Darwin-L Message Log 35: 1–30 — July 1996

Academic Discussion on the History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

Darwin-L was an international discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences, active from 1993–1997. Darwin-L was established to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present, and to encourage communication among scholars, scientists, and researchers in these fields. The group had more than 600 members from 35 countries, and produced a consistently high level of discussion over its several years of operation. Darwin-L was not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles Darwin, but instead addressed the entire range of historical sciences from an explicitly comparative perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology, systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical geography, historical anthropology, and related “palaetiological” fields.

This log contains public messages posted to the Darwin-L discussion group during July 1996. It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been reformatted, and error messages and personal messages accidentally posted to the group as a whole have been deleted. No genuine editorial changes have been made to the content of any of the posts. This log is provided for personal reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.

The master copy of this log is maintained in the Darwin-L Archives (rjohara.net/darwin) by Dr. Robert J. O’Hara. The Darwin-L Archives also contain additional information about the Darwin-L discussion group, the complete Today in the Historical Sciences calendar for every month of the year, a collection of recommended readings on the historical sciences, and an account of William Whewell’s concept of “palaetiology.”

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DARWIN-L MESSAGE LOG 35: 1-30 -- JULY 1996
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DARWIN-L
A Network Discussion Group on the
History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

Darwin-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu is an international network discussion group on
the history and theory of the historical sciences.  Darwin-L was established
in September 1993 to promote the reintegration of a range of fields all of
which are concerned with reconstructing the past from evidence in the present,
and to encourage communication among academic professionals in these fields.
Darwin-L is not restricted to evolutionary biology nor to the work of Charles
Darwin but instead addresses the entire range of historical sciences from an
interdisciplinary perspective, including evolutionary biology, historical
linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology,
systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, historical
anthropology, historical geography, and related "palaetiological" fields.

This log contains public messages posted to Darwin-L during July 1996.
It has been lightly edited for format: message numbers have been added for ease
of reference, message headers have been trimmed, some irregular lines have been
reformatted, and some administrative messages and personal messages posted to
the group as a whole have been deleted.  No genuine editorial changes have been
made to the content of any of the posts.  This log is provided for personal
reference and research purposes only, and none of the material contained herein
should be published or quoted without the permission of the original poster.
The master copy of this log is maintained on the Darwin-L Web Server at
http://rjohara.uncg.edu.  For instructions on how to retrieve copies of this
and other log files, and for additional information about Darwin-L and the
historical sciences, connect to the Darwin-L Web Server or send the e-mail
message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu.

Darwin-L is administered by Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu), Center for
Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts and Department of Biology, University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A., and it
is supported by the Center for Critical Inquiry, University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, and the Department of History and the Academic Computing Center,
University of Kansas.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:1>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Mon Jul  1 00:17:04 1996

Date: Mon, 01 Jul 1996 01:16:59 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: List owner's monthly greeting
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Greetings to all Darwin-L subscribers.  On the first of every month I send
out a short note on the status of our group, along with a reminder of basic
commands.  For additional information about the group please visit the
Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu).

Darwin-L is an international discussion group for professionals in the
historical sciences.  The group is not devoted to any particular discipline,
such as evolutionary biology, but rather seeks to promote interdisciplinary
comparisons across the entire range of "palaetiology", including evolution,
historical linguistics, archeology, geology, cosmology, historical geography,
textual transmission, and history proper.  Darwin-L currently has about 700
members from more than 35 countries.

Because Darwin-L does have a large membership and is sometimes a high-volume
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Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Dr. Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)  |  Darwin-L Server
Cornelia Strong College, 100 Foust Building  |   http://rjohara.uncg.edu
University of North Carolina at Greensboro   |  Strong College Server
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.      |   http://strong.uncg.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:2>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Mon Jul  1 00:28:30 1996

Date: Mon, 01 Jul 1996 01:28:25 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: July 1 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

JULY 1 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1646 (350 years ago today): GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ is born at Leipzig,
Germany.  One of the most brilliant and wide-ranging scholars of his age,
Leibniz will be best remembered by future generations for his work in
mathematics and philosophy, but his writings will span genealogy, history,
jurisprudence, geology, and linguistics as well: "The study of languages must
not be conducted according to any other principles but those of the exact
sciences.  Why begin with the unknown instead of the known?  It stands to
reason that we ought to begin with studying the modern languages which are
within our reach, in order to compare them with one another, to discover their
differences and affinities, and then to proceed to those which have preceded
them in former ages, in order to show their filiation and their origin, and
then to ascend step by step to the most ancient tongues, the analysis of
which must lead us to the only trustworthy conclusions."

1858: CHARLES LYELL and JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER present three short papers by
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace before the meeting of the Linnean
Society at London, addressing their introduction to the Society's secretary,
John Joseph Bennett:

  My Dear Sir, --
    The accompanying papers, which we have the honour of communicating to the
  Linnean Society, and which all relate to the same subject, viz. the Laws
  which affect the Production of Varieties, Races, and Species, contain the
  results of the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles
  Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace.
    These gentlemen having, independently and unknown to one another,
  conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and
  perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both
  fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of
  inquiry; but neither of them having published his views, though Mr. Darwin
  has for many years past been repeatedly urged by us to do so, and both
  authors having now unreservedly placed their papers in our hands, we think
  it would best promote the interests of science that a selection from them
  should be laid before the Linnean Society.
    Taken in order of their dates, they consist of: --
    1. Extracts from a MS. work on Species, by Mr. Darwin, which was sketched
  in 1839, and copied in 1844, when the copy was read by Dr. Hooker, and its
  contents afterwards communicated to Sir Charles Lyell.  The first Part is
  devoted to "The Variation of Organic Beings under Domestication and in the
  Natural State;" and the second chapter of that Part, from which we propose
  to read to the Society the extracts referred to, is headed, "On the
  Variation of Organic Beings in a state of Nature; on the Natural Means of
  Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and true Species."
    2. An abstract of a private letter addressed to Professor Asa Gray, of
  Boston, U.S., in October 1857, by Mr. Darwin, in which he repeats his views,
  and which shows that these remained unaltered from 1839 to 1857.
    3. An Essay by Mr. Wallace, entitled "On the Tendency of Varieties to
  depart indefinitely from the Original Type."  This was written at Ternate in
  February 1858, for the perusal of his friend and correspondent Mr. Darwin,
  and sent to him with the expressed wish that is should be forwarded to Sir
  Charles Lyell, if Mr. Darwin thought it sufficiently novel and interesting.
  So highly did Mr. Darwin appreciate the value of the views therein set
  forth, that he proposed, in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, to obtain Mr.
  Wallace's consent to allow the Essay to be published as soon as possible.
  Of this step we highly approved, provided Mr. Darwin did not withhold from
  the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of Mr. Wallace),
  the memoir which he had himself written on the same subject, and which, as
  before stated, one of us had perused in 1844, and the contents of which we
  had both of us been privy to for many years.  On representing this to Mr.
  Darwin, he gave us permission to make what use we thought proper of his
  memoir, &c.; and in adopting our present course, of presenting it to the
  Linnean Society, we have explained to him that we are not solely considering
  the relative claims to priority of himself and his friend, but the interests
  of science generally; for we feel it to be desirable that views founded on
  a wide deduction from facts, and matured by years of reflection, should
  constitute at once a goal from which others may start, and that while the
  scientific world is waiting for the appearance of Mr. Darwin's complete
  work, some of the leading results of his labours, as well as those of his
  able correspondent, should together be laid before the public.
    We have the honour to be yours very obediently,
      Charles Lyell    Jos. D. Hooker

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:3>From dasher@netcom.com Sun Jun 30 22:39:31 1996

Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996 20:39:29 -0700
From: dasher@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: birth order

And what is "fluctuating asymmetry"?  How is it measured?

