Anthropology.net

Publishers Wiley InterScience have made available a handful of pretty interesting papers, which concentrate on anthropological studies in Australia and neighbouring Asia, and are listed as follows:

Here’s the abstract of a paper which is freely available from the Royal Society, in which deceptive communication facilitated by tool use in Bornean orang-utans comes under the spotlight. The kiss-squeak may not be familiar to all, so here’s a link to a page at the University of Zurich where different types can be heard, whilst elsewhere on the same page, an entire repertoire of orang-utan calls is described. of Moreover, not only is this paper free, but according to the Royal Society’s Facebook page, by way of celebrating 350 years of publication, their entire digital archive of 65,000 papers is free to access until February 2010, details of which will appear later in this post.

Abstract

Culture has long been assumed to be uniquely human but recent studies, in particular on great apes, have suggested that cultures also occur in non-human primates. The most apparent cultural behaviours in great apes involve tools in the subsistence context where they are clearly functional to obtain valued food. On the other hand, tool-use to modify acoustic communication has been reported only once and its function has not been investigated.

Thus, the question whether this is an adaptive behaviour remains open, even though evidence indicates that it is socially transmitted (i.e. cultural). Here we report on wild orang-utans using tools to modulate the maximum frequency of one of their sounds, the kiss squeak, emitted in distress. In this variant, orang-utans strip leaves off a twig and hold them to their mouth while producing a kiss squeak. Using leaves as a tool lowers the frequency of the call compared to a kiss squeak without leaves or with only a hand to the mouth. If the lowering of the maximum frequency functions in orang-utans as it does in other animals, two predictions follow: (i) kiss squeak frequency is related to body size and (ii) the use of leaves will occur in situations of most acute danger. Supporting these predictions, kiss squeaks without tools decreased with body size and kiss squeaks with leaves were only emitted by highly distressed individuals. Moreover, we found indications that the calls were under volitional control.

This finding is significant for at least two reasons. First, although few animal species are known to deceptively lower the maximum frequency of their calls to exaggerate their perceived size to the listener (e.g. vocal tract elongation in male deer) it has never been reported that animals may use tools to achieve this, or that they are primates. Second, it shows that the orang-utan culture extends into the communicative domain, thus challenging the traditional assumption that primate calling behaviour is overall purely emotional.

The theory holds that by making their voices sound deeper, orang-utan seek to deceive predators into thinking their intended prey is larger than is actually the case, and thus the predator faces greater risk of injury or mission failure in any ensuing encounter. The authors comment on the way in which temporarily increased body size is a common tactic deployed throughout the animal kingdom as a deterrent towards predators, but that only the orang-utan observed in the study use tools as a means of doing this. There’s an interesting note on the environment in which this behaviour occurs:

This pattern indicates that kiss squeaks with the hand and on leaves, i.e. with lower frequencies, were emitted in circumstances assumed to be more dangerous. This functional use is plausible because orang-utans are arboreal apes living in dense forests, where visibility is usually poor and rarely sufficient to make accurate visual assessments of body size, particularly in disturbing encounters when orang-utans use displays and missiles towards potential predators. This way, the visual salience hypothesis (Peters 2001) for the function of the kiss-squeak forms also seems unlikely owing to poor visibility and because the dropping of leaves is not executed in isolation, but in combination with branch-shaking, breaking and throwing for example.

Although one might argue that individuals of bigger body size classes (e.g. flanged males) would not deploy kiss squeaks with the hand and on leaves for the purpose of functional deception, this interpretation ignores that all individuals may benefit from appearing larger in highly disturbing contexts. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that kiss-squeak forms function to deceptively convey to the predator a larger body size.

Indeed, as expected, orang-utans were never observed or reported to emit kiss squeaks with the hand and on leaves towards other orang-utans, since producer and receiver will generally be familiar with one another and/or with the deceptive technique. At the same time, low-sound frequencies travel farther than high-sound frequencies (Lameira & Wich 2008), and thus the use of hands and leaves during the production of kiss squeaks could be meant for the purpose of conspecifics’ recruitment. However, this is unlikely since recruitment of conspecifics via the emission of kiss-squeak forms, while not uncommon, usually takes much longer than the duration of an encounter (Van Noordwijk & Van Schaik 2009).

