#577 Russell Gray: Language Evolution, Big Gods and Rituals, and Animal Cognition

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Dr. Russell Gray is the director to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Dr. Gray’s research spans the areas of cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy of biology.

In this episode, we talk about linguistics, cultural evolution, and animal cognition. We start with linguistics, and discuss if language is innate or acquired and Universal Grammar; approaches to the study of the evolution of languages, like Bayesian phylolinguistics; constraints in linguistic variation; the evolution of languages in the Pacific and the timing of peopling there; and what we know about the Indo-European language(s). We then talk about religion: how notions of god vary with ecology; the relationship between Big Gods and social complexity; and ritual human sacrifice and the evolution of stratified societies. We discuss D-PLACE, and the difficulties in building comparative cultural databases. Finally, we discuss animal cognition, with a focus on the cognition of New Caledonian crows and their tool use. We talk about tool use in animals, the relationship between brain size and cognitive ability, and the problems with talking about a generally “smart” species and “one cognition”.

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