*\\* Anton 						Ubi scriptum?

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<35:4>From kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu Tue Jul  2 07:13:35 1996

Date: Tue, 2 Jul 96 08:13:19 EDT
From: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: linguistic & biological evolution

>>>>> "Jeremy" == Jeremy C Ahouse <ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu> writes:

    Jeremy>         When I initiated the thread on the pronunciation
    Jeremy> of '@' (by crossposting something from the HUMANIST list)
    Jeremy> , I ventured that "Language change through time really
    Jeremy> does seem different from organismal evolution."  Bob
    Jeremy> O'Hara and Kent Holsinger challenged this. I want to open
    Jeremy> this up a bit more.

I've been thinking about Jeremy's post for a while and trying to find
time to comment. He also questions the analogy between memes and
genes. I've not thought enough about memes to have a strong opinion
about them, so I'll ignore that part of his post. I do want to argue,
however, that there are, in fact, *strong* analogies between language
evolution and organismal evolution. (A reminder to everyone. My
expertise is in biology not linguistics. I'm counting on the linguists
on this list to correct any misrepresentations of linguistic
phenomena.)

    Jeremy>         Biology has lineages. These ancestor descendant
    Jeremy> relationships result in a topology of connections that is
    Jeremy> primarily branching (dichotomously) above the species
    Jeremy> level. Some would even define species as that level of
    Jeremy> organization where the number of reticulate branches
    Jeremy> whither.  This toplogy underwrites some of the ways that
    Jeremy> we can make inferences about the relationships between
    Jeremy> organisms. (For one thing we expect them to be nested.)
    Jeremy> Cladistics has taken this understanding of the topology
    Jeremy> (lineage + dichotomous branching) and run with it. At what
    Jeremy> times/places does language have these properties?

The analogies here seem overwhelming. Romance languages, for example,
seem to be variants of Latin that diverged from one another through a
process much like geographical speciation in plants or animals. With
the fall of the Roman Empire (perhaps before, my history is too shaky
to know) local populations continued to speak Latin.

New usages, new pronunciations, new words arose in each local
population that were different from those used elsewhere (analagous to
mutations arising independently in different parts of a species'
range). In the absence of continuing and extensive contact between
these populations (analagous to continuing and extensive gene flow),
the non-directed accumulation of these differences leads eventually to
the origin of dialects, which though recognizably different are
mutually intelligible (perhaps analagous to geographical races or
subspecies, which though recognizably distinct recognize one another
as mates and leave fertile offspring). Continued long enough, this
divergence leads to the origin of distinct languages, where native
speakers of each can communicate fluently with speakers of their own
language but are unable to communicate with speakers of their sister
language (analagous to classical ``biological species'' that are
reproductively isolated from one another).

Just as with biological evolution, this process of descent with
modification will lead to a hierarchical relationship of languages. It
is precisely because of this structure that historical linguists have
been able to recognize language families, whether as small as the
Romance languages or as vast as Indo-European. (Whether Amerind
qualifies as an example is a point others will have to decide.)

One story I have heard suggests that the analogies may be even more
extensive. My understanding is that if one were to go from village to
village from Sicily, north through Italy, west along the Mediterranean
to the tip of the Iberian peninsula neighboring villagers would be
able to understand one another, though villagers from Sicily could not
understand those from Portugal or vice versa. If this is true, it
sounds to me like a linguistic example of a Rassenkreise or ``circle
of races.'' It suggests that the processes of language change share
some fundamental similarities with the processes of organismal
evolution.

One significant difference between organismal evolution and linguistic
evolution that we discussed here a year or two ago is that it appears
that reticulation/hybridization/borrowing is more extensive in
language evolution than it is in biological evolution. From what I
have been able to gather, the reticulation is not sufficient to
destroy the hierarchical structure though it may be sufficient to
limit the ability of linguists to reconstruct deep historical
branches.

-- Kent

--
Kent E. Holsinger                Kent@Darwin.EEB.UConn.Edu
-- Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
-- University of Connecticut, U-43
-- Storrs, CT   06269-3043

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:5>From IRMSS668@sivm.si.edu Tue Jul  2 07:20:55 1996

Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 08:20:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jim Felley <IRMSS668@sivm.si.edu>
Subject: birth order
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu

 dasher@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) asked:
>And what is "fluctuating asymmetry"?  How is it measured?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Asymmetry for a bilateral structure is measured as the difference in
the structure's value between the two sides, i.e.
         Asym = L - R

For length-related characters, it is measured as
         Asym = (L-R)/(L+R)

Van Valen (1962, A study of fluctuating asymmetry.  Evolution
16: 125-142) identified 3 types of asymmetry, based on distributions of
asymmetry values.  Directional asymmetry is characterized by a skewed
distribution (1 side consistently larger than the other), antisymmetry
is characterized by a bimodal distribution (one side or the other
larger).  He considered that these two types of asymmetry reflected
the results of selection.
   Fluctuating asymmetry is characterized by a normal distribution
about a mean of 0 (no asymmetry) and Van Valen considered that this
type of asymmetry resulted from developmental accidents.  Fluctuating
asymmetry is commonly quantified by some measure of dispersion,
such as the variance of the distribution of asymmetry values.
   Fluctuating asymmetry has been widely used to measured the effects
on development of various stressors.  For a more recent appraisal, see

   Palmer, A.R. and C. Strobeck.  1986.  Fluctuating asymmetry:
      measurement, analysis, patterns.  Annual Review of Ecology and
      Systematics 17:391-421.
                                    Jim

       #%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#
       %                                                           %
       #     James D. Felley, Computer Specialist                  #
       %     Room 2310, A&I Building, Smithsonian Institution      %
       #     900 Jefferson Drive, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20560     #
       %     Phone (202)-357-4229   FAX (202)-786-2687             %
       #                    EMAIL:  IRMSS668@SIVM.BITNET           #
       %                            IRMSS668@SIVM.SI.EDU           %
       #%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#%#

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:6>From mycol1@unm.edu Tue Jul  2 14:00:52 1996

Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 13:00:50 -0600 (MDT)
From: Bryant <mycol1@unm.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: birth order

On Sun, 30 Jun 1996, Anton Sherwood wrote:

> And what is "fluctuating asymmetry"?  How is it measured?

FA is asymmetry in bilateral traits with developmental "targets" of
symmetry.  It boils down to being a measure of developmental errors
caused by stress during trait ontogeny.  A useful way to detect just how
stressful a given pesticide is to a fish population, for example.

It's a crude measure of developmental stress, and the fact that it
correlates with IQ and birth order suggests that 1) low IQs may be due
partly to developmental stress, and 2) that late birth order is, for some
unknown reason, biologically more stressful than early birth order.

Odd.