The recent articles on Ardipithecus ramidus explained how the species lived in a wooded environment, and it would be interesting to know whether similar deceptions were used in that context as well, and/or whether their bipedalism evolved in part as a deterrent to the predatory instincts of those animals that hunted them.

As mentioned at the top of this article, Royal Society Publishing have an announcement regarding free access on their Fb page, the gist of which is this:

Between November 2009 and November 2010, the Royal Society will be celebrating its 350th anniversary, promoting a spirit of enquiry, excitement and engagement with science.  To mark this special occasion, all our digital content, greater than 65000 articles including our entire archive dating back to 1665, is now FREE …TO ACCESS for three months, until 28 Feb 2010.  Read articles by Newton, Hook, Boyle, Darwin, Watson and Crick, Stephen Hawking, Dorothy Hodgkin, Dirac, G. I. Taylor, Flemming, Captain James Cook and many many other eminent scientists.  Enjoy all this via http://royalsocietypublishing.org – you lucky things!

The Royal Society is planning further events to commemorate its founding in 1660, as can be seen from their dedicated web-page.

image: A Bornean orangutan. Courtesy of Flickr user Graham Racher (via Smithsonian.com)

Reference:

Tool use in wild orang-utans modifies sound production: a functionally deceptive innovation? by Madeleine E. Hardus, Adriano R. Lameira, Carel P. Van Schaik and Serge A. Wich.

Proc. R. Soc. B October 22, 2009 276:3689-3694;  published online before print August 5, 2009, doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1027

A new paper by Martin A.J. Williams et al, on the Mount Toba eruption 73,000 years ago, proposes that the destructive aftermath of the event caused widespread de-forestation in India, some 3,000 miles distant from Sumatra, the island on which the volcano was located. Here’s the abstract of that paper which is behind a paywall, but commented upon in Science Daily, to which I’ll refer shortly:

Abstract

The cooling effects of historic volcanic eruptions on world climate are well known but the impacts of even bigger prehistoric eruptions are still shrouded in mystery. The eruption of Toba volcano in northern Sumatra some 73,000 years ago was the largest explosive eruption of the past two million years, with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of magnitude 8, but its impact on climate has been controversial. In order to resolve this issue, we have analysed pollen from a marine core in the Bay of Bengal with stratified Toba ash, and the carbon isotopic composition of soil carbonates directly above and below the ash in three sites on a 400 km transect across central India.

Pollen evidence shows that the eruption was followed by initial cooling and prolonged desiccation, reflected in a decline in tree cover in India and the adjacent region. Carbon isotopes show that C3 forest was replaced by wooded to open C4 grassland in central India. Our results demonstrate that the Toba eruption caused climatic cooling and prolonged deforestation in South Asia, and challenge claims of minimal impact on tropical ecosystems and human populations.

The story is taken up by Science Daily,  in Supervolcano Eruption In Sumatra Deforested India 73,000 Years Ago, where the sheer scale of the event is reflected in this description of the eruption and the site itself:

The volcano ejected an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, leaving a crater (now the world’s largest volcanic lake) that is 100 kilometers long and 35 kilometers wide. Ash from the event has been found in India, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea.

The bright ash reflected sunlight off the landscape, and volcanic sulfur aerosols impeded solar radiation for six years, initiating an “Instant Ice Age” that — according to evidence in ice cores taken in Greenland — lasted about 1,800 years.

During this instant ice age, temperatures dropped by as much as 16 degrees centigrade (28 degrees Fahrenheit), said University of Illinois anthropology professor Stanley Ambrose, a principal investigator on the new study with professor Martin A.J. Williams, of the University of Adelaide. Williams, who discovered a layer of Toba ash in central India in 1980, led the research.

The report then goes on to comment on the debate that has sprung up surrounding the idea that this event nearly wiped humanity off the face of the planet, causing a putative genetic ‘bottleneck’ event, whereby the diversity of the human gene pool was dramatically reduced, prompting some researchers to contend that the anatomically modern human population immediately after Mount Toba may have numbered only about 15,000 individuals. This idea has however been contested, most notably in a 2007 paper by Michael Petraglia et al, in which it is suggested that Middle Palaeolithic technology appears to have continued across the region without significant interruption, following investigations at the site of Jwalapuram.

