Field: Evolutionary Dynamics 
Value: up to $200,000USD per annum for 2 yearsDetails: http://www.templeton.org/node/1521
Deadline: 31 Jan 2012

The deadline is rather soon, but the initial application requirements are not that taxing, so someone might be interested in putting an application in. The reason I list it here is due to two of the suggested research questions which have relevance to current work in evolutionary linguistics:

• Can we build precise models for the evolution of cells, multi-cellular organisms, animal societies and human language? 
  
• What are the differences between genetic and cultural evolution, and how can these differences be formalized?
  

Event Dates: 19 March 2012
Event Location: Tokyo, Japan
Event URL: http://tokyoforum.evolutionarylinguistics.org/

The Tokyo Evolutionary Linguistics Forum is being organized as a venue to extend discussions on any interesting issues raised at this years 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang9) which is being held form the 13th to 16th of March in Kyoto. It is hoped that the event will stimulate interest in this burgeoning field of study in the Tokyo academic community, and lead to ongoing collaborations between local and international researchers.

Invited Speakers:
-Bart de Boer (University of Amsterdam)
-Erica Cartmill (University of Chicago)
-Rafael Núñez (University of california, San Diego)
-Thom Scott-Phillips (University of Edinburgh)
-Monica Tamariz (University of Edinburgh)
-Jordan Zlatev (Lund University)
+More to come

Important Details  
Date: 19th March 2012
Venue: Komaba Campus, The University of Tokyo 
Cost: Free
Registration: On site
Language: English
Website: http://tokyoforum.evolutionarylinguistics.org/

Call deadline: 13 January 2012
Event Dates: 13 March 2012
Event Location: Kyoto, Japan
Event URL: http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/call-papers


EVOLANG WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS
http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/workshops

We invite submissions of abstracts to the following four workshops scheduled for the first day of 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG9) to be held 13-16 March, 2012, in Kyoto, Japan:

-Language and Brain
-Emotion and Language
-Animal Communication and Language Evolution
-Constructive Approaches to Language Evolution

Further details and descriptions of these workshops are available here.

In preparing abstracts for submission, please follow the standard EVOLANG stylesheets for 2-page Abstract type submissions. The relevant stylesheets are available here. Please note that the Constructive Approaches to Language Evolution workshop is somewhat flexible and allows submissions of papers between 2-10 pages (These too should be formatted according to the standard EVOLANG stylesheets). 

Abstracts should be submitted directly to the contact address of the relevant workshop listed on the workshop descriptions page. Please note that the Theoretical Linguistics/Biolinguistics workshop is by invitation only and will not be accepting abstracts. The other four workshops will select 4-8 submitted papers for oral presentation. The abstracts of selected talks will not be included in the main conference proceedings, but will be included in a separate workshop booklet distributed to conference participants and made available for download on the conference website.

The conference will be offering limited financial support to help student authors attend the conference to present their own work. This applies equally to students accepted to give presentations as part of the main conference or workshops. Please see the conference website for further details. 

For further details please see the workshop page of the conference website or contact the organizer of the relevant workshop directly. 

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: 13 Jan 2012
Notification: Early February 2012
Workshops: 13 March 2012

In a recent talk on language evolution at UCL Chomsky made some comments on studies of language evolution which seem to indicate his upcoming talk at Evolang might be quite interesting. 

The comments start at approximately 27:00 and the video is available here.

Partial transcript:

"There is a field called Evolution of language, which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense. But anyway, its growing. In fact, it isn't even about evolution of language, its almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication which is a different topic. And its kind of natural topic to look at if your caught up in another myth, a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which holds that changes take place only incrementally. Small change, then another small change, and finally you get complex organisms. That was believed at one time, and you can find sentences in darwin... you can quote, thats the bible. But for a long time evolutionary biologists have understood it doesn't work like that. You can have quite sudden changes that, small changes, that lead to huge phenomenal difference. In the area of communication you can mislead yourself into believing that since every organism you can think of, from bacteria to humans, has some kind of communication system, so maybe our communication system us just a slight modification of primates' or whatever you like. But its undoubtedly not true, but at least you can delude yourself into believing it. On the other hand language seems totally separate. These nothing even remotely analogous or nothing at all homologous as far as anyone knows. Theres a few things that look similar, like say songbirds are at such a distance from an evolutionary point of view that its just got to be convergent evolution to the extent that there is a similarity. And there is interesting questions you can study, but only if you take biology in the last 50 years seriously. 
If you are back to the pop darwinism that you learned in 8th grade thats no good. Anyhow, the fact that theres been no evolution in 5000 years is interesting if anyone really wants to study evolution of language. It raises a lot of questions, but I don't want to get to far from the Poverty of the Stimulus...

Call deadline: 30 December 2011
Event Dates: 13 March 2012
Event Location: Kyoto, Japan
Event URL: http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/workshops

The following five workshops have been announced at next year's Evolang9 in Kyoto.

• Theoretical Linguistics/Biolinguistics
• Language and Brain
• Emotion and Language
• Animal Communication and Language Evolution
• Constructive Approaches to Language Evolution
  

Detailed descriptions of each of the workshops is available at:   http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/workshops

Call deadline: 25 November 2011
Event Dates: 15-28 March 2012
Event Location: Durham, UK
Event URL: 
http://www.dur.ac.uk/jeremy.kendal/EHBEA2012/Welcome.html
Dear colleagues,

We are organising a special themed session on language evolution at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, which is held in Durham, UK, 25th-28th March 2012 (http://www.dur.ac.uk/jeremy.kendal/EHBEA2012/Welcome.html). EHBEA is an excellent venue for interdisciplinary work on the cultural and biological evolution of human behaviour, including language. Given that EHBEA is running shortly after EVOLANG next year, we are happy for research that is targeted at EVOLANG to also be submitted here, although note that the audience for each is likely to be different.

If you would like to submit an abstract for consideration as part of this themed session, please follow the submission instructions on the EHBEA website, marking your abstract as for consideration in the language evolution special session, organised by Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith. Abstracts will be independently reviewed by the usual EHBEA reviewers, so bear that in mind when preparing your submission. The themed session will only run if sufficient abstracts are accepted - of course, papers on language evolution could be presented independently as standard EHBEA talks.

The deadline for submissions is November 25th.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED!

Best wishes,
Simon & Kenny