Hi! I’m an enthusiast from a totally unrelated field, and I’m overwhelmed and not sure how to filter what to read or watch to learn more. I’m particularly interested in cognitive linguistics, evolutionary linguistics, and linguistic relativity. If you have any books, videos, or documentaries to recommend, that would be amazing!
I know that algorithms which were developed in evolutionary biology can be used to study language evolution. What needs to be considered when doing so? How does the data differ in linguistics compared to biology? I am especially interested in hybridization and HGT algorithms
The wikipedia article got me interested in the subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
Please recommend some modern, well written books on the origin of language and evolutionary linguistics.
I've read in linguistics texts that some of the basic ideas and methods of evolutionary biology can be traced to the historical linguistics, but only in a very sketchy description. Clearly, there are parallels between phylogenic trees and language families, and the idea that languages evolve from others was at one point a non-obvious idea. And they have both suffered opposition from Biblical literalists. Apparently, Hebrew was once thought to be the proto-language that was splintered at Babel.
What I want to know is whether this connection has ever been explicitly acknowledged in the literature of biology, and whether there is more to it than a few somewhat superficial observations.
I know there is forensics anthropology (thanks to Bones) and cultural anthropology, but what other sub categories of anthropology is there?
Postmortem
When the Petrel got close enough to Earth-space to start sending messages, things got crazy quickly. First, the entire ship needed to be quarantined to prevent possible contamination from the alien species, and then suitable research facilities needed to be organized to investigate the artifacts. Representatives from every faction had opinions about every aspect. What does it mean to humans that another space-faring species has been found? Who will go recover the wreckage and how? How will first contact with this species be implemented to avoid a similar catastrophe to this one, or worse, biological contamination from humans to the aliens? Accidentally killing one ship is bad, but what if humans accidentally kill off an entire planet? It wasn’t long before a massive research effort and its parallel diplomatic effort were under-way.
The first breakthrough came from Information Specialist Almasi Mwangi herself. On the long journey back to human space, she had successfully identified markers in the recovered data storage media that allowed her to separate recordings of voice and video from other digital data. This meant that some of the alien ship’s logs could be replayed. This was jumped on by linguists who, by comparing the alien’s logs of the encounter with the Petrel’s logs of the encounter were able to construct a sort of Rosetta Stone for the alien language. This in turn led to learning the ship’s name (Dawnflower), the names of the crew, how their communications equipment worked, how their star charts worked, and much, much more. Humans now knew where the rladii-occupied planets were and how to communicate with them. It also caused bureaucrats and intelligence services across the Factions to realize how vulnerable humans were to other aliens capturing a human ship. There were going to have to be some serious redesigns for future deep-space ships.
Another set of breakthroughs came from a team headed up by Danish physician and biologist Mark Ruthgar and his team. The frozen pair brought back were indeed a middle aged male and female (named Gnolder and Nagla, according to the linguists), and the female was pregnant. This gave the biologists an unexpected bonanza of information about anatomy and reproduction, as well as tissues for understanding what dis
... keep reading on reddit ➡Actually I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion around here or not but I assume it is due to the level of clout this series has.
I thought I wouldn’t like it because I’m a grown-ass man and it’s a YA series—not always the case but I often find it to be so. I was so pleasantly surprised to find that in terms of tone, prose, and theme, it didn’t feel YA to me at all. Yes the main characters are children but Pullman definitely isn’t writing down to anyone and has no problem brushing up against adult topics when appropriate. What a fresh breath of air for a series marketed as YA. (Edit: apparently this is not uncommon of YA series and my own personal experience with YA is coincidentally confined to very “clean” books)
Unfortunately, there were plenty of other reasons I ended up finding it quite awful. I think it’s clear that Pullman wrote Northern Lights / The Golden Compass without any real idea where the rest of the trilogy was going. Looking back at the end of the series, the gyptians, witches, and armored bears that were so central in book one feel like they’re from a different series. The story in book two takes such a drastic turn away from so many elements set up in the first novel that it feels much more like the actual start of the series, which isn’t something you can get away with when there are only 3 books total.
