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This is Science Surf 96.1, the very first issue.

SCIENCE SURF
William H. Calvin

The flâneurs of this café électronique will have to provide their own espresso – but the science that you'll overhear is pretty exciting all by itself, virtual caffeine for the inquiring mind.
The raconteur at this particular café finds neurobiology fascinating, dabbles in evolutionary theory, and is a long-time observer of what's going on in anthropology and archaeology, complexity and chaos, climate change (abrupt and gradual), linguistics, neurology, neurosurgery, oceanography, physics/astronomy, psychology and psychiatry, and the enabling technologies, all the way from brain imaging to web servers.
My Scientific American article, "The emergence of intelligence," has been widely translated, and my book The River That Flows Uphill recently became a bestseller in German translation.
My other ten books and some of my science articles can be browsed at http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin

Quick Links... The "timing attack" on public-key cryptosystems. || Straight from Stockholm, The 1995 Nobel Prizes || Don't miss seeing the new web page designs at Cape Cod's Marine Biological Laboratory || New Scientist is now on the web || Grand Canyon River Running || Bonobos (pygmy chimps) || El Niño climate data || Neurosciences || Boids (Flocks, Herds, and Schools) || San Francisco's Exploratorium || The Armchair Scientist (Lo Scienziato in Poltrona) || Découverte d'une grotte ornée paléolithique à Vallon-Pont-d'Arc (Ardèche) || StarTrak monthly skies || The Virtual Earth || Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory || GLOBAL CHANGE || The ASTRONOMY CAFE || EVERYDAY SCIENCE || CELLS alive! || Bill's World of Astronomy || Bonobo Sex and Society || CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report || Aquatic Ape Info || Fossil Hominids || WWWVL History of Science, Technology and Medicine - Overview || Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species full text || Rock Art || Le radici della memoria || the Natural History Museum (London) || Shakespeare Homepage || Hawaii Lava Flow Hazard Map || TEACHERS ONLY: Discover how to hide answers on web page questions


Back Issues...

[Well, there aren't any yet....]


FEATURES....

What we all need to reset our circadian rhythms is an instantaneous
   Time Jump


Educated birds and bonobos have been getting better at language, but linguists keep raising the hurdles for
   True Language


BOOK BITES....

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin's
      Kanzi

Derek Bickerton's
      Language and Species

James Gould and Carol Grant Gould's
      The Animal Mind

DEPARTMENTS....

Department of Lists covers what other recommenders are recommending these days.

Besides writing books such as The Media Lab and How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand has been running a book club for the futurist-minded members of the Global Business Network since 1988 and the cumulative list of selections (with Stewart's commentaries) has a lot of food for thought.

Department of Brains (Here at Brainstorms, we have a division of responsibility: Howard is in charge of the storms).

[Sorry, no brains today]

Department of Reading There are [NEW!] books from

Gary Cziko Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution . Bookstore link.
Richard Dawkins River Out of Eden. Bookstore link
Stan Franklin Artificial Minds. Bookstore link
Walter Freeman Societies of Brains,
John Holland Hidden Order,
Kay Redfield Jamison An Unquiet Mind
George Johnson Fire in the Mind
Stuart Kauffman At Home in the Universe,
William J. Mitchell City of Bits,
Jay Ogilvy Living Without a Goal,
Oliver Sacks An Anthropologist from Mars,
Jonathan Weiner The Beak of the Finch.


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BOOK BITES....
Short comments but mostly excerpts, in the Whole Earth Review style.





Kanzi

is the excellent book on ape language by



Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

and

Roger Lewin

(McGraw-Hill 1994). ISBN 047115959X. Now out in paperback.

The NHK/Nova/BBC special last year introduced you to Kanzi, the bonobo with an understanding of English equal to a two-and-a-half year old child.


"All organisms with complex nervous systems are faced with the moment-by-moment question that is posed by life: What shall I do next?"