Bryant

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:7>From anave@ucla.edu Tue Jul  2 21:40:09 1996

Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 19:31:11 -0700
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: anave@ucla.edu (Ari Nave)
Subject: Hybrid Zones

Would anyone have references to material on hybrid zones written after
1989?  I am finishing a paper which compares evolutionary processes which
maintain genetic hybrid zones with similar processes maintaining ethnic
group boundaries in the presence of continual inter-ethnic marriage.  I
have not found anything after Barton and Hewitt's materials published in
the mid and late 1980s.  Any help much appreciated.  I will post the paper
on my web site once complete if anyone is interested.

Ari Nave
                   Dept. of Anthropology
                   University of California, Los Angeles
                   Los Angeles, CA 90024-1553
                   Campus Mail Code:  155303

e-mail:  anave@ucla.edu
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/nave
Fax: (310) 552-3453

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:8>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Wed Jul  3 00:00:20 1996

Date: Wed, 03 Jul 1996 00:55:57 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Brazilian universities (fwd)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

I post the following message about Brazilian universities at the request
of Charbel Nino El-Hani, who has been a long-time friend of Darwin-L.  The
message is important, but since it does not relate to the topic of our
group I would like to ask those who wish to reply to do so directly to
Charbel or to the persons mentioned rather than to Darwin-L.

Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)

--begin forwarded message--------------

Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 17:02:43 -0300 (GRNLNDST)
From: Charbel Nino El-Hani <charbel@ufba.br>
Subject: On brazilian's universities situation
To: Robert O'Hara <darwin@iris.uncg.edu>

Dear Robert O'Hara,
   In the following message, the professors and researchers of Brazilian
universities try to inform the international and national scientific
communities about the plans of Brazilian government to change the current
model of education in Brazil. I would like to ask you if the nettiquete
of Darwin-L allows such a message to be posted.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Charbel Nino El-Hani <charbel@ufba.br>
    Department of General Biology
        Institute of Biology
  Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
#######################################

We ask for your solidarity with the struggle of the Brazilian public
university professors for the PUBLIC, FREE and GOOD QUALITY UNIVERSITY, by
forwarding the following message to the users at your system, as also to
other research and education institutions of your knowledge:

BRAZILIAN PUBLIC UNIVERSITY CRIES FOR HELP!
BRAZILIAN FEDERAL UNIVERSITIES PROFESSORS ARE ON STRIKE IN DEFENSE OF THE
PUBLIC UNIVERSITY AND TECHNOLOGICAL EDUCATION.
The Brazilian public Universities, where the country's most important
scientists work, are responsible by approximately 90% of all research and
50% of the total number of superior education enrollments in Brazil.
Notwithstanding these facts, the government of President Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, himself a former university professor, develops an aggressive
undermining process with the main objective of privatizing the public
Universities. The government policies comprise:  compressing the salaries,
offering no mechanisms of recuperation of income eroded by inflation; taking
out the employment stability guarantees; inducing professors to retirement
and not filling the vacant positions; reducing the costs and maintenance
budgetary allowances; and promoting changes in the present legislation which
establishes: equal career and juridical rule, salary equivalence among the
universities, non-dissociability of teaching, research and extension, and
the exigency of financing the public federal University with federal budget
resources. In defense of a PUBLIC, FREE and GOOD QUALITY UNIVERSITY, the
Brazilian University professors ask for your solidarity by sending a message
to the Brazilian Republic President and Education Minister
(secretaria@mare.gov.br).

UNIVERSITARIAN GREETINGS!
APUB - ASSOCIACAO DOS PROFESSORES UNIVERSITARIOS DA BAHIA (UNIVERSITY
PROFESSOR'S ASSOCIATION OF THE STATE OF BAHIA)
Please send also a copy of your message to our Association (apub@ufba.br) or
to ANDES/SN (National Association of Superior Education Professors /
National Syndicate - (andes@brnet.com.br). We would highly appreciate your
comments or suggestions.

MESSAGE:
(secretaria@mare.gov.br)
Exmo. Sr.
Prof. FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO
Presidente da Republica do Brasil
Exmo. Sr.
Prof. PAULO RENATO SOUZA
Ministro da Educacao
The Brazilian Federal Public Universities, for their scientific and
technological production and for their work in the formation of qualified
superior professionals, represent an inestimable asset of Brazilian society.
We manifest to Your Excellency, as you also are an University professor, the
necessity that the Brazilian Federal Government assures the maintenance of
the PUBLIC and FREE Federal Universities and the conditions for its GOOD
QUALITY, by attending the demands of the university professors (salary;
autonomy; democracy and funding; employment; retirement; suspension of the
course, in National Congress, of the law projects related to the University,
for discussion of their contents by the university community and other
social sectors, and assurance of the establishment of the educational policy
foreseen in Law Project no. 101/93)

--end forwarded message----------------

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:9>From ptenglot@summon.syr.edu Wed Jul  3 09:16:01 1996

From: "Peter T. Englot (Graduate School)" <ptenglot@summon.syr.edu>
Organization: Syracuse University
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 10:15:33 +0500
Subject: Re: Linguistic and Biological Evolution

Kent Holsinger wrote:

> One story I have heard suggests that the analogies may be even more
> extensive. My understanding is that if one were to go from village to
> village from Sicily, north through Italy, west along the Mediterranean
> to the tip of the Iberian peninsula neighboring villagers would be
> able to understand one another, though villagers from Sicily could not
> understand those from Portugal or vice versa. If this is true, it
> sounds to me like a linguistic example of a Rassenkreise or ``circle
> of races.'' It suggests that the processes of language change share
> some fundamental similarities with the processes of organismal
> evolution.
>
> One significant difference between organismal evolution and linguistic
> evolution that we discussed here a year or two ago is that it appears
> that reticulation/hybridization/borrowing is more extensive in
> language evolution than it is in biological evolution. From what I
> have been able to gather, the reticulation is not sufficient to
> destroy the hierarchical structure though it may be sufficient to
> limit the ability of linguists to reconstruct deep historical
> branches.

To be sure, there are some aspects of language change that appear to
be quite similar to biological change.  (Mirroring Kent, I warn that
my background is in linguistics, not biology.)  But I question
whether language change can be seen as reproduction.  In a real
sense, language is recreated as it is passed from one generation to
another, rather than reproduced.  The genesis of creole languages is
a vivid example of this.

Further, I wonder what we are comparing a language to in this
analogy.  Is it a species?  Because if a species is defined by its
genes, then unlike a language, its fate is sealed, in a sense.
Members of a species typically can't change their genes.  (I'm
reminded of scene from _The Pope of Greenwich Village_, in which a
two-bit con artist and gambler played by Mickey Rourke says to a
companion about betting on the races: "Horses are what they are. They
can't improve themselves like you and me.")  Language change doesn't
just occur, or perhaps even primarily occur, across generations, but
within generations.

While we may be able to organize our understanding of language
change and biological change across generations in similar ways, it
appears to me that the processes of change are similar only
metaphorically.