And where does that story go? To one of the most absurd and laughably nonsensical places I could have imagined. Pullman starts out by dealing with adolescence and original sin, and somehow by the end of book two he has onboarded dark matter and angels. Reading Dr. Malone’s conversation with her “Shadows” will forever be one of the most ridiculous things I’ve had the misfortune of coming across. For our big reveal to be, “Dust is the same as Shadows is the same as dark matter is the same as…angels!” absolutely lost me and almost made me stop reading altogether. I like the idea of tackling the nature of consciousness and modern cosmological theory, and I like the idea of a gritty take on biblical history, but doing both at the same time without any substantial connections or explanations is some of the goofiest shit I could imagine.
And it doesn’t stop there. Next we’re in book 3 and suddenly there’s a world of the dead, an underworld like Hades. No prior mention of this phenomenon, let’s just introduce it in the final book. So now we have Greco-Roman mythology as part of the party too. Oh and by the way there are beings called
... keep reading on reddit ➡As of 14 months ago, I no longer believe in the truth claims and worldview promoted by the LDS church. The following is a brief summary of the arguments in my research that I've found to be most convincing and influential in my loss of faith. I've split the arguments into four main sections that address (A) general religious belief, (B) general Christianity, (C) early Mormonism, and (D) modern Mormonism.
Please push back if any of these are weak, insufficient, poorly formed, or otherwise wanting arguments. I'm also happy to provide citations and/or research resources where applicable. These are all topics that I believe warrant further research for any individual analyzing their faith.
Happy reading!
____________________________________________
A. Religious belief appears to be a natural byproduct of evolutionary processes.
- Religious belief unites groups via shared tenets and prohibits the group members from questioning those tenets. (Religious belief ‘binds and blinds.’)
- Requiring group members to behave and think differently than surrounding populations (e.g., via dietary restrictions, work restrictions, speaking patterns, religious rites, etc.) strengthens the in-group mentality and places a barrier between the in-group and the out-group.
- Our brains are pre-wired for finding patterns, trusting the words of our elders, confirming our own biases and beliefs, ascribing natural events to the workings of an external agent, etc.
- We dislike having our core beliefs challenged, and we are pre-wired to engage in motivated reasoning and belief perseverance in protecting our emotional biases. Our brains reward us when we resolve the cognitive dissonance of having our beliefs challenged.
- Religious belief provides groups with pre-made moral frameworks, purpose in life, relief from existential dread, and supposed knowledge of how things ‘really are.’
- Feelings of peace, expansion, inner warmth, and exhilaration are physiologic and have been reported in a wide variety of scenarios; e.g., in many religions, meditative practices, group activities (secular and religious), psychoactive substance usage, experiences with nature, etc. Religious activities often use practices that stimulate these physiologic responses; e.g., chanting, singing, public speaking, abstaining from food and/or water, meditating, reflecting on others’ suffering, contemplating nature, etc.
- The human subconscious funct
Women are Wonderful Effect
According to Wikipedia — Women-are-wonderful effect: > The women-are-wonderful effect is the phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with women compared to men. This bias reflects an emotional bias toward women as a general case. The phrase was coined by Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic in 1994 after finding that both male and female participants tend to assign positive traits to women, with female participants showing a far more pronounced bias. Positive traits were assigned to men by participants of both genders, but to a far lesser degree. > […] > One study found that the effect is mediated by increased gender equality. The mediation comes not from differences in attitudes towards women, but in attitudes towards men. In more egalitarian societies, people have more positive attitudes towards men than in less egalitarian societies. > […] > Some authors have claimed the "Women are wonderful" effect is applicable when women follow traditional gender roles such as child nurturing and stay-at-home housewife. However, other authors have cited studies indicating that the women-are-wonderful effect is still applicable even when women are in nontraditional gender roles, and the original Eagly, Mladinic & Otto (1991) study discovering the women-are-wonderful effect found no such ambivalence.
Nursery Rhyme — What Are Little Boys Made Of?
What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Snakes, snails
And puppy-dogs' tails
That's what little boys are made of
What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all things nice
That's what little girls are made of
In [Are Women Evaluated More Favorably Than Men?: An Analysis of Attitudes, Beliefs, and Emotions (Eagly et al., 1991)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-6402.199
... keep reading on reddit ➡Do your worst!