The Science Daily report also gives details of how Williams and his team were able to deduce the climatic impact of the eruption, as we see from this:

To address the limited evidence of the terrestrial effects of Toba, Ambrose and his colleagues pursued two lines of research: They analyzed pollen from a marine core in the Bay of Bengal that included a layer of ash from the Toba eruption, and they looked at carbon isotope ratios in fossil soil carbonates taken from directly above and below the Toba ash in three locations in central India.

Carbon isotopes reflect the type of vegetation that existed at a given locale and time. Heavily forested regions leave carbon isotope fingerprints that are distinct from those of grasses or grassy woodlands.

Both lines of evidence revealed a distinct change in the type of vegetation in India immediately after the Toba eruption, the researchers report. The pollen analysis indicated a shift to a “more open vegetation cover and reduced representation of ferns, particularly in the first 5 to 7 centimeters above the Toba ash,” they wrote in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The change in vegetation and the loss of ferns, which grow best in humid conditions, they wrote, “would suggest significantly drier conditions in this region for at least one thousand years after the Toba eruption.”

The dryness probably also indicates a drop in temperature, Ambrose said, “because when you turn down the temperature you also turn down the rainfall.”

The carbon isotope analysis showed that forests covered central India when the eruption occurred, but wooded to open grassland predominated for at least 1,000 years after the eruption.

“This is unambiguous evidence that Toba caused deforestation in the tropics for a long time,” Ambrose said.

This disaster may have forced the ancestors of modern humans to adopt new cooperative strategies for survival that eventually permitted them to replace Neandertals and other archaic human species, he said.

That last sentence regarding Neanderthal extinction seems to me to be stretching a point, especially when we bear in mind that Neanderthals survived Mount Toba by around 50,000 years, and there is nothing specific in the archaeological record that points to sudden innovations by AMH at this time. Even if we take into account the findings at Blombos for example, where it was originally proposed that the first modern human attempts at creating art were made, around 77,000 years bp, and subsequently at several even earlier sites in North Africa, it is clear that the path, or at least a side-road of that path to so-called modernity had been embarked upon prior to the eruption. It is notable howeverthat this particular mode of behaviour seems to disappear until modern humans made their mark in Upper Palaeolithic Europe around 42,000 bp.

To demonstrate that AMH would have changed the way in which they made a living to the extent that it gave them some sort of killer advantage would require a more exhaustive analysis on floral and faunal populations as well – obviously prey species would have been affected by the eruption, but whether entire species were wiped out causing AMH to adopt different food hunting and gathering methods is an open question. It seems parsimonious to suggest that a reduced human population would have been able to survive on a reduced (but not extinct) prey population, meaning that supply would still have roughly matched demand, and that no large changes in material culture would have been necessary.

What we don’t know of course is the impact the Toba eruption might have had on the mindsets of both AMH and Neanderthals who may have occupied the region,  and maybe late-surviving H. erectus, all of whom would no doubt have been awed by the sheer magnitude and extent of the destruction visited upon their world; titanic explosions that rained down debris from the sky, causing rapid deterioration of climate and associated habitats could well have spawned thoughts that the world was coming to an end, though whether such disasters were routinely ascribed to the natural world or some kind of divine or hellish intervention, is again, an unknown.

However, there is one location in Africa, and dated to 70,000 bp, that might offer an intriguing hint that some kind of behaviour linked to abstract belief through use of ritualistic symbolism in the guise of destruction, was present at this early date. The 2006 report, again from Science Daily, World’s Oldest Ritual Discovered Worshipped The Python 70,000 Years Ago documents a discovery by Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, which describes what might be the earliest known example of the ritual destruction of humanly crafted objects, in this case, red spear-points, that were fashioned from stones sourced from hundreds of kilometres away from the Tsodilo Hills, site of the cave, described in part here:

“Stone age people took these colourful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site. Our find means that humans were more organised and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the pre-historic landscape.” says Sheila Coulson.