Peter Englot
Assistant Dean
The Graduate School
Syracuse University
303 Bowne Hall
Syracuse, NY 13244-1200
PTENGLOT@SUMMON.SYR.EDU
(315) 443-4492

"Out of the crooked timber of
humanity, no straight thing
was ever made." Kant

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:10>From delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Jul  3 10:54:10 1996

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 08:53:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott DeLancey <delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: linguistic & biological evolution

On Tue, 2 Jul 1996, Kent E. Holsinger wrote:

>     Jeremy> Cladistics has taken this understanding of the topology
>     Jeremy> (lineage + dichotomous branching) and run with it. At what
>     Jeremy> times/places does language have these properties?
>
> The analogies here seem overwhelming. Romance languages, for example,
> seem to be variants of Latin that diverged from one another through a
> process much like geographical speciation in plants or animals. With
> the fall of the Roman Empire (perhaps before, my history is too shaky
> to know) local populations continued to speak Latin.

Quite true.  In the idealized "Stammbaum" model of linguistic
relationships, all dialects and languages are organized into
a hierarchical model reflecting successive population divergences.

I won't repeat Kent's summary of how independent changes in
daughter populations lead to "speciation", but it's right on,
and the parallels (speaking as a linguist, here, with only an
amateur knowledge of biology) are just as precise and striking
as he says.

> One story I have heard suggests that the analogies may be even more
> extensive. My understanding is that if one were to go from village to
> village from Sicily, north through Italy, west along the Mediterranean
> to the tip of the Iberian peninsula neighboring villagers would be
> able to understand one another, though villagers from Sicily could not
> understand those from Portugal or vice versa. If this is true, it
> sounds to me like a linguistic example of a Rassenkreise or ``circle
> of races.'' It suggests that the processes of language change share
> some fundamental similarities with the processes of organismal
> evolution.

It is true.  I remember learning about this in intro linguistics and
about the biological parallel (the example used was leopard frogs
in the eastern U.S., as I remember) about the same time.

> One significant difference between organismal evolution and linguistic
> evolution that we discussed here a year or two ago is that it appears
> that reticulation/hybridization/borrowing is more extensive in
> language evolution than it is in biological evolution. From what I
> have been able to gather, the reticulation is not sufficient to
> destroy the hierarchical structure though it may be sufficient to
> limit the ability of linguists to reconstruct deep historical
> branches.

This is generally true, and is still often taught in historical
linguistics courses as dogma--"there are no mixed languages".
Actually, there do appear to be occasional examples of Michsprachen,
which give orthodox historical linguists conniption fits.
Japanese is a probable example, combining Altaic and Austronesian
elements inextricably enough to provoke a feud over its "correct"
genetic classification which has persisted over generations.

But there are differences, which I think bear in an interesting
way on the general question of genes vs. "memes".  I'd better
say something about that in a separate post; this is already
pretty long.

Scott DeLancey			delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:11>From sally@isp.pitt.edu Wed Jul  3 11:01:15 1996

To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Cc: sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu
Subject: Re: linguistic & biological evolution
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 1996 12:00:34 -0400
From: "Sarah G. Thomason" <sally@isp.pitt.edu>

Just one comment about Kent Holsinger's interesting post about
analogies between linguistic and biological evolution: the point
is still somewhat controversial, but I believe that most historical
linguists would now disagree with the claim (not made by Kent!) that
reticulation/hybridization/borrowing is "not sufficient to destroy
the hierarchical structure".  At some point the notion of descent
with modification loses most of its content, and seriously mixed languages
can be found in many parts of the world: pidgins and creoles are
the best-known examples (vocabulary typically from one language,
grammar neither from that nor from any other single language -- a
situation that must reflect a history radically different from the
whole-language-passed-down-from-generation-to-generation type of
transmission), but there are also two-language mixtures that at
least sometimes arise through sudden and more or less deliberate
decisions by groups of speakers (e.g. Michif, the language of the Metis of
Canada, which is a combination of French nouns & noun phrases with
Cree verbs & verb phrases).  Mixed languages are not the usual case,
however, and they declare themselves by the lack of systematic
correspondences in all linguistic subsystems with putatively related
languages.  So it's a tricky call: of course some parts of these languages
can, in favorable circumstances, be matched with/compared systematically
to other languages; but a mixed language as a whole is not a viable
candidate for systematic comparison with any other single language or
language group, and any effort to shoehorn it into a language family
will seriously skew the historical picture when one tries to reconstruct
a parent language for the entire group and to trace the changes member
languages have undergone.  The interaction of linguistic elements from
more than one system causes irregularities in correspondences even in
the subsystems (e.g. the vocabulary) that seem to derive from a single
language.  The only way to fit such languages into a family is to
decide arbitrarily that one subsystem -- e.g. the vocabulary or the
inflectional morphology (word structure) -- is the only one that
counts for language classification; and such a decision greatly
reduces the historical value of the notion "language family", it
seems to me.

  -- Sally
     sally@isp.pitt.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:12>From delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Jul  3 11:24:32 1996

Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 09:24:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott DeLancey <delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: linguistic & biological evolution

More on the topic ...

On Tue, 2 Jul 1996, Kent E. Holsinger wrote:

> I've been thinking about Jeremy's post for a while and trying to find
> time to comment. He also questions the analogy between memes and
> genes. I've not thought enough about memes to have a strong opinion
> about them, so I'll ignore that part of his post.

A problem with the analogy is that in biology (I'm,
probably obviously, speaking as a non-biologist here; somebody
fix me if I go awry) we have for a long time been able to identify
fundamental units of transmission.  Even before we knew anything
about codons, before DNA, even back in the days of Mendel before
we knew anything at all about the mechanisms of transmission,
we could, at least in a rough-and-ready way, identify traits that
were transmitted as units, and thus find a specific level of analysis
where we could say with some explicitness what we mean by a "gene".
There is nothing equivalent in the "meme" model, and, at least in
our present state of understanding of human cognition and culture,
no way of even setting about to find one.  Where he first talks
about memes, Dawkins gives as an example something like a particular
way of making pots.  But that's not by any means an irreducible unit--
it's comparable not to a gene, or a trait, but to a whole complex
structure.

As Kent says,

> One significant difference between organismal evolution and linguistic
> evolution that we discussed here a year or two ago is that it appears
> that reticulation/hybridization/borrowing is more extensive in
> language evolution than it is in biological evolution.

and here the comparison gets really complicated.  In the biological
case, we're essentially talking here about genes moving from species
to another, or hybrids with genetic inheritance from two distinct
lineages, where "genetic inheritance" can in principle be made
absolutely explicit--A, C, and E from one parent, B, D and F from
the other, or whatever.  When languages mix/borrow/otherwise affect
one another, there's a much broader range of possibilities.  A
language can borrow anything from a single word up to half or
more of its vocabulary (cf. the French/Latin vocabulary in English),
from a single sound (rare without accompanying vocabulary borrowing,
but possible) to a whole phonological system, from a particular
syntactic construction to a whole grammatical structure.  Or, groups of
languages which are in contact with one another can change
together in particular directions, so that it may be difficult
or impossible to identify one or another as the donor and others
as recipients for particular features which they have in common.
As Kent says, this sort of thing doesn't ordinarily prevent us
from identifying lineages and creating reasonable hierarchical
classifications (which, by the way, are *always* cladistic, or
at least intended to be--when I first heard about arguments in
biology about cladistic classification I had trouble understanding
the issue; it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would call anything
else a classification), but it does give the actual synchronic
state of many languages a much more complex history than I think
a biological species could have.

