I took a lot of notes this morning in a session about human cognition and creativity. A pet topic of mine, but the note volume is surely a good sign that it was a thought-provoking and scribble-worthy bunch of talks. My scrawlings weren’t as organized and coherent as they could have been, but that turned out to be a fairly good comparison with how people seem to feel about this field in general. Let me explain.

Researchers are coming at this problem from a lot of different angles. But there doesn’t always seem to be as much stepping back and taking stock as might be worthwhile for such nebulous terms as ‘language’ and ‘cognition’.

First up, Richard Lewontin of Harvard gave a talk entitled ‘why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition’. Heartening start. His argument was that a lot of research directed at understanding what it is to be human is just story-telling, and that he’s not interested in theories of how we got the faculties we have that are impossible to test. For good measure, he added that “we don’t even know what we mean by cognition”.

The trouble was, he was then followed by people with various stories to tell about human evolution. Dean Falk of Florida State University told us her theory of how humans evolved linguistic capabilities, and, in short, the story proceeded thus: human infants, unlike chimps, can’t grasp onto their mothers, and therefore have to be actively carried, but also put down from time to time as mum forages for food. In turn, mums have to speak what some refer to as ‘motherese’, meaningless baby talk, to keep a bond with the baby. Language is a product of this motherese.

Lewontin wasn’t the only one to sound a note of caution. Robert Berwick of MIT has been taking a close look at some of the genetic work on language, centred on a gene called FOXP2, which disrupts speech if mutated. Lots of people got very excited when this gene was discovered, and some groups have suggested that the differences you see between the chimp and human versions (there are 2 amino acid changes) have been preferentially selected for in human evolution, and thus contributed to our linguistic ability. But Berwick’s contention is that these mutations could well have happened by chance. He finished by imagining the body as a computer suite, and likening the role of FOXP2 – a gene that controls the expression of other genes in the brain and elsewhere in the body – to that of the instructions for your computer’s printer. Quite a relegation by some geneticists’ standards.

I took a lot of notes this morning in a session about human cognition and creativity. A pet topic of mine, but the note volume is surely a good sign that it was a thought-provoking and scribble-worthy bunch of talks. My scrawlings weren’t as organized and coherent as they could have been, but that turned out to be a fairly good comparison with how people seem to feel about this field in general. Let me explain.

Researchers are coming at this problem from a lot of different angles. But there doesn’t always seem to be as much stepping back and taking stock as might be worthwhile for such nebulous terms as ‘language’ and ‘cognition’.

First up, Richard Lewontin of Harvard gave a talk entitled ‘why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition’. Heartening start. His argument was that a lot of research directed at understanding what it is to be human is just story-telling, and that he’s not interested in theories of how we got the faculties we have that are impossible to test. For good measure, he added that “we don’t even know what we mean by cognition”.

The trouble was, he was then followed by people with various stories to tell about human evolution. Dean Falk of Florida State University told us her theory of how humans evolved linguistic capabilities, and, in short, the story proceeded thus: human infants, unlike chimps, can’t grasp onto their mothers, and therefore have to be actively carried, but also put down from time to time as mum forages for food. In turn, mums have to speak what some refer to as ‘motherese’, meaningless baby talk, to keep a bond with the baby. Language is a product of this motherese.

Lewontin wasn’t the only one to sound a note of caution. Robert Berwick of MIT has been taking a close look at some of the genetic work on language, centred on a gene called FOXP2, which disrupts speech if mutated. Lots of people got very excited when this gene was discovered, and some groups have suggested that the differences you see between the chimp and human versions (there are 2 amino acid changes) have been preferentially selected for in human evolution, and thus contributed to our linguistic ability. But Berwick’s contention is that these mutations could well have happened by chance. He finished by imagining the body as a computer suite, and likening the role of FOXP2 – a gene that controls the expression of other genes in the brain and elsewhere in the body – to that of the instructions for your computer’s printer. Quite a relegation by some geneticists’ standards.