Being Human

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There's a comprehensive and compelling introduction to neuroanthropology over at the blog of the same name that outlines why we can't fully understand the brain or culture while thinking of them as separate entities.

The Neuroanthropology blog is run by two of the main researchers in the field and this recent article was written to launch their recent conference 'The Encultured Brain'.

The article is in-depth but accessible and clearly lays out the main ideas in the field, looking at the benefits to both brain science and cultural studies in a combined approach and noting where narrow thinking has dimmed our view of human nature.

The potential gains are enormous: a robust account of brains in the wild, an understanding of how we come to possess our distinctive capacities and the degree to which these might be malleable across our entire species. The applications of this sort of research are myriad in diverse areas such as education, cross-cultural communication, developmental psychology, design, therapy, and information technology, to name just a few. But the first step is the one taken here – by coming together, we can achieve significant advances in understanding how our very humanity relies on the intricate interplay of brain and culture.

Link to 'Why Neuroanthropology? Why Now?'

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky writes to me, following up on my Maurice Sendak "half-sentence" posting (which I'll have more to say about in a while):

… if I knew how to encourage sentence fragments, I would go for that. Opal's sentences go on for*ev*er. And if I type them for her, and she's watching, and I try to put a period in, so there's a shorter sentence even though it starts with "And"? She says "No, that's not right, it's part of the same sentence. Didn't you hear the 'and'?" Fortunately she doesn't usually watch me type, allowing me to punctuate things as I see fit.

Two things here. First, Opal's attention to the conventions of writing, including her awareness of the stupid No Initial Coordinators advice about written English. Opal is 5, in kindergarten (which she started last month), and is writing on her own, but decidedly imperfectly (she is given, for example, to shifting to a new line when she comes to the edge of the paper, even if that's in the middle of a word), so I'm astonished that she even knows about NIC (and can refer, albeit indirectly, to it), much less cares so deeply about it. Where did she pick up this stuff? Certainly not from her family.

The other thing is Elizabeth's reference to "sentence fragments". Sentences with initial coordinators are not sentence fragments on that account (Elizabeth's sentence beginning "And if" is indeed a sentence fragment, but not because of the "And"). The problem is how to refer to sentences with initial coordinators in an unbiased fashion, without labeling them as a kind of error, as "sentence fragments". Yes, I know, sentence fragments are not in general ungrammatical, but the label has picked up an association with incorrectness. Similar problems arise in other contexts, for instance with regard to "dangling modifiers".

The usual labels are the ones that are widely known by the general public, but they are tainted by their association with error, and that makes it hard to talk about phenomena. In my own practice, I bounce back and forth between the usual labels and neutral, but unfamiliar, terminology, depending on the context.

In a comment on my post "Metapun", John S. Wilkins traced the phrase "missing link" back, conceptually if not literally,  to the  "great chain of being" metaphor featured in Alexander Pope's 1744 Essay on Man:

[…] On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From Nature's chain whatever link you like,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

Although Pope didn't use the specific word-sequence "missing link" — nor the word missing at all –  the concept is implicit in the idea of the "link" that "breaks the chain".  This morning, Victor Steinbok sent in the result of some textual sleuthing, which suggests that the collocation "missing link" was in the air of  1860 Britain with reference to links in other sorts of metaphorical chains,  neither Darwin's chain of "descent with modification" nor Pope's chain of "full creation".  Victor also turns up an example, from a widely-read work originally published in 1844, that uses "missing link" in the context of patterns of taxonomic similarity in biology.

Here's Victor's note:

You probably know that I am little more than an amateur when it comes to word sleuthing. On the other hand, unlike high-tech enterprises, it is a field that is somewhat accessible to amateurs with an inclination to research (and I have plenty of research training in rather diverse disciplines) and a desire for accuracy.

Lacking affiliation and easy research library access, at the moment, this would be a complete waste of time without Google Book Search –and these are, by all accounts, notoriously unreliable in many respects. The greatest part that is missing is context–it is often hard to place the volume, even correctly identified and dated, within the context of its contemporaneous publications. In a different field, this would be small bother–one can simply look up more books on the same subject and get a rather exhaustive picture. Not so here.

So, with this preface, I want to attempt to dig further into the "missing link"–the subject broached earlier on Language Log and on Visual Thesaurus (hence the two recipients of this email). I find it interesting that the OED entry for the "missing link" has an explicit evolutionary component:

1. Something lacking to complete a series or to form an intermediate between two things, esp. in an evolutionary process; (Anthropol.) a hypothetical animal assumed to be an evolutionary link between man and the anthropoid apes, esp. as sought by early evolutionary biologists.

The second definition is simply a variation on the first. Given the list of citations, this is not surprising. All are dealing with hominid species supposedly bridging the gap between large apes and humans. To these there should be added at least one entry from 2009–there have been quite a few pronouncing the end of the "missing link theory" with the arrival of "Ardi". In fact, similar claims have been made repeatedly with the latest finds of early hominids throughout the decade.