Sheila Coulson also noticed a secret chamber behind the python stone. Some areas of the entrance to this small chamber were worn smooth, indicating that many people had passed through it over the years.

Ostensibly there’s nothing to suggest that the human activities in this cave of the python were directly or even indirectly influenced by the Mount Toba eruption thousands of miles away, and indeed the dates for both the eruption and ritual activity in the African cave aren’t exact, but assuming Toba was the preceding event, it would be interesting to know if, when and to what extent news of Toba reached ancient African ears, and exactly how the eruption and ensuing catastrophic decline in environment and climate may have been reported and interpreted.

via Gene Expression

image: Landsat satellite photo of Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia. (Credit: Image courtesy of NASA / via Wikimedia Commons)

References:

Environmental Impact of the 73 ka Toba super-eruption in South Asia, Article in Press, Corrected Proof , by Martin A.J. Williams , Stanley H. Ambrose, Sander van der Kaars, Carsten Ruehlemann, Umesh Chattopadhyaya, Jagannath Pal and Parth R. Chauhan, doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2009.10.009

Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption, by Michael Petraglia et al, Science 6 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5834, pp. 114 – 116 DOI: 10.1126/science.1141564

Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York confirmed that the Hobbits, or Homo floresiensis, are indeed a separate “human” species instead of a population of diseases Homo sapiens. The 7th Human Evolution Symposium, Hobbits in the Haystack: Homo floresiensis and Human Evolution was held this year at Stony Brook.

According to the press release, researchers William Jungers and Karen Baab used statistical analysis on the skeletal remains of LB1 (nicknamed Flo) to determine that Homo floresiensis are indeed a distinct species. A few characteristics of LB1 that makes her and her kind a separate species than modern humans.

• LB1′s cranial capacity is about 400cc, about the same size as a chimpanzee.
• The skull and jawbone of LB1 is more primitive looking than any normal modern humans.
• The thigh bone and shin bone of LB1are much shorter compared to modern humans including Central African pygmies, South African KhoeSan (formerly known as ‘bushmen”) and “negrito” pygmies from the Andaman Islands and the Philippines. Jungers and Baab believe that these are primitive retentions as opposed to island dwarfing.
• Using a regression equation developed by Jungers, LB1 was about 3 feet, 6 inches (106cm) tall, far smaller than modern human pygmies whose adults grow to less than 4 feet, 11 inches (150cm) tall.

Read more about the Hobbits at The geometry of hobbits: Homo floresiensis and human evolution (Free Wiley Interscience PDF).

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio.

Although I somehow completely missed this latest Four Stone Hearth in that I didn’t even remember it was happening this week, the 80th edition is nevertheless now online at Middle Savagery, so be sure to check it out.

The first few entries look at tool use, Ardipithecus ramidus and of course, Neanderthals, without whom no occasion such as this would be complete, and there’s also a slew of posts delving into matters archaeological. Elsewhere are other items that between them consider such issues as swine flu and digital authority – I’m a little pushed for time and haven’t as yet had time to read through the various submissions, hence the lack of any meaningful commentary from me.

Thanks go out to Colleen Morgan for hosting this edition, and the 81st will be held at Spider Monkey Tales on Wednesday, December 2nd. There is still a vacant hosting slot for the last carnival of 2009, whilst 2010 is a vast and open window of opportunity for around 25 hosts who might wish to consider hosting 4SH at their own sites. For details of how to embark on such an enterprise, just head to the main carnival page and take it from there.

This via Mind Hacks – Seed Magazine have published a piece by Joe Kloc, in which he looks at the relationship between humans and life-like robots, with regard to the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ effect, described here at Wikipedia:

(Masahiro) Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.^[5]

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction

Readers will doubtless be familiar with such films as Blade Runner and AI – Artificial Intelligence, both of which address the hypothesized relationships between organic humans and their android equivalents in a technological future as yet only imagined – in both cases, the lines of identity become blurred; in Blade Runner, we have two androids, Deckard and Rachael who at first don’t even realise they aren’t human (although this isn’t clear in the narrated version as far as Deckard is concerned), in part due to the sophistication of the memories inserted into their circuitry, whilst AI , in a rework of Pinocchio, examines whether a human can emotionally bond with a robot that has been programmed to bond with them.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the linked article, which explains that it isn’t just humans who can spot a fake:

New findings published in PNAS this September are putting some long-overdue experimental rigor behind the uncanny valley. Last spring at Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species.

