Dr. Simon J. Greenhill:

The evolution of languages and cultures

I’m a post-doctoral research fellow in the Psychology Department and Computational Evolution Group at the University of Auckland.

My main research focus is the evolution of languages and cultures. I have applied cutting-edge computational phylogenetic methods to language and cultural evolution, and used these methods to test hypotheses about human prehistory and cultural evolution in general. The questions I have explored so far include how people settled the Pacific, how language structure and complexity evolve, the co-evolution of cultural systems in the Pacific, and how cultural evolution can be modeled.

Research Interests

Human Prehistory

Languages are the archives of history. They not only provide us with a system for communicating historical information, but their elements — such as lexicon and grammar — carry historical signal about the people who spoke these languages and their cultures.

The main theme of my research into this area has been using language information to test between different scenarios of Pacific settlement.

My research into this area has been covered in
The New Zealand Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, New Scientist, Cosmos Magazine, Le Monde, Russian Newsweek, among others.

Language Evolution

Apart from using language information to explore prehistory, I am interested in broader questions about how languages evolve over time.

Cultural Evolution

Since the publication of Darwin’s (1859) Origin of Species there has been an ongoing debate about how evolutionary ideas can be applied to cultural and linguistic changes. I have been at the forefront of a “virtual anthropology” movement to apply phylogenetic methods to cultural evolution.

First, a common criticism of cultural evolution methods is that the horizontal transmission of cultural information invalidates computational phylogenetic methods. To test this, I (along with Tom Currie and Russell Gray) used a natural model of linguistic evolution to simulate borrowing between languages/cultures. The results show that these methods are robust to realistic levels of borrowing.

  • Greenhill SJ, Currie TE, & Gray RD (2009) Does horizontal transmission invalidate cultural phylogenies? Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 276: 2299-230
  • Currie TE, Greenhill SJ, & Mace R (in press) Is horizontal transmission really a problem for phylogenetic comparative methods? A simulation study using continuous cultural traits. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Second, in collaboration with Russell Gray and Rob Ross, I have argued that a phylogenetic approach to cultural evolution provides a powerful framework for tackling questions about how cultures evolve.

Third, with Fiona Jordan, Ruth Mace and Russell Gray, I have investigated kinship systems in the Pacific and showed that matrilocal residence was the ancestral state of Austronesian societies.

Databases

One of the major driving factors in biology over the last 20 years has been the development of large-scale databases of biological information. I believe that anthropology and linguistics can benefit immensely from taking a similar approach and constructing open-access, interoperable databases of linguistic and cultural information. To this end, I constructed the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database. This database currently contains lexical information from almost 700 languages making it one of the largest cross-cultural linguistic databases in the world.

Other stuff

I have written a few programs including genbank-download, mnemosyne, solvedoku and more.

I have also contributed to a number of open source projects, including the web development framework Django and the bibliography manager referencer.