But this is clearly not a sufficient reason to get excited. Adding recent citations does not involve any antedating.

Now, returning to the source of the definition–largely citations of texts related to evolution. Judging from this list, it would be easy to overlook the fact that "missing link" was quite a popular expression, say, in London, circa 1860. And it had nothing to do with evolution. In fact, GoogleBooks does provide evidence of other sources–for one, a book published in 1859 in London by that very title. The exact name of the volume was "The missing link: or, Bible-women in the homes of the London poor, by L.N.R." It did not take long for the literatti to figure out that "L.N." stood for "Ellen", so that the book had actually been written by Ellen Henrietta Ranyard.

The subject of the book was, predictably, "Bible-women"–actually, women who went to the London tenements, Bible in hand, to return the masses to religion. The book appears to have been quite a hit–so much so that the London Quarterly Review turned it into the lead for the July 1860 issue. And it crossed the Atlantic as well–the New Englander and Yale Review gave it a paragraph (p. 274) in its February 1860 issue, and returned to it again (p. 1113f) in its November 1860 issue as part of the review of Ranyard's other book (both mentioned in Vol. XVIII).

The Book and its Story–The writer of this book published some time ago a little volume, to which she gave the somewhat singular title, "The Missing Link." We furnished some account of it on page 274 of the present volume. It was a simple narrative of her efforts in sending female colporteurs, or "Bible women," among that wretched class of people in London, who swarm in "tenement houses" in such places as "The Seven Dials." The success which these female colporteurs met with in circulating the Bible was suh that her account of it has been rapidly but quietly working its way into public favor and notice; and in July last, the London Quarterly made "The Missing Link" the basis of its leading Article.

To say the least, London, specifically, and English readers, more broadly, had been well primed by this little volume. With that in mind, Hopkins's line

But then, where are the missing links in the chain of of intellectual and moral being?

may well take on a somewhat different meaning. Although the citation is sandwiched by two Lyell quotations that have an undoubtedly evolutionary meaning, the two are actually quite removed from each other. Meanwhile, Hopkins wrote his article in Frasier's precisely around the time when the book was making rounds, explaining how the women were providing the "missing link" in the moral development of the wretched classes.

My proposition is a mere speculation, but, I don't believe, we can simply ignore the context here. Of course, there are two more things to consider. First, Lyell's 1851 citation is still earlier than Ranard's book. So there is no primacy claim. Rather, I am suggesting that the use in the anti-evolutionary circles might have arisen from the blend of the two tomes published, quite coincidentally, in the same year.

Second–and this is more important–the use of the expression in the title suggest that it was not quite as "singular" as the Yale Review suggests. In fact, it may well have been a play on a more familiar use and that surely was not the one exemplified by Lyell. Note, for example another 1860 periodical (November) using the phrase in a way similar to Ranyard's:

The Arabs of the street and of the city are being gathered into ragged schools, the social evil is being grappled with at midnight, "the missing link" of woman's gentle hand is now bringing up from the dregs of society into the genial influences of regenerating love and truth the most hideous shapes of lost humanity.

Here, GoogleBooks fails. This is precisely the limitation that I mentioned earlier–simply having access to a number of scanned books cannot provide a live context. Yet, it does offer a glimpse, even though most of the sources in question are not actually available.

Obviousness is a term of art in patent law that describes a type of invention that would have been inevitably discovered through regular use and adaptation of existing patents and, therefore, does not allow for a patent of its own. Certainly, the combination "missing link" is obvious in this sense. (See, for example, The Head of the Family, by Dinah Maria Craik, 1852, p. 67)

By far the more interesting use of "the missing link" is in genealogy. In particular, WorldCat has a pointer to an 1810 title My ancestors to the missing link, or, The family tree of Pierson Worrall Banning (Chicago). There is a GoogleBooks entry, but it lacks the text. Yet, the meaning within the title appears to be rather similar to that used later in evolutionary arguments.

The link between genealogical use and evolutionary use of the expression should by no means be ignored! Widener (Harvard) holds another 1860 London volume that provides an interesting text. (p. 51)

The internal structure of the stem, and the character of the seed-vessels, show them to have been a link between single-lobed and double-lobed plants–a fact worthy of note, as it favours the idea of a progress in vegetable creation, in the line of an improved organization. It is also curious to find a missing link of so much importance in a genus of plants which has long ceased to have a living place upon earth.

The volume is the 11th edition (!) of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation [apparently] by Robert Chambers. Note, in particular, that the text does not refer merely to a "link" but to a "missing link". The text also appears to have been adopted from earlier editions, as additional materials are [bracketed] (e.g., on p. 54). The text cites Murchison and Agassiz rather heavily. (There is a citation to Lyell's Elements of Geology on p. 88 and a reference to Darwin's Journals on p. 81.) It is interesting that when the author gets to "the origins of the animated tribes", the text turns to religion. Evolution is only brought up in the appendix ("Proofs, Illustrations, Authorities, etc."). But the same "missing link" phrase is found on p. 62 of the 1845 2nd New York edition, which claims to be "from the third London edition, greatly amended by the author".