“By showing that monkeys can do it, several things become plausible,” Ghazanfar says. “One is that there is an evolutionary explanation for the uncanny valley and the other is that it is not something specific to our human, cultural experience.” These findings may for the first time allow scientists to go back through a century’s worth of peculiar ideas about the origins of the uncanny valley and begin putting them to the test.

Which begs the question as to whether a human would intuitively know that a robotic macaque wasn’t real, or a macaque that an android wasn’t really a human either, or whether one species is better at spotting  the fake than the other, and why that would be the case.

Reference is made to an essay, ‘The Uncanny’ by Sigmund Freud, with this commentary from the linked essay:

According to Freud, the phenomenon that would later be called the uncanny valley stems from a primitive attempt of humans to skirt death and secure our own immortality by creating copies of ourselves—such as wax figures and, later, life-like robots. He quotes his colleague Otto Rank in saying that this “doubling” behavior is “an energetic denial of the power of death” and suggests the idea of the immortal soul was the first double of the body.

Our uncanny response follows from the fact that most of us no longer believe we can secure our own immortality by making copies of ourselves, but we haven’t yet shaken the primitive habit of trying to do so. The sad consequence of this is that, in Freud’s words, “The double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” The copies we feel compelled to make only serve to remind us why we began making them in the first place: We are, inevitably, going to die.

About the earliest example of large size models of humans which evoke (in me) a sense of the uncanny in this regard would be the strange lime-plaster anthropomorphic statues from the Neolithic site of ‘Ain Ghazal, near Amman in modern-day Jordan, dated to around 8,500 years ago, whose exact function and meaning have been lost to us. An odd aspect of these is the way in which some statues are of two beings emerging from the same base, whilst others merely represent a lone individual. Although they were found cached in specifically prepared pits, they had been made with the intention of standing them up, though whether they were on public or private display is unknown, as is whether they were used on special ceremonial occasions or rituals, with regard for instance to mortuary practice, or merely formed a backdrop to daily life, is again, an open question.Obviously there’s a huge difference between the Neolithic statues and the human-like robots that technology allows to be made in the present,

Back to the linked article:

In the West, there is often a Frankensteinian stigma attached to artificial intelligence, but Mori offered Japan a much different perspective. In The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion, published in 1974, he wrote, “I believe robots have the Buddha-nature within them—that is, the potential for attaining Buddhahood.”

His ideas about religion and the uncanny valley have had a substantial influence on the development of Japanese robotics. “In Japan, there is a great sensitivity in the government for having people who are accepting of robotics and robots in general. Mori’s interpretation of the uncanny valley became a kind of dogma,” says Karl MacDorman, a roboticist at Indiana University. As a result, Japan spent the next few decades avoiding human-like robot designs.

It looks like being a good few decades or even centuries before technological advances allow humans to create robots that are sentient, and there are persistent doubts as to whether an analogue brain and consciousness can ever be replicated into binary code, or whether this is even a desirable or prudent goal to pursue.

The Uncanny Valley Masahiro Mori, 1970

Alun Salt will doubtless be known to many readers here, not least for his interest in archaeo-astronomy, research which looks into the ways in which ancient peoples regarded the sky from the perspective of its solar, lunar and planetary components. I just got word that he has published the linked paper, for which this is the abstract:

Despite its appearing to be a simple question to answer, there has been no consensus as to whether or not the alignments of ancient Greek temples reflect astronomical intentions. Here I present the results of a survey of archaic and classical Greek temples in Sicily and compare them with temples in Greece. Using a binomial test I show strong evidence that there is a preference for solar orientations. I then speculate that differences in alignment patterns between Sicily and Greece reflect differing pressures in the expression of ethnic identity.