Scott DeLancey			delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:13>From dewar@uconnvm.uconn.edu Wed Jul  3 13:32:38 1996

From: "Bob Dewar" <dewar@uconnvm.uconn.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 13:28:15 +0000
Subject: Re: Hybrid Zones

In response to Ari Nave's question about recent research in hybrid
zones: Nora Bynum has just finished a Ph.D. thesis (Anthropology,
Yale) on a hybrid zone between two species of Sulawesi macaques.  It
is available from University Microfilms.  She also has some articles
in preparation, but I do not know if any are yet published.  Her
address next year will be at The University of the South.
Robert E. Dewar                860 486-3851 - office
Department of Anthropology     860 486-1719 - fax
University of Connecticut      dewar@uconnvm.uconn.edu
U-176
Storrs, CT  06269

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:14>From NJOHNSON@ALBERT.UTA.EDU Wed Jul  3 13:35:04 1996

From: "NORMAN JOHNSON" <NJOHNSON@ALBERT.UTA.EDU>
Organization:  University of Texas at Arlington
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 13:33:05 CST
Subject: Re: Hybrid Zones

Ari-

There's a book edited by R. G. Harrison with the title of
something like _Hybrid Zones and the Evolutionary Process_ (I don't
have it in front of me right now) published by Oxford University
Press in 1993.....that may give you some inroads into the more recent
literature.

Norman

Norman Johnson
njohnson@albert.uta.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:15>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Thu Jul  4 00:16:10 1996

Date: Thu, 04 Jul 1996 01:16:06 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: July 4 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

JULY 4 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1795: KARL EDUARD IVANOVICH EICHWALD is born at Mitau, Latvia.  Following
study of science and medicine at a number of European universities, Eichwald
will take his doctorate in medicine at the University of Vilnius in 1819, and
will work for a time as a physician.  Successive teaching appointments at the
Universities of Dorpat, Kazan, and Vilnius will widen his experience in
zoology, botany, and paleontology, and he will eventually take up a teaching
post in St. Petersburg in 1838, remaining there for the rest of his career.
Eichwald will become one of the leading paleontologists of Russia, and will
make substantial contributions to the development of a geologic column for
eastern Europe.  His monumental _Lethaea Rossica ou Paleontologie de la
Russie_, a comprehensive synthesis of Russian paleontology, will appear
over the course of fifteen years beginning in 1853.

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:16>From s-mufwene@uchicago.edu Thu Jul  4 23:46:20 1996

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 23:46:03 -0500 (CDT)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
From: Salikoko Mufwene <s-mufwene@uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: Linguistic and Biological Evolution

At 10:15 AM 7/3/96 +0500, you wrote:
>Kent Holsinger wrote:

>To be sure, there are some aspects of language change that appear to
>be quite similar to biological change.  (Mirroring Kent, I warn that
>my background is in linguistics, not biology.)  But I question
>whether language change can be seen as reproduction.  In a real
>sense, language is recreated as it is passed from one generation to
>another, rather than reproduced.  The genesis of creole languages is
>a vivid example of this.
>
     I am not a biologist and cannot unfortunately claim to be a historical
linguist either, but isn't there a sense in which reproduction of the
species need not be taken literally? I think of variation within the species
and of cases where mating is a condition for "reproduction." I would guess
the selection of advantageous genes (or members of a species) in specific
ecological conditions may be analogized to processes that lead to language
change.

>Further, I wonder what we are comparing a language to in this
>analogy.  Is it a species?  Because if a species is defined by its
>genes, then unlike a language, its fate is sealed, in a sense.

   I am tempted again to think of different kinds of species being subjected
differently to the constraint suggested here, such as when members of one
race interbreed with members of another. I would assume that the problem is
more complex when one considers individuals within a species, in which case
no individual really reproduces a parent. Culture has of course conditioned
us to class offspring from interracial mating differently, but isn't the
difference just a matter of degree from those other offspring not considered
mixed? When it comes to language, transmission of linguistic features is not
chanelled through genetic inheritance--although there is a prerequisite
genetic infrastructure--and culture probably plays an important role in
controlling what is tansmitted and selected versus what is not. But I wonder
how far comparisons of linguistic and biological evolutions have proceeded
to really reveal how far the analogies go and where they end.

Sali.
**************************************************************
Salikoko S. Mufwene                   s-mufwene@uchicago.edu
University of Chicago                 (312)702-8531
Department of Linguistics             Fax: (312)702-9861
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
**************************************************************

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:17>From kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu Fri Jul  5 06:37:34 1996

Date: Fri, 5 Jul 96 07:37:18 EDT
From: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger)
Message-Id: <9607051137.AA05413@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu>
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: linguistic & biological evolution

>>>>> "Sally" == Sarah G Thomason <sally@isp.pitt.edu> writes:

    Sally> So it's a tricky call:
    Sally> of course some parts of these languages can, in favorable
    Sally> circumstances, be matched with/compared systematically to
    Sally> other languages; but a mixed language as a whole is not a
    Sally> viable candidate for systematic comparison with any other
    Sally> single language or language group, and any effort to
    Sally> shoehorn it into a language family will seriously skew the
    Sally> historical picture when one tries to reconstruct a parent
    Sally> language for the entire group and to trace the changes
    Sally> member languages have undergone.  The interaction of
    Sally> linguistic elements from more than one system causes
    Sally> irregularities in correspondences even in the subsystems
    Sally> (e.g. the vocabulary) that seem to derive from a single
    Sally> language.  The only way to fit such languages into a family
    Sally> is to decide arbitrarily that one subsystem -- e.g. the
    Sally> vocabulary or the inflectional morphology (word structure)
    Sally> -- is the only one that counts for language classification;
    Sally> and such a decision greatly reduces the historical value of
    Sally> the notion "language family", it seems to me.

The problem of ``mixed languages'' sounds in linguistics sounds a lot
like the problem of ``hybrids'' in biological systematics to me. In
both cases the mixed entity is the result of fusion between other
entities that have separate histories. The confusing combination of
characters in this mixed entity reflect *both* histories, and the
relationship is no longer hierarchical.

In treating an species of hybrid origin in biological systematics, I
don't think any currently active systematists would even try to say
that it belongs in only *one* line of descent. Rather, what we try to
do (or rather what *I* would try to do if I were a practicing
systematist instead of a population geneticist) is to reconstruct the
hierarchical relationship among the non-hybrid entities first and then
indicate the parentage of the hybrid entities. If the parental
entities are species that belong to the same genus, then the hybrid
would generally be treatedas a species in that same genus, but
classified separately in a different subgenus or section. The problem,
of course, is in correctly identifying the hybrid entities.

It seems that Sally is suggesting the same thing. It makes little
sense to force a mixed language into an historically well-defined
language family that reflects only part of its ancestry. Rather, its
parentage should be indicated. If the parental language families
belong to a larger superfamily, it seems reasonable to include the
mixed language within that superfamily as a separate family.

Lucinda McDade has investigated the problem of recognizing hybrids in
a phylogenetic analysis, with particular application to plant
systematics. I must confess that I don't recall her papers well enough
to be able to summarize them, but I wonder if they might have some
ideas that could be applied to the problem of recognizing and/or
classifying mixed languages.