This makes perfect sense–it is highly unlikely that the phrase "the missing link" would have been adapted as satire on evolutionary claims had its normal use not been already well established in paleobotany or a related discipline. The connection to genealogy makes perfect sense.

I've done little more than some preliminary work, in an attempt to trace the possible formation and evolution of the expression prior to its use in the debates on evolution. I really don't know if anyone else will care for extending the origin of the phrase back anywhere from 6 to 50+ years, even though the meaning is not precisely the same. In fact, there appear to be two meanings — one is the genealogical one, referring to some unidentified, near-mythical ancestor, the other the connection between the Great Unwashed and the "intellectual and moral development", i.e., religion and/or the Bible. Both of these appear to have merged in the debate on evolution, giving it the necessary ironic twist.

[Above is a guest post by Victor Steinbok.]

[(myl): Here's a description of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, from the publisher's blurb for a  recent reprint:

Originally published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges proved to be as controversial as its author expected. Integrating research in the burgeoning sciences of anthropology, geology, astronomy, biology, economics, and chemistry, it was the first attempt to connect the natural sciences to a history of creation. The author, whose identity was not revealed until 1884, was Robert Chambers, a leading Scottish writer and publisher. Vestiges reached a huge popular audience and was widely read by the social and intellectual elite. It sparked debate about natural law, setting the stage for the controversy over Darwin's Origin. In response to the surrounding debate and criticism, Chambers published Explanations: A Sequel, in which he offered a reasoned defense of his ideas about natural law, castigating what he saw as the narrowness of specialist science. With a new introduction by James Secord, a bibliography of reviews, and a new index, this volume adds to Vestiges and Explanations Chambers's earliest works on cosmology, an essay on Darwin, and an autobiographical essay, raising important issues about the changing meanings of popular science and religion and the rise of secular ideologies in Western culture.

This reprint, whose version of Vestiges is a facsimile of the 1844 original, has the same passage ("It is also curious to find a missing link of so much importance in a genus of plants which has long ceased to have a living place upon earth").  This seems to indicate that a taxonomic meaning of "missing link", indeterminate between creationist and evolutionary interpretations, was well established before the publication of Darwin's work in 1859.]

In response to my recent posts "The United States as a subject" and "When did the Supreme Court make us an 'is'?", Rich Rostrom sent the following essay, reflecting some research he did a few years ago.

One popular comment on the Civil War is that "before the war, people said 'The United States are…', whereas after the war, they said 'The United States is…". That is, the common idea of 'the United States' changed from plural to singular - from a collection of states to a nation.

This comment was given much play in the Ken Burns PBS series a few years ago.

However, some have questioned it, as being rather too neat, and not actually supported by evidence.

I decided to make an inquiry, by examining a number of texts from the periods before and after the war, to see if there was a change in usage. I went to the Avalon Collection at Yale University for my sources.

The documents in the Avalon Collection include the Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents, Annual Messages of the early Presidents, and many of the treaties made by the United States.

I searched through these documents for all usages of the phrase "United States", and noted from context whether the phrase was a plural or singular. This could be determined by the form of an associated verb: "are"/ "is", of course, but also "have"/"has", or "do"/"does". An associated possesive is also indicative: "their"/"its".

All the indicative usages I found are quoted below.

The phrase did not appear as often as one might imagine - it is missing entirely from, for instance, some of the inaugural addresses.

In many other cases, it appears as a part of a longer phrase, such as "President of the United States" or "Constitution of the United States", or in a manner that does not distinguish singular from plural. For instance in the phrase 'the United States will…', 'United States' could be either singular or plural. It seems that some authors preferred to avoid any indicative usage.

Of all the documents I looked at, only 20 had an indicative usage. Some had more than one. Monroe's two inaugurals had nine plural usages. He seems to have been more decided on the point than anyone else.

The first singular usage appears in Jackson's Proclamation Regarding Nullification of 1832; there is also a plural usage there. The next singular usage is in the Gadsden Purchase Treaty of 1853, where there are three such (and no plurals); a big change from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, where there are five plurals.

The next item (in chronological order) is Seward's treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska, in which "the United States agree to pay…" - after the War, but still plural.

I mentioned the various treaties. Most of these are routine treaties for commerce, navigation, trade-marks, naturalization, and so on. The boiler plate at the beginning of some of these lists the persons concerned in the making of the treaty: the President, the American negotiator, the foreign minister of the other power, and the other state or monarch. In several of these treaties, the boiler plate begins "The President of the United States of America, So-and-So, their Envoy…" etc.  That is, the envoy or minister of the United States in plural. This usage appears as late as an 1896 treaty with Argentina.   Some of the treaties had no indicative usage; none had singular usage.

The last four documents are the inaugural addresses of McKInley, Taft, and Hoover. All references in them are singular.

