldwin-type mechanisms.  This was taken up and  
advocated by Daniel Dennett in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea thus given  
greater visibility to Baldwin’s notion.  About the same time Terrence  
Deacon utilized the Baldwin effect in his The Symbolic Species to  
explain the rapid evolution of human language.  Concurrently, David  
Depew and I, in Darwinism Evolving, argued that background assumptions  
in systems dynamics gave insight to different phases of the Darwinian  
research tradition and that a shift to complex systems dynamics allows  
Darwinism to encompass phenomena that had been excluded from the  
Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, such as the origin of life. In a volume  
that Depew and I edited, Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect  
Reconsidered, we extend that argument to include the Baldwin effect.   
I will argue that the turn to background assumptions of complex  
systems dynamics allows a supple Darwinism that can include a  
significant role for the Baldwin effect, in particular in  
understanding the emergence of human language.


Everyone is welcome.

Speaker list and papers are available at http://www.chd.ucsd.edu/seminar/f08sched.shtml

For any questions about the seminar contact Katie at kgwagner at psy.ucsd.edu



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