By way of further clarification, a few words from the author himself, via electronic correspondence:

It’s the first in what I hope is a series of papers. This one puts forward a basic argument that Greek temples are astronomically aligned and that it acts as an ethnic marker of religious activity. From my point of view the reason it’s in PLoS rather than an archaeology journal is that I wanted to be sure the statistical technique was sound, so it seemed best to stick it in front of statisticians. There might also be a story in the Times about it, but I’m not sure if it’s appearing as news, in the weblog or not at all.

If you’re interested in blogging about it I’ve uploaded new scans of my Sicily photos with added notes on most of the photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/sets/72157622666021209/ . The most astronomically interesting one Temple B at Naxos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/4114051783/in/set-72157622666021209/) which is aligned to sunrise in Early / Late Summer. You can see the remains of a wall for Temple A which was built only a few years earlier, but built over for ‘B’ shortly after. ‘ A’ faced too far north to ever face a sunrise, but I don’t know if that’s why ‘B’ was built. ‘A’ looked like enough effort as it was.

And from the paper itself, a suggestion as to why temples in Sicily and Greece may have differed in the ways in which they were aligned:

One reason for the difference in results might be the context of their construction. Temples in Greece were frequently built upon sites that had been sacred for generations, reaching back into the Bronze Age at places like Thermon, where the later classical temples were built over the remains of Mycenaean era megaron. [21] There was the matter of historical tradition which meant that temples built in the archaic and classical periods might be built not only according to the cosmology of the time of construction, but also within the restraints of prior religious thought. The temples in Sicily were built in cities that, at the time of building, saw themselves as immigrants in a distant land. [22] Therefore there was no historical precedent to shape the construction of the temples. They were much more likely to be purely the products of seventh-, sixth- and fifth-century cosmology. The lack of prior foundations gave the Sicilian Greeks more freedom to express current thought in religious practice through their temples.

For the statistical analysis you’ll need to check the rest of the paper, which of course is freely accessible.

see also: ‘People and the Sky’ by Anthony Aveni, (commentary by A. Salt)

image: The Wall of Temple B, Naxos, by author

Reference: Salt AM (2009) The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples. PLoS ONE 4(11): e7903. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007903

Here’s a link to a brief article by Edmund Blair Bolles regarding the current research into FOXP2, from which this is the introduction:

A letter to the current issue of Nature has caused a stir among those interested in the evolution of language. It looks at the FOXP2 gene in more detail than any paper has ever done before. It also inspires at least as many questions as it answers, but now at least we have better questions. Also it has dealt yet another blow to the theory that language depends on distinct cognitive modules that permit internal thought and that later interface with motor modules (vocalizing or signing) for “externalizing” what you are thinking. If anything is becoming apparent from FOXP2, it is that language and motor activities are deeply entangled. It also provides more reason to doubt the original recent date ascribed to the gene’s mutations.

Be sure to check Babel’s Dawn at least once a week – it’s usually updated on a Monday if past experience is anything to go by.

I’m still mostly offline, hence the brevity of posting in recent weeks, but nevertheless I still have time today to point readers in the direction of this week’s podcast from ‘All in the Mind’, from ABC Radio National, in which cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga’s chat on left-brain/right brain research is reprised. I’d recommend this to everyone with an interest in not only how the conscious mind arises from the brain, how the two different brains operate and govern our actions and perceptions of the world around us, but in the increasingly controversial and at times acrimonious debate as to what degree people have criminal responsibility for their misdeeds with regards to the legal system. Here’s a word of introduction from Natasha Mitchell:

How does your brain give rise to your mind, are there really left-brained people and right-brained people, and do brain scans have a legitimate role in the legal arena? Michael Gazzaniga is one of the big names of 21st century neuroscience, professor of psychology and director of the Sage Centre for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s well known for his many popular science books including The Ethical Brain, the Mind’s Past, and The Social Brain, among others. He sits on the US president’s bioethics council and heads up a major new law and neuroscience project too. But it’s his work with so-called split brain patients that many folk know him for, it really changed our understanding of how our brain’s two hemispheres, left and right, work differently.