"Comprehension demands an active intellectual process of listening to another party while trying to figure out, from a short burst of sounds, the other's meaning and intent both of which are always imperfectly conveyed. Production, by contrast, is simple. We know what we think and what we wish to mean. We don't have to figure out "what it is we mean," only how to say it. By contrast, when we listen to someone else, we not only have to determine what the other person is saying, but also what he or she means by what is said, without the insider's knowledge that the speaker has."
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Language and Species

is the book on the evolution of human language abilities by

Derek Bickerton

(University of Chicago Press, 1990).

His Language and Human Behavior is just out from the University of Washington Press. See the book review by George Johnson in the New York Times Book Review of December 10, 1995.

"[We] can understand neither ourselves nor our world until we have fully understood what language is and what it has done for our species. For although language made our species and made the world we inhabit, the powers it unleashed drove us to understand and control our environment, rather than explore the mainspring of our own being. We have followed that path of control and domination until even the most daring among us have begun to fear where it may lead. Now the engine of our quest for power and knowledge should itself become the object that we seek to know."

"The paradox of consciousness -- that the more consciousness one has, the more layers of processing divide one from the world -- is, like so much else in nature, a trade-off. Progressive distancing from the external world is simply the price that is paid for knowing anything about the world at all. The deeper and broader [our] consciousness of the world becomes, the more complex the layers of processing necessary to obtain that consciousness."
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The Animal Mind



James Gould

and

Carol Grant Gould

(Scientific American Library, 1994).
"What makes the wasp's behavior more like that of a computer than an architect is the lack of any comprehension of the goal. Instead, the insect focuses on a series of immediate tasks. This distinction between "local" tasks, which could be accomplished by innate programming alone, and "global" goals, which may require a more complete perspective and understanding of the need a behavior serves, will be crucial to our analyses of more complex behavior."

"While innate processing, instinctive behavior, internally orchestrated motivation and drive, and innately guided learning are all essential and important elements of an animal's cognitive repertoire, they are not likely to be part of that more esoteric realm of mental activity that we associate with thinking, judgment, and decision-making. But what is thought, and how are we to recognize its operation in other creatures within that most private of organs, the brain? What behavioral criteria can permit us to distinguish between the true thought that we are wont to believe goes into our aesthetic, moral, and practical decision-making on one hand, and the intricate programming that can create the illusion of thought in at least certain other animals? Or could it be, as advocates of artificial intelligence suspect, that all thought, including ours, is just the consequence of clever programming?"

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FEATURES...
(Well, you could have taken the fast links -- and then used the bounce-back buttons)



TIME JUMPS:
Resetting Circadian Rhythms
by Ten Time Zones
in Only One Day

copyright ©1995 by
William H. Calvin

Problem: You are boarding an overnight over-the-pole flight in North America that will get you into Europe in the morning. The following day, you'll need to get up at 0630 for a full day of business. But 0630 there is (yawn) 9:30pm back home.

Actually, for me, it is usually worse because I've been staying up late, getting ready for the trip, and so have slept late for the last few days. Thus I have a 10-11 hour time shift to make, night into day in a big way. But I can usually do it in just one night: I'm normally alert the first business day in Europe and sleeping well the rest of the week. The method is simple and requires nothing more than a sleeping mask and earplugs for the airplane flight.

I arrived at the method because, as a physiologist, I've been following some of the sleep researchers' studies on resetting circadian rhythms with bright lights. Melatonin is released by the pineal gland during darkness, and it's something of a master hormone. Influence it and you influence many of your body's other biological clocks. And I'd also noticed another result from the sleep researchers: about half your eight hours of sleep are only a very light sleep. That's when you are seemingly half awake, mulling things over repetitively without making much progress. Yet it's restful.

And so Rule #1: Stay in the dark on that plane flight by using a sleep mask most of the time.
Ignore the movie and use ear plugs to avoid hearing the conversations around you. Even if you don't "fall asleep," those hours of mulling things over still "count." Don't yield to the temptation to turn on the light and read. I eat the dinner and breakfast when served, get up to exercise, and check out the glaciers if flying over Greenland -- but otherwise I wear the sleeping mask and earplugs.