So while it is true the change in question took place, it is not at all clear that it took place at the time of the Civil War.

Here are the quoted usages.

Fourth Annual Message of George Washington, November 6, 1792 …

on the part of the United States or their citizens…

First Annual Message of John Adams, November 22, 1797

… vessels and merchandise taken within the limits and jurisdiction of the United States and brought into their ports…

Third Annual Message of John Adams, December 3, 1799

…the engagements contracted by the United States in their treaties with His Britannic Majesty…

First Inaugural Address of James Monroe, MARCH 4, 1817

During a period fraught with difficulties and marked by very extraordinary events the United States have flourished beyond example.

Situated within the temperate zone, and extending through many degrees of latitude along the Atlantic, the United States enjoy all the varieties of climate, and every production incident to that portion of the globe.

With such an organization of such a people the United States have nothing to dread from foreign invasion.

It is particularly gratifying to me to enter on the discharge of these duties at a time when the United States are blessed with peace.

Second Inaugural Address of James Monroe, MARCH 5, 1821

… the United States… will always have it in their power to adopt such measures … as their honor and interest may require.

the right claimed by the United States for their citizens to take and cure fish …

The great interests which the United States have in the Pacific…

The situation of the United States in regard to their resources, the extent of their revenue…

The United States now enjoy the complete and uninterrupted sovereignty over the whole territory…

President Jackson's Proclamation Regarding Nullification, December 10, 1832

… the laws of the United States, its Constitution…

To say that… is to say that the United States are not a nation.

Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Navigation and Commerce Between the United States and Venezuela; May 31, 1836

… whatever… can be… lawfully imported into the United States in their own vessels…

Morocco - Treaty of Peace; September 16, 1836

If any of the citizens of the United States, or any persons under their protection…

Treaty with Hanover of Commerce and Navigation; June 10, 1846

… whatever… can be… lawfully imported into the United States in their own vessels…

… the growth, produce, and manufacture of the United States, and of their fisheries

The United States agree to extend…

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; February 2, 1848

… those invasions which the United States have solemnly obliged themselves to restrain.

The United States engage, moreover, to assume and pay to the claimants…

The United States do furthermore discharge the Mexican Republic…

The United States, exonerating Mexico from… the claims of their citizens… undertake to make satisfaction for the same…

Gadsden Purchase Treaty : December 30, 1853

The United States, by its agents, shall have the right…

… the effects of the United States government and its citizens…

… the United States may extend its protection as it shall judge wise to it when it may feel sanctioned…

Treaty concerning the Cession of the Russian Possessions in North America …to the United States of America : June 20, 1867

In consideration of the cession aforesaid, the United States agree to pay…

Convention Concerning the Rights, Privileges, and Immunities of Consuls: December 5, 1868

Henry Shelton Sanford, a citizen of the United States, their Minister Resident near His Majesty the King of the Belgians

Trade-Mark Convention Between the United States and Austria-Hungary; November 25, 1871

The President of the United States of America, John Jay, their Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America to His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty…

Extradition Convention Between the United States and Argentina; September 26, 1896.

The President of the United States of America, William I. Buchanan, their Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, to the Argentine Republic…

First Inaugural Address of William McKinley, MARCH 4, 1897

The United States has progressed with marvelous rapidity…

Second Inaugural Address of William McKinley, MARCH 4, 1901

… the … policy of the United States in its relation to Cuba.

Inaugural Address of William Howard Taft, MARCH 4, 1909

… the mainland of the United States and in its dependencies.

… the United States can maintain her interests intact…

The policy of the United States in the Spanish war and since has given it a position of influence…

Inaugural Address of Herbert Hoover, MARCH 4, 1929

The United States fully accepts the profound truth…

The United States seeks by these reservations…

[Above is a guest post by Rich Rostrom.]

Grace Wu sent me a photograph taken at Taipei Storyland, shown at the right (click on the image for a larger version).

The characters running down the right side of the picture read as follows:

WO3 YAO4 SHUO1 GUO2YU3, BU4 SHUO1 FANG1YAN2
"I want to speak the national language, not the topolects."

In other words, "Let's speak Mandarin, not Taiwanese, Hakka, Cantonese, etc."

This injunction to speak Mandarin at the expense of the regional Sinitic languages ties in with numerous Language Log posts, such as Arnold Zwicky's "How many ethnic groups?" and my own on the "Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages."

Moreover, it also comports with the Zeitgeist reflected in several recent articles in the South China Morning Post.  The first (October 6, 2009, p. A6), entitled "Cantonese almost became the official language," is by He Huifeng:

Putonghua is the official language on the mainland, but if history had played out differently the vast majority could have been speaking Cantonese.

In 1912, shortly after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the founding fathers of the republic met to decide which language should be spoken in the new China.

Mandarin - now known as Putonghua [the common language] - was then a northern dialect spoken by the hated Manchurian officials. While it had served as China's lingua franca for centuries, many perceived it as an "impure form" of Chinese.