-- Kent

--
Kent E. Holsinger                Kent@Darwin.EEB.UConn.Edu
-- Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
-- University of Connecticut, U-43
-- Storrs, CT   06269-3043

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:18>From kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu Fri Jul  5 07:13:22 1996

Date: Fri, 5 Jul 96 08:13:05 EDT
From: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger)
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Linguistic and Biological Evolution

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Englot <ptenglot@summon.syr.edu> writes:

    Peter> Further, I wonder what we are comparing a language to in
    Peter> this analogy.  Is it a species?  Because if a species is
    Peter> defined by its genes, then unlike a language, its fate is
    Peter> sealed, in a sense.  Members of a species typically can't
    Peter> change their genes.

In my mind the comparison *is* between a language and a species. What
species are defined by has been and continues to be a major source of
controversy within biological systematics. I think its safe to say,
however, that few systematists today would define species in terms of
their genes. Rather, they would define them either in terms of lines
of descent lacking reticulation or ability to interbreed. In either
case, the definition has an effect similar to defining languages in
terms of mutual comprehensibility.

    Peter> Language change
    Peter> doesn't just occur, or perhaps even primarily occur, across
    Peter> generations, but within generations.

This is an interesting difference between biological evolution and
linguistic evolution. Characters acquired by an organism during its
lifetime are not transmitted to its offspring, only its
genes. Language features acquired by individuals during their lifetime
are (potentially) transmitted to everyone with whom they come in
contact. Perhaps, then, there are two really significant differences
between biological and linguistic evolution:

1) A greater degree of reticulation (borrowing/hybridization) in
   linguistic than in biological evolution.

2) Different modes of transmission for organismal and linguistic
   traits, with strict parent to offspring transmission in the former
   and significant, perhaps predominant, transmission within
   contemporaneous populations in the latter.

-- Kent

--
Kent E. Holsinger                Kent@Darwin.EEB.UConn.Edu
-- Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
-- University of Connecticut, U-43
-- Storrs, CT   06269-3043

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:19>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Fri Jul  5 16:48:32 1996

Date: Fri, 05 Jul 1996 17:48:28 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: July 5 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

JULY 5 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1795: ANTONIO DE ULLOA Y DE LA TORRE GIRAL dies at Isla de Leon, Cadiz, Spain.
A naval officer and explorer, Ulloa travelled to America in the 1730s and
1740s to conduct navigational research under the auspices of the Paris Academy
of Sciences.  The results of his expedition, _Relacion historica del viaje a
la America meridional_, were published in Madrid in 1748.  Ulloa played an
important role in the establishment of the royal natural history collection
at Cadiz in 1752, and his extensive service in Spain's American colonies led
to the further publication of _Noticias americanas: Entretenimiento fisico-
historico sobre America meridional y septentrional-oriental_ in Madrid in 1772.

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:20>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sat Jul  6 00:35:12 1996

Date: Sat, 06 Jul 1996 01:35:00 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: July 6 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

JULY 6 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1686: ANTOINE DE JUSSIEU is born at Lyons, France.  The son of a pharmacist,
Jussieu will receive his medical degree at Montpellier where he will study
with the botanist Pierre Magnol.  He will later travel to Paris to work with
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.  Shortly after Tournefort's death, Jussieu will
succeed him as professor of botany at the Jardin du Roi, and he will remain
there for the rest of his life.  His influence as a teacher will be far
reaching, and his two younger brothers, Bernard and Joseph, as well as his
nephew Antoine-Laurent, will also become celebrated botanists.  Jussieu will
publish the first botanical description of coffee and will encourage its
cultivation; he will recognize that fungi are one of the components of
lichens; and he will describe the many fossil ferns found in the Lyons coal
mines.  His interest in fossils and "figured stones" will lead him also to the
study of archeology and the production of prehistoric flint tools.  He will
die in Paris in 1758.

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L, an international
network discussion group on the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Send the message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@raven.cc.ukans.edu or connect to
the Darwin-L Web Server (http://rjohara.uncg.edu) for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:21>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Jul  7 15:15:12 1996

Date: Sun, 07 Jul 1996 16:15:08 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Bailyn on history and quantification
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

I just came across a fine short book that would serve as a very good
introduction for anyone interested in the problems of traditional historical
writing:

 Bailyn, Bernard. 1994.  _On the Teaching and Writing of History_.  Hanover,
   New Hampshire: University Press of New England.

Bailyn is a distinguished American historian who has written many books on the
European colonization of North America and the American Revolution, and his
perspective is that of a traditional narrative historian, concerned as much
with the literary quality of his work as he is with its facutal content.

The book is in the form of an interview, with Bailyn answering questions
from other historians about the practice of history.  A couple of things
caught my eye with respect to our discussion here on Sulloway's birth order
work, which is highly statistical.  The interviewer asks Bailyn about current
quantitative work in history; part of his answer follows:

  [p.33] I don't see why quantification must ignore time and context, but I do
  think that there is a distinction between the kind of history that emerges
  uniquely from quantification and history that derives from more traditional
  evidence.  The former involves, essentially, what I think of as "latent"
  history; that is, historical events or developments that the participants
  were not themselves aware of -- like shifts in the birth rate (that is
  obviously very important -- everything can turn on that -- though the
  individuals involved at the time are not aware of it; they may be aware of
  some manifestation or illustration of it within their personal lives, but
  that's a different story).  Most history, however, concerns manifest events,
  public or private -- events that people are keenly aware of, think about,
  struggle with.

  One of the subtler problems now emerging is how to integrate these two
  levels of historical knowledge into a single whole.  It is a difficult
  technical problem, which is becoming more and more important I think....

  New technology, especially computer-based quantitative techniques, has had
  an important effect.  Just as Laslett and the group around him in Cambridge
  transformed early modern social history in Britain, so the group working on
  the American South of the seventeenth century, in the Chesapeake area,
  transformed [p.34] that subject by technical means that were not available
  before.  They quantified probate records, genealogies, tax records, and
  church records; and they discovered the means of establishing death rates,
  birth rates, family structure, and other vital statistics, in such a way
  that we get a picture of the seventeenth-century South that is far different
  from anything we had before.  It's a grim picture, of desolation, of a death
  rate far beyond the birth rate: for almost a century the Anglo-American
  population in the South was not reproducing itself (in fact, it survived
  only by continuous immigration -- waves of new arrivals who repeated the
  suffering and devastation of their predecessors).

As a traditional narrative historian, Bailyn's main concern is with "manifest"
events that conscious historial actors are involved with; most of the events
of natural history that we are concerned with on Darwin-L would come under
his heading of "latent" history, since either there are no conscious actors
involved (as with geology and almost all evolution), or the events take place
unconsciously (as they do in language change, a good example of "latent"
history in Bailyn's sense).

Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)      |
Cornelia Strong College, 100 Foust Building  |  http://rjohara.uncg.edu
University of North Carolina at Greensboro   |  http://strong.uncg.edu
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.      |

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:22>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Jul  7 19:02:59 1996

Date: Sun, 07 Jul 1996 20:02:56 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: New volume on High Miller
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

The nineteenth-century geologist Hugh Miller has been a subject of
discussion on Darwin-L from time to time for his wonderful descriptions
of deep time and geological history.  A new volume on Miller has just
appeared, edited by a Darwin-L member in fact.  It is:

  Shortland, Michael (ed.).  1996.  _Hugh Miller and the Controversies
    of Victorian Science_  Oxford: Clarendon Press.