Michael Gazzaniga takes up the story:

An argument was born between Sperry and Popper and Eccles, I think Popper and Eccles were more correct, as we look back on it. What was shocking at the time was that there were these two systems that could respond independently—one not knowing what the other was doing. That is as true today as it was then; an extremely dramatic finding, as can be witnessed by the following of these patients. But the question was were they really co-equal. We knew from the start that there were differences, obviously: the left hemisphere spoke, the right hemisphere did not, and then over the years differences began to emerge that one side was really quite different from the other.

Whilst on the legal side of things, we have this from later in the interview, in response to a question about culpability and how it is currently addressed in the court-room with regard to ongoing research:

Right now I would say it’s low, that it should be even less. The neuroscientists are very cautious about this because they know what a brain scan means and what it doesn’t mean, and we don’t want it to be overplayed in the courtroom. The general public takes maybe too seriously a brain scan and what it means, and they say, oh well if it’s on a brain scan then we can reason one way or the other. I did want to come back to the one point on the free will thing because I just think it’s a kind of a red herring. People talk about free will, you should return the question and say free from what, what are you talking about?

I mean what we all are, are information gathering organisms that have learned through a life’s experience what to do, what not to do, what’s good, what’s bad, does this payoff versus that payoff? And when a new situation presents itself we call upon our knowledge of the world from past experience to decide what to do. And that decision goes on through mechanisms of the brain, and once the brain decides, based on all your past experience, to do something, you want it to do it right. It’s not clear to me what free will means in that way of knowing that we have all these automatic processes that are going on in the brain that we’ve trained through time.

I think how you think about it is that personal responsibility, which is a key concept in our culture, is alive and well because it really isn’t in your brain, it’s in the social rules of a group. So think of it this way, if you’re the only person in the world, the concept of personal responsibility means nothing. Who are you responsible to? If there are two people to six billion, all of a sudden the rules develop. If we are going to socially interact, which is crucial for the human condition, we are going to have these rules. Almost everybody—you’d have to be extremely neurologically compromised—almost everybody can follow a rule.

Fascinating stuff, and with the prospect of more research and data being made available in the near and long-term future, the implications for this and related fields of research will fuel many an argument as to exactly what degree each human being is ultimately responsible for his or her actions, whether free will exists or is merely a societal construct, as well of course, the true nature of consciousness itself, if indeed that can ever be truly understood.

Michael Gazzaniga’s web-page can be found here.

The Times Higher Education supplement, as mentioned by PLoS, has an interesting and informative article on the current state of play regarding open access, peer review, copyright and  funding, amongst other items for consideration. As will be apparent, there are deep divides between the publishing companies, universities, academics and libraries as to what degree of open accessibility to peer reviewed work can be offered, with two main models, green access and gold access being the most prominent in ongoing discussions. As we see:

There are two main open-access routes – the “gold” and the “green” (names invented by an open-access advocate purely to aid differentiation). In the “gold” or “author-pays” route – as used by Rainger – authors (supported by their funders) pay the costs of publishing in an open-access journal so that peer-reviewed articles then appear online and can be accessed immediately by users for free.

The “green” route – as used by Hicks – sees researchers “self-archive” the final peer-reviewed versions of their articles in institutional or subject repositories, where they are available for anyone to view. The versions deposited are generally not the final PDFs produced by the publishers (which own the copyright on this “version of record”), but rather the “post-print” or final versions that scholars send to journals after the work has gone through the refereeing process and the authors have made any corrections (the “pre-print” is the article before it has been peer reviewed). They are not formatted in the journals’ style and do not have the in-house edits, but having been peer reviewed they have a stamp of quality and will do the job for those who need to access them.

Much to the chagrin of the subscription journals (see box, right), since open-access advocacy began in about 2001 on the back of the web’s growing reach, it has come a long way. Although an evangelical group of academics may have led the charge, the movement has rapidly gained converts, including enlightened funders and cash-strapped libraries.

Interesting to note that there is much greater availability of academic research papers in fields such as physics, where new discoveries are said to overwrite previous research quite rapidly, whereas the humanities journals tend to keep much more material behind paywalls as the research is more often to be held as valid years after publication as when the authors submitted their research.