Many of the revolutionary leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, were from Guangdong - which has long been China's land of new ideas. A great debate started between the delegates and eventually led to a formal vote. Cantonese lost out by a small margin to Putonghua and the rest is history.

While historians today still argue about the authenticity of the story, it is something Guangdong people love to tell. Many Cantonese speakers feel proud of their native language, saying it has more in common with ancient classical Chinese than Putonghua - which is a mix of northern dialects heavily influenced by Manchurian and Mongolian.

Linguists agree to some extent. "Cantonese is closer to classical Chinese in its pronunciation and some grammar," Jiang Wenxian , a Chinese language scholar, said. "Using Cantonese to read classical poetry is a real pleasure," he said. "Many ancient poems don't rhyme when you read them in Putonghua, but they do in Cantonese.

"Cantonese retains a flavour of archaic and ancient Chinese. Nowadays few people understand classical Chinese, so Cantonese should be protected as a type of language fossil helping us study ancient Chinese culture."

Cantonese is spoken by about 70 million people in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and communities abroad.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Guangdong was the only Chinese province allowed to trade directly with foreigners. Many Westerners at the time learned Cantonese. Up till very recently, there were more Cantonese speakers in overseas Chinese communities than Putonghua speakers. In Canada, for instance, Cantonese is the third most commonly spoken language after English and French.

On October 11, Chloe Lai published a long article entitled "Linguistic heritage in peril:  A group of friends are hoping to revive Cantonese in Guangzhou," from which I here give brief excerpts:

"Speak Putonghua, write standardised characters, use civilised language, be a civilised person." The words are printed on a red banner hanging in the main entrance of a primary school in Guangzhou, a city that once set the standard for the Cantonese-speaking community.

"It is a common practice; many schools are doing the same," said Yao Cheuk, an artists' agent in the city. "They are doing this because it is national policy to promote Putonghua. From time to time, there is news that kids got punished for speaking Cantonese in schools. It is outrageous. They are eliminating Cantonese."

Angry about the official bias, Yao went on to explain the superiority of Cantonese, which he described as a more mature language with a richer linguistic history than Putonghua. He cited soccer player David Beckham's name to illustrate his arguments. Cantonese translates his family name using two characters, while Putonghua uses four.

"You know why?" asked Yao. "Because Cantonese is an ancient language that has a rich phonetic system, it takes only one character in Cantonese to mimic the English sound 'ham', whereas it takes Putonghua two Chinese characters."

He pointed out that Putonghua has only 23 vowel sounds, while Cantonese has 59, leaving Putonghua relying heavily on the context for meaning.

Yao's friend, surnamed Pang, stressed they were not anti-Putonghua. "Language is for people to communicate. I speak Putonghua whenever there are people whose native tongue is not Cantonese," the college student said. "Kids will do the same when they need to communicate with their friends. Why force us to abandon our native language?"

Both insist on using Cantonese pronunciations to spell their names in English. Pang and Yao are among a group of Guangzhou natives who fear for the future of Cantonese in the capital of Guangdong. Their worries are not without basis. For example, more than 80 per cent of cabbies do not speak Cantonese and often drivers will suggest that Cantonese speakers use Putonghua for directions….

Pang, Yao and their friends believe Putonghua speakers in Guangzhou already outnumber Cantonese speakers, because of the influx of migrants from other parts of China and the national policy of promoting Putonghua. The trend, they say, will continue, leading eventually to the extinction of Cantonese in Guangzhou….

Cantonese is regarded as a modern variation of the ancient Han language, said Roxana Fung, an assistant professor at Polytechnic University's department of Chinese and bilingual studies. The Cantonese system - pronunciations, vocabulary and usage - is very similar to the official language used during the Tang dynasty (618-907)….

Professor Fung does not want to see Cantonese eliminated.

"Dialects are language fossils, they keep many characteristics of the ancient language. Through dialects, we can understand many ancient scripts," she said.

All is certainly not yet lost, since among certain sectors of youth, Cantonese is experiencing a resurgence.  In another SCMP article by He Huifeng, entitled "Trendy Shenzhen teenagers spearhead Cantonese revival" (updated on October 6, 2009), we read:

A new craze is sweeping through the ranks of Shenzhen's teenagers. Whether it is in school, at the shopping mall or the KTV club, there's only one way to prove you are a real "Shenzhener" - by speaking Cantonese. In the past couple of years, there has been growing concern that regional dialects are being lost to the relentless tide of Putonghua. But in Shenzhen, many immigrants are swimming against the current. Li Zhen is a 16-year-old high school student who was born in Wuhan and moved to Shenzhen at the age of 10. She insists on talking to her friends in Cantonese. "My parents do not speak Cantonese and we speak Putonghua or Wuhan dialect at home," Li said. "But in school, we only speak Putonghua in class. All my friends are Cantonese speakers. Cantonese is the fashionable language among Shenzhen teenagers." Li's friend, Wang Zijing, said speaking Cantonese made them feel more international. "Being bilingual, we feel we have more in common with international cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong or New York than with people from the hinterland who can usually only speak Putonghua," she said….

