A sleeping zebra finch (courtesy of Margoliash lab)

One of the repeated themes of the Darwin/Chicago 2009 meeting two weeks ago was the history of the anti-evolution movement, a resistance that has actually changed form, even *cough* evolved, quite a bit since The Origin of the Species. At the opening night event in Rockefeller Chapel, science historian Ronald Numbers talked about differences between the anti-Darwinists led by William Jennings Bryan in the 1920’s (immortalized in the Scopes Monkey Trial and Inherit the Wind) and today’s intelligent design supporters and creationists. Surprisingly, Bryan and his followers were considerably less extreme than today’s anti-evolutionists, as Numbers explained that most who railed against Darwinism in the early 20th century were fine with the evolution of animals over billions of years, they merely could not abide that humans also evolved.

The evolution vs. creation debate has obviously become a lot more complicated since then, but Bryan’s primary objection has lingered - the core of most people’s opposition to evolution is the idea that humans must be somehow separate and different from the rest of the natural world. One “proof” of this uniqueness is the complexity of human language, a form of communication that, to the casual observer, appears in an entirely different league from the songs, gestures, or simple noises that animals use to share information. The assumption that the more complex forms of human language are unique is even held by some in the field of linguistics and psychology, including the legendary Noam Chomsky, who argued as much in a 2002 Science paper with cognitive psychologist (and Darwin/Chicago speaker) Marc Hauser.

That assumption is a handicap to the study of language, argue University of Chicago’s Daniel Margoliash and Howard Nusbaum in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. The idea that human language is biologically unique, and thus the kind of “hopeful monster” geneticist Richard Goldschmidt coined to describe the sudden appearance of a new feature in evolutionary history, walls off language from the world of biology. Perceiving human language in its proper evolutionary context, and thus exposing it to the tools of comparative biology, will allow scientists to fully understand how language works and where it originated, Margoliash and Nusbaum conclude.

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Hockey players conducting hands-on research

If you had to pick a group of researchers who would be interested in hockey, you’d probably first think of dentists, not psychologists. Certainly you wouldn’t consider hockey players an ideal subject pool for mapping the brain’s language pathways, unless you were uniquely interested in the comprehension of French-Canadian slurs.

But hockey players and their brains were perfectly suited for the lab of Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago psychologist looking to study whether experts in an action-based field - such as one involving pucks, sticks and skates - process language differently than those with little experience in the field. Professional and college hockey players, as well as hockey fans and hockey novices, sat in MRI machines while they heard sentences about hockey (“The hockey player knocked down the net.”) or more mundane topics (“The individual closed the book.”). The resulting images revealed that people who play hockey for a living exhibit a unique pattern of brain activation when they hear sentences about their sport, suggesting that experience can shape the way humans comprehend language at its most basic level.

It may not be surprising that people who spend dozens of hours a week practicing slap-shots and fore-checking have a deeper understanding of their sport’s terminology than someone who thinks a hat trick is a Charlie Chaplin bit. But Beilock, an associate professor of psychology at U. of C., said nobody previously had viewed modulation of language pathways as a function of an individual’s motor expertise. In fact, psychologists long considered language and one’s ability to shoot a puck to be unrelated processes in the brain, never sharing information.

“People used to often talk about language as being a very specific cognitive activity in a very specific part of the brain,” Beilock said. “What we’re showing is that people with experience in acting out things they might read, hear or talk about seem to call upon not just traditional language areas when hearing information, but seem to call upon areas involved with acting out things the language depicts.”

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