The eleven chapters cover a great range, from Scottish geology, to Miller's
religion, to his role in church history, to literary natural history, and
more.  There is a comprehensive bibliography of Miller's enormous output, too.
Miller was notable for his extensive literary comparisons between geology
and history, so this volume would be an excellent addition to any Darwin-L
library.  Congratulations to Michael on its appearance.

Bob O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)      |
Cornelia Strong College, 100 Foust Building  |  http://rjohara.uncg.edu
University of North Carolina at Greensboro   |  http://strong.uncg.edu
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.      |

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:23>From WCalvin@U.Washington.edu Sat Jul  6 10:35:42 1996

Date: Sat, 06 Jul 1996 08:34:31 -0700
From: "William H. Calvin" <WCalvin@U.Washington.edu>
Organization: University of Washington
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Linguistic evolution, circle of species

Remember that adjacent villages understanding each other doesn't imply
an ability to speak the dialect, only to correctly guess at the meaning.
Each can speak their own dialect to the other.

Comprehension is usually a much easier task than production
(two-years-olds understand sentences long before they can speak them),
though it's worth noting Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's comment in her KANZI
book:

"Comprehension demands an active intellectual process of listening to
another party while trying to figure out, from a short burst of sounds,
the other's meaning and intent  both of which are always imperfectly
conveyed.  Production, by contrast, is simple.  We know what we think
and what we wish to mean.  We don't have to figure out "what it is we
mean," only how to say it.  By contrast, when we listen to someone else,
we not only have to determine what the other person is saying, but also
what he or she means by what is said, without the insider's knowledge
that the speaker has."
--

  William H. Calvin                   WCalvin@U.Washington.edu
                       http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wcalvin/

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:24>From hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl Sun Jul  7 18:14:59 1996

From: "Hans-Cees Speel" <hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl>
Organization:  TUDelft
To: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger), darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 01:13:56 +0000
Subject: Re: Linguistic and Biological Evolution

I have been away for a week, so I will comment on some mails on
biological and language evolution. I am a biologist, and specialise
on that area between biology and cultural evolution. But language as
such has not been the focus of my thought. Policy and theory have
been, but they pre-suppose some language, and focus on specific parts
of language [theories, problem-descriptions, etc] which you could say
have a specific role or maybe function in language.
I can make some usefull remarks for the discussion below, and add
that most of my understanding comes from the views of David Hull, who
worked out the analogy between genes and theories in science in his
book science as a process.

>     Peter> Further, I wonder what we are comparing a language to in
>     Peter> this analogy.  Is it a species?  Because if a species is
>     Peter> defined by its genes, then unlike a language, its fate is
>     Peter> sealed, in a sense.  Members of a species typically can't
>     Peter> change their genes.
>
> In my mind the comparison *is* between a language and a species.

In my view you can compare whatever you want. What comparison is most
apt depends on the questions you want to answer.

> What
> species are defined by has been and continues to be a major source of
> controversy within biological systematics. I think its safe to say,
> however, that few systematists today would define species in terms of
> their genes. Rather, they would define them either in terms of lines
> of descent lacking reticulation or ability to interbreed. In either
> case, the definition has an effect similar to defining languages in
> terms of mutual comprehensibility.

As far as I see this is correct. A species is a special case of a
lineage of genes. In the species genes are shuffled by more than one
mechanism. Within species there are parts that shuffle more
internally, like populations, demes, etc. <ost lineages however are
not species, i.e. they are lines of bacteria, non-sexual lineages,
etc.

>     Peter> Language change
>     Peter> doesn't just occur, or perhaps even primarily occur, across
>     Peter> generations, but within generations.
>
> This is an interesting difference between biological evolution and
> linguistic evolution.

I think it is not. Bacteria interchange genes within generation, so
can virusses act as communication of genes between species. What
counts further in this case is what yuo call a charateristic.

Characters acquired by an organism during its
> lifetime are not transmitted to its offspring, only its
> genes. Language features acquired by individuals during their lifetime
> are (potentially) transmitted to everyone with whom they come in
> contact. Perhaps, then, there are two really significant differences
> between biological and linguistic evolution:
>
> 1) A greater degree of reticulation (borrowing/hybridization) in
>    linguistic than in biological evolution.

this depends what you see as a generation Hul proposed that if you
want to compare memes to genes the appropriate thing is not time as
such, but generation time of a replcator [that which is copied, be it
a meme, or gene]. Every copying instance counts as a generation. If
you take bacteria in real time its generations are much quicker than
language evolution, if you take the ice-bear it would be slower in
many cases thatn meme-generations..

> 2) Different modes of transmission for organismal and linguistic
>    traits, with strict parent to offspring transmission in the former
>    and significant, perhaps predominant, transmission within
>    contemporaneous populations in the latter.

I don't know what you mean by 'modes'. If you take language
transmission with the generation time of replication, and not the
biological entity that copies [humans] this descriptions makes no
sense any more.

In my view comparing replicator-lineahes is general enough to compare
evolution of memes and genes. For more on this you could read my
essay on these matters at my www-pages.

greeitngs, Hans-Cees

Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
-------------------------------------------------------
|Hans-Cees Speel School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and management
|Technical Univ. Delft, Jaffalaan 5 2600 GA Delft PO Box 5015 The Netherlands
|telephone +3115785776 telefax +3115783422 E-mail hanss@sepa.tudelft.nl
www.sepa.tudelft.nl/~afd_ba/hanss.html featuring evolution and memetics!

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:25>From hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl Sun Jul  7 18:17:53 1996

From: "Hans-Cees Speel" <hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl>
Organization:  TUDelft
To: Salikoko Mufwene <s-mufwene@uchicago.edu>, darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 01:17:32 +0000
Subject: Re: Linguistic and Biological Evolution

> >To be sure, there are some aspects of language change that appear to
> >be quite similar to biological change.  (Mirroring Kent, I warn that
> >my background is in linguistics, not biology.)  But I question
> >whether language change can be seen as reproduction.  In a real
> >sense, language is recreated as it is passed from one generation to
> >another, rather than reproduced.  The genesis of creole languages is
> >a vivid example of this.

I think it can help if you distinguish between replication and
reproduction. In biology reproduction is when an organism makes
little ones. Repliation is when genes are copied, and this can also
happen in cell-division, whithout reproduction of the whole organism.

Hans-Cees

Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
-------------------------------------------------------
|Hans-Cees Speel School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and management
|Technical Univ. Delft, Jaffalaan 5 2600 GA Delft PO Box 5015 The Netherlands
|telephone +3115785776 telefax +3115783422 E-mail hanss@sepa.tudelft.nl
www.sepa.tudelft.nl/~afd_ba/hanss.html featuring evolution and memetics!

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:26>From hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl Sun Jul  7 18:27:43 1996

From: "Hans-Cees Speel" <hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl>
Organization:  TUDelft
To: Scott DeLancey <delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu>,
        darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 01:26:48 +0000
Subject: Re: linguistic & biological evolution

> A problem with the analogy is that in biology (I'm,
> probably obviously, speaking as a non-biologist here; somebody
> fix me if I go awry) we have for a long time been able to identify
> fundamental units of transmission.  Even before we knew anything
> about codons, before DNA, even back in the days of Mendel before
> we knew anything at all about the mechanisms of transmission,
> we could, at least in a rough-and-ready way, identify traits that
> were transmitted as units, and thus find a specific level of analysis
> where we could say with some explicitness what we mean by a "gene".
> There is nothing equivalent in the "meme" model, and, at least in
> our present state of understanding of human cognition and culture,
> no way of even setting about to find one.  Where he first talks
> about memes, Dawkins gives as an example something like a particular
> way of making pots.  But that's not by any means an irreducible unit--
> it's comparable not to a gene, or a trait, but to a whole complex
> structure.