There is a two-pronged attack on the local language - internal migration on the one hand, and central government policies of a "common language for a unified country and harmonious society" on the other. In the 1980s, the universal adoption of Putonghua was enshrined in the constitution and in all schools from kindergartens up. In the 1990s, local dialects were even banned in many provincial and state-controlled television stations….

But things have taken an interesting turn in the past decade. As the second generation of migrants grows up, they are embracing Cantonese culture and language. "We feel no different from Cantonese natives," Li said."We speak Cantonese with no accent. We watch Hong Kong television dramas. We enjoy Cantonese cuisine such as herbal tea and fish balls. We sing old Cantonese songs at KTV. But actually, we are Shenzheners, or new Cantonese."

…In Guangdong, while the official policy of promoting Putonghua over local dialects remains unchanged, officials are increasingly putting emphasis on developing "Lingnan [Cantonese] culture". The reasons behind this go beyond pride in the indigenous culture. Guangdong leaders - many of them migrants from other provinces - are starting to realise the role of culture in social and economic development. There have been concerns that the Pearl River Delta is falling behind the Yangtze Delta in attracting skilled workers and top talents, all because of a perceived weaker cultural environment. In response, Guangdong invests billions of yuan in cultural development each year. The result is a wave of cultural propaganda showing off ancient Cantonese culture.

But to return to the anti-topolect slogan in Taipei Storyland with which I began, the National Language Movement (GUO2YU3 YUN4DONG4 國語運動) has a history going back even before the beginning of the Republican Period in 1912.  When the Guomindang (Kuomintang / KMT) was defeated by the Communists on the mainland and retreated to Taiwan, they brought Mandarin with them and promoted it rigorously.  In the 50s and later, it was illegal to speak Taiwanese in schools, universities, and other public places.  During this period, one could even be put in jail for compiling Taiwanese language teaching materials (I know someone who was incarcerated for having done so).

Under President Chen Shui-bian, Taiwanese, Hakka, and even the aboriginal (Austronesian) languages experienced a strong revival.  Now, however, Chen languishes in prison under a life sentence, the KMT is back in power, and Mandarin is being promoted vigorously.  Hence the slogan pasted on the window frame in Taipei Storyland.

In a paper entitled "How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language" that I published on the Web,  I attempt to put the dialectical dance of the "dialects" with Mandarin in historical and linguistic context.

[Hat tip to June Teufel Dreyer.]

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Slate has a brilliant article on the links between face structure and aggression and whether we can see criminality in the face. Contains the wonderful euphemism 'muscular unreasonableness'.

Video games are good for the brain, according to an article from The Boston Globe that reviews evidence for the cognitive benefits of computer games.

The BPS Research Digest has an awesome review of the state of brain scan 'lie detection' research. Punchline: scientifically interesting, practically useless still.

There's a brilliant article on doing cognitive neuroscience experiments with patients during neurosurgery in this week's Nature. Stupidly locked behind a paywall but has been touched by the irony fairy and given the rubbing-salt-in-the-wounds title 'Opening up brain surgery'.

PsyBlog has as excellent piece on 'how rewards can backfire and reduce motivation'.

The tragedy of the commons is really a farce, according to an excellent piece from The New York Times TiernyLab blog that tackles the myth behind the phrase and the latest economics nobel.

Not Exactly Rocket Science covers new research on how the placebo effect affects pain signalling in the spine.

The sound of something getting closer increases the sensitivity of the visual cortex – before you're even conscious of hearing it, according to new research covered by New Scientist.

Neurotopia is live blogging the annual Society of Neuroscience gathering of the tribes and has a list of other bloggers covering the proceedings.

An experiment on the neurobiology of fizz, is covered by a carbonated Science News.

Time magazine has a piece on the debates over whether dementia should be considered a terminal illness and new evidence that challenges the traditional view that the brain decline itself isn't fatal.

There's an great piece on placebo side-effects on the increasingly excellent Neuroskeptic.

The New York Times travels into the science of the ear and hearing.

Is Alzheimer's like a strange form of brain cancer? asks Disover Magazine.

APS Observer has an interesting piece on an antique piece on psychology equipment called the 'memory drum'.

New research on Galileo's work in the science of perception is covered by the wonderful Advances in the History of Psychology.

The Times has a breathless piece on the dawn of 'brain to brain communication' which includes "sending messages formed by one person’s brain signals though an internet connection to another person’s brain many miles away". RFC1149 is that you?

The Star-Ledger - NJ.com
Community, "Advanced Criminal Law": Jeff defends Britta
The Star-Ledger - NJ.com
And because "Advanced Criminal Law" was supposed to air before last week's "Social Psychology," the Jeff/Britta relationship seems to be going in circles, ...