Rule #2 is to avoid naps when you check into the hotel.
Go out and sightsee, and sit in a sidewalk cafe when you get tired. Drink many glasses of water, as airplane flights are dehydrating. Get lots of sunlight while it is nighttime back home, to keep that melatonin secretion suppressed. After dinner (skip the coffee, of course), you can consider getting ready for bed, but avoid alcohol for a few hours before bedtime (it makes you more likely to wake up three hours later, totally unable to get back to sleep). If you have to get up in the middle of the night, don't leave the lights on for very long. Don't read. Don't take a sip of scotch. Hopefully you'll get ten hours of good sleep, dreams and all, but get at least ten hours of mulling-things-over in the dark in any event.

Rule #3 applies the next morning: before breakfast, go for a walk.
That's usually the only way to get a lot of bright light, and it will stop melatonin. The exercise will warm you up, and accelerating the morning rise in body temperature also helps reset those circadian rhythms. During breaks in the day's schedule, get outdoors and look at the tree tops, even if only for ten minutes. Repeat the next morning and you'll probably convince your body's clocks that the big reset is for real.

The worst thing you can do (which is indeed what most people do) is to get up late, hurry through breakfast, and then go into a relatively dim conference room for the rest of the day -- thereby missing the dose of bright light and the exercise. It may be hard to stay up all day after arrival, and hard to avoid getting up to read when you can't sleep, but it avoids the disrupted sleep that otherwise affects you for many days.

One more minor rule, more psychological than physiological: reset your watch to the destination's time when you first board your flight.
If someone asks you what time it is back home, say "I don't want to even think about it."

Westbound is easier, as it's just one very long day and you finally get to bed at a locally normal hour. In-flight naps and alcohol are okay except in the evening, destination time. Get up the next morning at a normal hour and go for a long walk, avoiding naps for the rest of the day.

No guarantees, but this method has been working for me for a few years now, and I used to be jetlagged for four days. I carry along some melatonin pills to take if I have trouble getting to sleep, but they're seldom necessary.

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TRUE LANGUAGE:
Animal Language Abilities
and What the Linguists Study

copyright ©1995 by
William H. Calvin

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.
Bertrand Russell


Problem: Chimpanzees, our closest cousins, have about three dozen vocalizations. But they're all meaningful in themselves: A chimp's loud waa-bark is defiant, angry. A soft cough-bark is, surprisingly, a threat. Wraaa mixes fear with curiousity ("Weird stuff, this!") and the soft huu signifies weird without hostility ("What is this stuff?"). Combinations are not used for special meanings. Humans also have about three dozen units of vocalization -- but they're all meaningless! Even syllables like /ba/ and /ga/ are meaningless unless combined with others to make meaningful words such as bat.

Vervet monkeys in the wild use four different alarm calls, warning of each of their typical predators. They have other vocalizations that call the group together or warn of the approach of another group of monkeys. But they're all single purpose calls. Vervets may repeat them to intensify their meaning, but they don't combine two of them to create a third meaning. If the chimp's waa-wraaa-huu (literally: defiant-angry, curious-fear, then simply weird) is to mean something different than huu-wraaa-waa, then the chimp is going to have to suspend judgment, ignore those standard meanings of each call until the whole string has been received and analyzed.

The honey bee has, at least in the context of a simple coordinate system, broken out of the mold of one-sign-one-meaning. The bee returning to her hive performs a "waggle dance" in a figure-8 that communicates a number of items of information about the location and quality of a food source that she has just visited. The angle of the figure-8 axis points toward the food. The duration of the waggle dance is proportional to the distance from the hive, e.g., three loops around the figure-8 would suggest 60 meters away to the average Italian honey bee observing the dance (though 150 meters to a German one, a matter of genes rather than the company in which the bee had been reared).