A/N: Hey, guys! So, I've got family visiting this week, and I've been spending most of my days with them, and that hasn't left me with a whole lot of time or energy to write, but I have been striving to maintain the habit of writing. I've been doing some work on Episode 17, but most of that writing involves a lot of figurative heavy lifting with wrapping everything in Act III up and tying it all together in sensible fashion, and I haven't had the energy to make much progress on that (though special thanks to r/SemperRabbit, he's been a HUGE help with some important details).
That said, I have been plugging away at the next episode of A Submariner in Space. It's a lot easier to write right now, mostly because I don't have nearly as many characters or as much plotting or back story to deal with. Retreat, Hell is still going to be my main focus, but between family visits and work, I'm not expecting to have the next episode finished until well into September.
In the meantime, though, here's another episode of A Submariner in Space! Enjoy!
P.S. In case you missed it, Retreat, Hell has a Discord now! Come say hi!
https://discord.gg/bujmJ6sQxC
A Submariner in Space – Episode 2
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Mark slowly drifted back to consciousness, pulled there by several soft beeps and tones, at least one of which was keeping time with his hear. Am I in a hospital? Why am I … Was that a dream?
He opened his eyes. The ceiling was tall, almost vaulted, with smooth, metal frames and paneling. That doesn’t look like any hospital I’ve ever been in … He blinked. I’m lying naked on a table again. He carefully tried to raise an arm, and found it unrestrained by anything other than a light sheet. Well, at least I’ve got some decency this time around…
With a quiet sigh, he turned his head to the left. Yep. A bunch of fancy touch screens and symbols I don’t recognize. And everything’s at a more reasonable height … He pondered for a moment. They obviously picked me up, and I’m in some kind of medical room, so that’s a good sign … maybe … Still naked, again, but I’ve got a sheet, and I’m not strapped down, and this table is cushioned …
A cart rolled into view. This one didn’t seem to be quite as flimsy as the one he took cover behind. Instead of any
... keep reading on reddit ➡For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.
I said "hey look, an escaPEA"
No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!
Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂
It really does, I swear!
I'm surprised it hasn't decade.
Awareness is likely the intrinsic nature of a material world.
Hear me out.
I have recently come to the conclusion of panpyschism as a respectable, logical, and coherent hypothesis that explains observational evidence in a realm where existing explanations are, well, shoddy. I want to see if my reasoning is faulty.
Why do I think there is an issue to explore?
-
We know that a subjective experience exists. I exist. You, presumably, exist. We know the subjective experience with more certainty than we know the existence of a universe beyond our subjective experience. Cogito ergo sum, and all that.
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It's also reasonable to accept that the external universe exists. That there is a universe, and the universe is full of stuff, and that stuff obeys certain rules. Objective reality objectively does exist. The brain, by extension, is also made of that same physical stuff. No controversy thus far.
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This leads us to something known as the Hard Problem Of Conciousness. Even if you don't walk away with the panpsychist hypothesis, I do want you to walk away accepting this as a real problem for the physicalist account of reality and an active area of research.
The Hard Problem goes as such - even a full functional accounting of the brain does not tell you what it is like to be a subject. Experiment and external observation could (and, within a few decades, likely will) tell you exactly how the brain functions, what it does, what experiences correspond to what brain states, science will allow us a perfect and complete accounting of the brain - we will probably even one day find the exact mechanism which functions as our subjective experience.
But nowhere in any of this information will we or can we ever capture the exact nature of the moment you experience. It will not and cannot capture why, say, redness is a particular representation of the world for me. You could very well just have all of those visual sensations and wavelengths registering with completely different, perhaps even a fully inverted, color perception of the world - as one example. You can say the same for emotional affect, hot versus cold, the pitch of sound, etcetera. Qualia. These parts of the subject experience are innately inaccessible except via, well, your personal subject experience.
Experimental observation and model building tells us what stuff does. It tells us the objective nature of things. It does so with extreme accuracy. But this does not te
... keep reading on reddit ➡The Righteous Mind - Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Part 1
> I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.
> Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.
> Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.
> The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.
> Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selecti
... keep reading on reddit ➡They’re on standbi
Buenosdillas
Pilot on me!!
1. Introduction. In his book The Evolution of Everything, Matt Ridley analyses culture, human nature, technology, and much more using evolutionary science. Top insights from the book 👇
2. The evolution of morality. People think of morals and laws as inventions. Using the example of the common law, Ridley argues morality instead evolves, directed by "nobody and everybody." Very much like organisms, morality evolves through "replication, variation and selection."
3. The evolution of language. Like life itself, language continuously evolves. Like stronger life forms, crisp words proliferate. Like maladaptive organisms, confusing words that don't serve a purpose go extinct.
4. An interesting fact: the further you move from equator to the poles, the less diverse animal life gets. The same is true of languages. For reasons not entirely clear, both biological and linguistic diversity thrives around the equator.
5. The evolution of music. Humans and chimps have a common ancestor, so do musical instruments like piano and harp. There are "hybridisation events" in species development - and in music too. Ridley writes: "African traditional music mates with blues to produce jazz."
6. Why marriage evolved: "Societies that chose ‘normative monogamy’, or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, and encourage men to work rather than fight."
7. How technology evolves. Crabs independently evolved 5 times. Similarly, a lot of inventors often come up with the same idea independently. This is "convergent evolution." Poincare & Einstein had similar ideas about relativity, Newton & Leibniz created the calculus independently.
8. The evolution of attraction. Men find younger women attractive, and women find "strong, confident, mature and ambitious men attractive." This is evolution talking - men like younger women for their "reproductive fertility," women like high-status men for their resources.
9. Creationism vs Evolution in the economy. Socialist planned economies try to create growth through design but growth can only evolve through free markets. Economies, like evolution, works best when left undirected.
10. Bottom line. Matt Ridley shows that all aspects of life and society can be better understood when seen through the evolutionary lens. From sexual attraction to technology, from music to the ec
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hi, wondering if there are any books explaining how first contact might look like from a scientific perspective. I know there's plenty of fiction exploring the topic but I'm looking for a more expert opinion(s) from any relevant lens like linguistics, anthropology, evolutionary biology, etc. about what it might look like and how chances of friendly first contact could be improved. Realize the likelihood of any kind of first contact event happening in real life is incredibly low but still like the topic a lot.
Even if the book is not about science fiction aliens, and instead about uncontacted indigenous people's, that'd be great too.
Hello all,
For the longest time, I used to have these thoughts as well, and still do, though not as bad. I am a 24 year old male and feel followed every time I go somewhere public. People seem to whisper and gaslight me, ultimately causing me to feel horrible and publicly shamed and humiliated. Upon submitting to these horrible forces, it was as though waves of relief would shutter through these people and they'd become overcome with joy that their manipulation was working. I could never make sense of it all. There were obviously some people in my close friend group who experienced jealousy and envy, (I'd be with friends and all the girls would be focused on talking to me, I'd notice my friend's look of disgust as they overlook him and look at me), though I tried to not let that perception delude me. They would then go on to say nasty things about me but it held no water so ultimately nothing happened (except me becoming more popular as the lies were exposed as lies).
Friedrich Nietzche talks extensively about many of the same ideas that seem to be prevalent with gang-stalking. He talks of the "sick" and "clean". and how they should be thoroughly separated. The clean should not guide the sick, or try to help them, he writes. Doing so will corrupt the clean. One thing that stood out to me in my studies of Nietzche was his idea of what he called the "Shepard of the sick". These are people who guide the group to a new idea or area of attack.
To quote exactly....
"Altering the direction of Resentment. We must count the ascetic priest as the predestined savior, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd. . Indeed, he defends his sick herd well enough, this strange shepherd — he also defends it against itself, against the baseness, spite, malice, and whatever else is natural to the ailing and sick and smolders within the herd itself; he fights with cunning and severity and in secret against anarchy and ever-threatening disintegration within the herd, in which the most dangerous of all explosives, resentment, is constantly accumulating. So to detonate this explosive that it does not blow up herd and herdsman is his essential art, as it is his supreme utility; if one wanted to express the value of the priestly existence in the briefest formula it would be: the priest alters the direction of resentment. For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more exactly, an agent; still more specifically, a guilty agent who is susceptible to suff
... keep reading on reddit ➡
I’ve never understood people who like eating lobster. They are icky, alien creatures with segmented exoskeletons. If you really think about it, you’re basically dining on giant ocean spiders that crawl around the seafloor eating corpses. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against lobsters; they have their domain in the water, and we have ours on land. No reason we should ever have to meet. So when my wife requested a lobster dinner on Friday night to celebrate our anniversary, it was with no pleasure that I held the squirming arthropod a few inches above the pot of boiling water.