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How to Buy $100 Worth Of Happiness
Smartmoney.com
To understand why look at an experiment, published in 2003 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that explored how people's purchases made ...

The world's largest scientific conference, the Society for Neuroscience meeting, starts tomorrow in Chicago. Tens of thousands of researchers from all areas of neuroscience will meet to discuss all aspects of the brain. The conference always has a full programme of social events, as well as the usual scientific programme (I am still filled with regret about missing the 'Hippocampus Poetry Slam' the last time I went). If you are in Chigaco this year, one particular event you might want to check out is the Neuroethics Social, hosted by Martha Farah from the University of Pennslyvania

Neuroethics Social
Time & Date: Tuesday Oct 20, 6:30-8:00
Location: Room N139, convention center
Guests: J.T. Cacioppo J.D. Haynes J. Illes S. Laureys H.S. Mayberg E.A. Phelps R.A. Poldrack B.J. Sahakian
"Interested in the ethical, legal or policy implications of neuroscience? Come to the neuroethics social hour and meet others with the same interests. And don't miss the short but spirited debate, between two leading neuroimaging researchers, on the proposition that "brain imaging is already capable of (something worthy of the term) 'mind reading'."

Martha is the academic director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at U. of Pennsylvania and for the last few years has been running a 'Neuroscience Bootcamp' for professionals and graduate students in fields such as law, ethics and education who feel they need a crash course in modern neuroscience.

Stephen Colbert on Olympia Snowe (Colbert Report, Oct. 14):

We are now one step closer to a nightmare future where everyone has health insurance. And I will tell you who I blame: Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, the only Republican who voted in favor of the bill. And folks, I am angrier than an Eskimo… because I have 300 words for Snowe, and I can't say one of them on TV.

(Hat tip: Greg Howard.) The title for this post is lifted from the Twitter feed of Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig):

Susan Collins, R-Maine has hinted at a 'yes' vote. and only linguabloggers have "snowe-clone" in their repertoire of bad puns.

Speakers at conference agree female workers need to be assertive
Chicago Tribune
Thompson, who has written several books, including "The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator," which looks at negotiating and social psychology, said that ...

An interesting case study from a 2002 edition of The Lancet of a man who suffered paralysis from drinking too much Earl Grey tea owing to the toxic effects of huge doses of bergamot oil - taken from orange rind and used as flavour:

A 44-year-old man presented in May, 2001, with muscle cramps. He had no medical history of note, but volunteered the fact that he had been drinking up to 4 L of black tea per day over the past 25 years. His preferred brand was GoldTeefix (Tekanne, Salzburg, Austria). Since this type of tea had given him occasional gastric pain, he changed to Earl Grey (Twinings & Company, London, UK), which he thought would be less harmful to his stomach. 1 week after the change, he noticed repeated muscle cramps for some seconds in his right foot. The longer he drank Earl Grey tea, the more intense the muscle cramps became. After 3 weeks, they also occurred in the left foot...

Earl Grey tea is composed of black tea and the essence of bergamot oil, an extract from the rind of bergamot orange (Citrus aurantium ssp bergamia), which has a pleasant, refreshing scent. Bergamot oil contains bergapten (5-methoxypsoralen), bergamottin (5-geranyloxypsoralen), and citropten (5,7-dimethoxycoumarin), which can be found in grapefruit juice, celery, parsnips, and Seville orange juice. Bergamot oil is a well-known UVA-induced photosensitiser with a strong phototoxic effect, and is used therapeutically in psoriasis, vitiligo, mycosis fungoides, and cutaneous lymphoma. Because of this side-effect, bergamot oil has been widely banned as an ingredient in cosmetics and tanning products. Bergamot oil also has a hepatotoxic effect and may cause contact-allergy. The adverse effects of bergamot oil in this patient are explained by the effect of bergapten as a largely selective axolemmal potassium channel blocker, reducing potassium permeability at the nodes of Ranvier in a time-dependent manner. This may lead to hyperexcitability of the axonal membrane and phasic alterations of potassium currents, causing fasciculations and muscle cramps.

In other words, it disrupts the way chemical flow through the membrane of the nerve fibre, causing the neurons that connect to the muscles to malfunction.

Link to DOI entry for the case study.

Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, founding chancellor at UC Merced, dies after lengthy ...
Merced County Times
... science from Penn State University , her master's in psychology from Iowa State University and her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from UC Berkeley. ...

Symposium Spotlights Faculty Research In Texas A&M College Of Architecture
KBTX
... Everyday Environments” by Sam Gosling, a nationally renowned researcher and author who focuses on issues related to personality and social psychology. ...

Monsters and Wild Things
OUPblog (blog)
Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some ...

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Not Exactly Rocket Science covers a fantastic study on how the structure of the brain changes as illiterate adults learn to read and write. The research was conducted on rather a novel group of participants. Most were ex-members of guerilla forces in Colombia that had recently put down their weapons to re-integrate in society.