Still, the linguists are not very impressed:

All other creatures can communicate only about things that have evolutionary significance for them, but human beings can communicate about anything.... Animal calls and signs are structurally holistic [and] cannot be broken down into component parts, as language can.... Though in themselves the sounds of a language are meaningless, they can be recombined in different ways to yield thousands of words, each distinct in meaning.... In just the same way, a finite stock of words... can be combined to produce an infinite number of sentences. Nothing remotely like this is found in animal communication. [Ray Jackendoff, Patterns in the Mind, 1993]


With enough experience, various animals can learn a wide range of words, symbols, or human gestures – but one must be careful to distinguish between comprehension and the ability to originate fancy communications. They don't necessarily go together.

One psychologist's dog understands about 90 items; the 60 it produces don't overlap very much in meaning with the receptive ones. A sea lion has learned to comprehend 190 human gestures – but doesn't gesture back with the same productivity. Bonobos have learned an even greater number of symbols for words and can combine them with gestures to make requests. A gray parrot has learned, over the course of a decade, a 70-word vocabulary that includes 30 object names, seven colors, five shape adjectives, and a variety of other "words" – and can make requests with some of them.

None of these talented animals is telling stories about who did what to whom; they're not even discussing the weather. But it is clear that our closest cousins, the chimpanzee and the bonobo, can achieve considerable levels of language comprehension with the aid of skilled teachers who can motivate them. The most accomplished bonobo can interpret sentences he's never heard before, such as "Kanzi, go to the office and bring back the red ball," about as well as a 2.5-year-old child. Neither bonobo nor child is constructing such sentences, but they can demonstrate by their actions that they understand them. And comprehension comes first, production later, as language develops in children.


All of this animal communicative ability is very impressive, but is it language? The term language is used rather loosely by most people. First of all, it refers to particular dialects such as English and German and Dutch (and the Middle German of 1300 from which each was partially derived). But language also designates the overarching category of communication systems that are especially elaborate. Bee researchers use language to describe what they see, and chimpanzee researchers do too. Where do animal symbolic repertoires become humanlike language?

It's not obvious. Webster's offers "a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meaning" as one definition of language. That would encompass the above examples. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh suggests that the essence of language is "the ability to tell another individual something he or she did not already know" which, of course, means that the receiving individual is going to have to use some Piagettian guessing-right intelligence in constructing a meaning.

But humanlike language? Linguists will immediately say "No, there are rules!" They will start talking about the rules implied by mental grammar and questioning if they are present in any of the nonhuman examples. That some animals such as Kanzi can make use of word order to disambiguate requests does not impress them. The linguist Ray Jackendoff is more diplomatic than most, but has the same bottom line:

A lot of people have taken the issue to be whether the apes have language or not, citing definitions and counter-definitions to support their position. I think this is a silly dispute, often driven by an interest either in reducing the distance between people and animals or in maintaining this distance at all costs. In an attempt to be less doctrinaire, let's ask: do the apes succeed in communicating? Undoubtedly yes. It even looks as if they succeed in communicating symbolically, which is pretty impressive. But, going beyond that, it does not look as though they are capable of constructing a mental grammar that regiments the symbols coherently. (Again, a matter of degree – maybe there is a little, but nothing near human capacity.) In short, Universal Grammar, or even something remotely like it, appears to be exclusively human.
And what's grammar, let alone Universal Grammar? That's a story for another day. Suffice it to say that there can be levels of complexity to language, just as there are to music. You can't say that polyphonic music isn't music, merely because it lacks Bach's use of the contrapuntal techniques of stretto, parallel voice-leading, and mirror inversions of themes. But you can say that it isn't Bach.
Adapted from my book, How Brains Think in the Science Masters series from Basic Books (HarperCollins) in the USA, Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK, and various translation editions elsewhere (including China). It expands on my Scientific American article.
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THE END
Original elements (borrowing abounds, of course)
copyright ©1995 by William H. Calvin
thanks to www.digits.com