“Sorry,” I said as I lowered it into the plume of steam. Its gills flapped uselessly in the air and its claws clicked in an odd rhythm, a cacophony of sounds that seemed to get sharper with each repetition. The noises almost sounded familiar, even though I couldn’t recall ever being this close to a living lobster before.
The clicking and flapping increased in speed and volume as one of the lobster’s bluish legs touched the bubbling water and started to turn red. Why were those sounds so recognizable? I never even knew lobsters could verbally communicate with each other.
For a moment I paused, holding the lobster with one leg submerged as I tried to convince my brain that I was imagining things. A crazy person might believe that the lobster was attempting to form words out of a bunch of squelches and snaps. And I wasn’t crazy. But I couldn’t deny that I recognized honest-to-God human language creaking out of the mandibles and crevices of this creature.
“Fleshhh…” the lobster smacked.
“What?” I asked, holding the lobster up to my face and staring into its black poppy seed eyes.
“Flesh made bone, bone made flesh.”
The production of these sounds appeared to take some effort, as the lobster’s entire body contorted and undulated with each syllable. I turned off the stove so I could hear it better.
“Flesh made bone, bone made flesh. Flesh made bone, bone made flesh. Flesh made bone, bone made flesh…”
The lobster repeated the phrase over and over again, like an incantation. It was undeniable: I was an insane person. I put it back in the small plastic bucket of water I got from the grocery store and the words turned into muffled gurgles. Normal lobster noises, I presumed. Still, I had to be sure. I took a deep breath and picked up the lobster again.
“Flesh made bone…”
I quickly dropped it back in the water with a splash.
I looked at my watch. My wife was working late, so she wa
... keep reading on reddit ➡1. Sarjana
“The 231 session of the 132th refugee fleet congress is now in session.” the speaker announced. “We call upon the working group of radio contact #14” he continued “and ask them to present their findings. Chief engineer Sarjana, technical representative of the Penasora, what did your working group conclude?”
Sarjana stepped up “thank you mr speaker. As has been established, two twelve days ago, we detected anomalous radio signals within local space. It was quickly determined that these signals were of artificial origin, and represented contact with an alien vessel.” She paused to look around the room, concern visible throughout “This working group was then formed and tasked with establishing the nature and origin of this vessel. We have since come to the conclusion that this ship isn’t a ngaiyanan ship, and represents a hitherto unknown alien civilisation.”
The tension among the assembled fleet captains seemed to dissipate a bit, had it been a ngaiyanan military vessel, the immediate survival of the fleet would have been called into serious question. After a few moments, one of the assembled captains piped up “I would like to ask the working group, how did you come to this conclusion? I myself have looked at the thermal images of this unknown vessel, it isn't difficult to see similarities between it and ngaiyanan technology.” The captain in question was Pedang, captain of the Kerajan, and one known for being… obstinate.
It was a valid question though.
Sarjana nodded; “Whilst the thermal signature of their drive does resemble ngaiyanan models, it is likely to be the result of convergent design rather than common origin, there are only so many ways to design a fusion reactor, thus similar designs are bound to appear. All these thermal images tell us is that this vessel represents drive technology of roughly equal capacity to ngaiyanan equivalents.”
Before she could continue, Pedang interrupted her “You haven't answered my question though” Pedang insisted ” only that it is possible for an alien species to have built this ship, I'm asking what sets this ship apart from ngaiyanan vessels?” After a pause, he belatedly tacked on “In your informed opinion.”
As Sarjana was beginning to answer, another of the captains retorted “Captain Pedang, I would like to remind you that
... keep reading on reddit ➡Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.
This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.
If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.
Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.