Colombia has a sizeable program to rehabilitate ex-paramilitary 'reinsertados' that includes social support and education, as many have never attended school. As the researchers note, this sets up an interesting natural experiment:

After decades spent fighting, members of the guerrilla forces have begun re-integrating into mainstream Colombian society, introducing a sizeable population of illiterate adults who have no formal education. Upon putting down their weapons and returning to society, some had the opportunity to learn to read for the first time in their early twenties, providing the perfect natural situation for experiments investigating structural brain differences associated with the acquisition of literacy in the absence of other types of schooling or maturational development.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras, recruited a group of ex-paramilitaries who could read less than five simple words on a Spanish reading and writing test, and compared them to a similar group who learnt to read and write from an early age.

The research team use MRI scans to compare differences in brain structure between the two groups to allow an insight into how brain anatomy changes to accommodate reading and writing.

While it is possible to do this with children, it is almost impossible to separate out which are the brain changes due specifically to acquiring literacy and which are just part of the massive changes that constantly take place as children develop.

The images above show the areas of the brain (in orange) where the structure was significantly different between literate and illiterate adults.

Rather neatly, these are also areas that have been identified in brain activation studies of reading and writing, and are known to be associated with visual perception, processing word sounds and dealing with the meaning of words.

Subsequent analyses showed that pathways the angular gyrus, a key language area, across each hemisphere were less developed in illiterate adults and were less active when the participants were asked to name objects.

A brilliantly innovative study, a good write-up from Not Exactly Rocket Science and perfectly timed for my arrival in Colombia.

Link to NERS on guerilla reading.
Link to summary of scientific paper.

When I tried to read Dilbert this morning, comics.com showed me this instead:

I reckon that the sequence was:

FIrst, discussions of evolution focused on the concept of a "missing link" in the fossil record. According to the OED, this actually began with with a remark about purely geological history:

1851 C. LYELL Elem. Geol. xvii. 220 A break in the chain implying no doubt many missing links in the series of geological monuments which we may some day be able to supply. 1862Caledonian Mercury 11 Jan. 7/6 Until the existence of some animal was discovered which should supply the missing link between man and the gorilla, there was a great gap even in Mr Darwin's theory of the origin of species.

This phrase quickly took on various figurative uses:

1862 G. DU MAURIER Let. Oct. in Young G. du Maurier (1951) 178, I..said that if he would take the trouble to make a post mortem on the Irish roughs I intend to kill next Sunday in the Park, he might convince himself that the ‘missing link’ had been found.  1863 G. O. TREVELYAN Competition Wallah (1864) v. 113 The performances of these thin-legged, miserable, rice-fed ‘missing links’ are perfectly inexplicable according to our notions of muscular development. 1904 ‘O. HENRY’ Cabbages & Kings 22 The faces of missing links. 1990 in J. E. Lighter Hist. Dict. Amer. Slang (1997) II. 561/2 No date with the missing link tonight?

(Ben Zimmer discusses the history of the expression in much more detail here.)

Independently , there developed a series of illustrations of evolutionary progress, showing a procession of successively "more evolved" creatures  becoming taller and more erect. (See here for some discussion, with a couple of examples of the many visual puns that have been overlaid on it, and a reference to Stephen Jay Gould's Iconography of an Expectation, which gives a dozen or so more.)

Recently, Dave Whamond created another such visual pun, bringing in an imaginary photographer (in an enlightenment-era wig and lace collar? who is he supposed to be?), and adding the joke that someone named "Link" should have been in the procession, but is "missing". This is a verbal pun on "missing link", and a visual pun on the stereotyped evolutionary-progress image.

FInally, comics.com added another layer of pun, in which "link" is not the evolutionary "missing link", nor the guy named Link missing from the photographer's posed picture, but the "404 Not Found" missing hyper-link to the Dilbert strip that I was hoping to read.

Off hand, I can't think of any similarly dense meta-puns, but no doubt LL readers will be able to fill the gap.

Nigeria: SMA Nutrition Unveils New Logo
AllAfrica.com
The guest speaker, Dr Peter Willatts, Senior Lecturer, Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Scotland, said "recent ...

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In the celebrations of the fifty-year forty-year anniversary of the moon landing, we've probably all seen this iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin's footprint on the lunar surface:

Looking at it again yesterday, I realised that there was something that disturbed me about it. The footprint looks wrong somehow. Our world-knowledge tells us that footprints press into the surface they are made on, yet this footprint looks like it rises out. What gives?

The effect is due to a well known visual phenomenon whereby our brains use shading to infer the percepion of shape (in the book, Hack #22). We are wired to assume that light comes from above, so things with shading underneath, like the ridges of the footprint, are seen as sticking out towards us. Things with shading on the top are seen as sticking in, away from us.

You can make the moon-footprint look 'right' by turning the photograph the other way up. This is the opposite to the way it is normally shown, but gells with our natural inclination to assume light comes from the top of the photo:

Perhaps the unnatural look of this photo is one source of moonlanding-denial conspiracy theories?