I really must disagree here. In biology what is replicacted is not
the chararter but the physical gene. Surely we see its working
re-appear in succesive generaltions of organisms, but this is in no
way more clear than in cultural transmission.
Dawkins uses the gene definition of Williams, not reffering to
physical structures of DNA, but to those parts of the DNA that make a
differnece in the evolutionary process. In his definition a neutral
peace of DNA is no gene. I think that what the units of transmission
are exactly in a particular case is as messy as in cultural
evolution, only the definition is cleverly chosen, to ignore such
particular problems.

> and here the comparison gets really complicated.  In the biological
> case, we're essentially talking here about genes moving from species
> to another, or hybrids with genetic inheritance from two distinct
> lineages, where "genetic inheritance" can in principle be made
> absolutely explicit--A, C, and E from one parent, B, D and F from
> the other, or whatever.  When languages mix/borrow/otherwise affect
> one another, there's a much broader range of possibilities.  A
> language can borrow anything from a single word up to half or
> more of its vocabulary (cf. the French/Latin vocabulary in English),
> from a single sound (rare without accompanying vocabulary borrowing,
> but possible) to a whole phonological system, from a particular
> syntactic construction to a whole grammatical structure.

I assume you are right for language here, but not for biology.
Organisms can interchange parts of genes, chromosomes, parts of
neutral peaces of DNA, etc. Surely the classification of these parts
is different from that in language but not less messy or clear.

Hans-Cees

Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
-------------------------------------------------------
|Hans-Cees Speel School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and management
|Technical Univ. Delft, Jaffalaan 5 2600 GA Delft PO Box 5015 The Netherlands
|telephone +3115785776 telefax +3115783422 E-mail hanss@sepa.tudelft.nl
www.sepa.tudelft.nl/~afd_ba/hanss.html featuring evolution and memetics!

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:27>From hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl Sun Jul  7 18:31:11 1996

From: "Hans-Cees Speel" <hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl>
Organization:  TUDelft
To: kent@darwin.eeb.uconn.edu (Kent E. Holsinger), darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 01:31:01 +0000
Subject: Re: linguistic & biological evolution

> One story I have heard suggests that the analogies may be even more
> extensive. My understanding is that if one were to go from village to
> village from Sicily, north through Italy, west along the Mediterranean
> to the tip of the Iberian peninsula neighboring villagers would be
> able to understand one another, though villagers from Sicily could not
> understand those from Portugal or vice versa. If this is true, it
> sounds to me like a linguistic example of a Rassenkreise or ``circle
> of races.'' It suggests that the processes of language change share
> some fundamental similarities with the processes of organismal
> evolution.

My statement would be that if we compare language and genes in a
framework of replication and interaction and linages, we are no
longer analogizing, but have a fromal theoretical framwork with just
two different fields of inquiery. Much stronger than analogy.

Hans-Cees

Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
-------------------------------------------------------
|Hans-Cees Speel School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and management
|Technical Univ. Delft, Jaffalaan 5 2600 GA Delft PO Box 5015 The Netherlands
|telephone +3115785776 telefax +3115783422 E-mail hanss@sepa.tudelft.nl
www.sepa.tudelft.nl/~afd_ba/hanss.html featuring evolution and memetics!

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:28>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu Sun Jul  7 23:19:36 1996

Date: Mon, 08 Jul 1996 00:19:28 -0500 (EST)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: History of systematics (followup to Joe Felsenstein)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Joe Felsenstein wrote a few days ago:

>Bob O'Hara posted a most useful
>> PRELIMINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: RECENT WORKS ON THE HISTORY OF SYSTEMATICS.
>
>One thing I notice is the sparse coverage of the extremely hard-fought
>controversies in contemporary systematics.
>
>Permit me a "cri de coeur" (sp.?) here.  There is probably more coverage
>in the history-of-systematics literature of controversies in a given year
>in the mid-1810's than there is of, say, 1985.  I can understand the
>desirability of waiting until there is some perspective, though I also
>wonder whether that is not mostly done to ensure that the participants
>are safely dead.

I would certainly second Joe's call for more work by historians,
philosophers, and other interested people on the recent history of
systematics.  Joe is right that this is a tremendously rich territory
for all sorts of analysis, and most of the participants are still very
much alive (and sometimes kicking, as David Hull discovered).  (For
the non-specialists, we are referring to the extensive restructuring of
the whole field of systematics in the last thirty or so years, with
the result that the field is no longer about classification, but rather
is about historical reconstruction -- this being my synoptic description
of what has happened.)

I suspect that one of the reasons this revolution has not yet received a
great deal of attention is that many of the issues involved are rather
technical, and a few of them are still live issues for some people.  That
might make the usual approach of historians a bit difficult, but
sociologists of science ought to be able to have a field day.  In one of
my papers (Biology and Philosophy, 6:271) I suggested a philosophical/
sociological study that could be done to see how different members of the
field interpret diagrams; I still think that would make a great project
for a graduate student interested in systematics and the history and
philosophy of science.

A number of people have noted that the "Darwin Industry" among historians
has migrated a bit to become a "Synthesis Industry."  I think one of the
principal causes of this was the publication of Mayr & Provine's _The
Evolutionary Synthesis_, which contained a number of personal essays by
the historical actors themselves, as well as some historical interpretation.
One way to generate more interest in the recent history of systematics
would be to publish a similar volume, or at least a collection of essays
by participants in the controversies of the last 30 years.  (There are a
few who would probably refuse to participate, considering how great some
of the personal animosity became.)  Something along this line might be
very provocative, and would catch the attention of more science studies
people.  Maybe it could be a special issue of _Systematic Biology_?

Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)      |
Cornelia Strong College, 100 Foust Building  |  http://rjohara.uncg.edu
University of North Carolina at Greensboro   |  http://strong.uncg.edu
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.      |

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:29>From ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu Mon Jul  8 08:09:45 1996

Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 09:15:01 -0400
To: darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu (Darwin List)
From: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (Jeremy C. Ahouse)
Subject: Linguistic & Biological analogies?

        Kent Holsinger has given us a description of language dynamics,
indicating some ways that he sees them as paralleling biological evolution.
I commend his quick responses to the various cautions that have been
voiced. A number of those who are hesitant to embrace the strong analogy
are concerned about the precise level of the comparison; species,
population, lineage, ... These questions all arise for the biological
situation as well (as Kent suggests in response):

>In my mind the comparison *is* between a language and a species. What
>species are defined by has been and continues to be a major source of
>controversy within biological systematics. I think its safe to say,
>however, that few systematists today would define species in terms of
>their genes. Rather, they would define them either in terms of lines
>of descent lacking reticulation or ability to interbreed. In either
>case, the definition has an effect similar to defining languages in
>terms of mutual comprehensibility.

        My concern is the following. In Kent's model we have some (as yet)
unspecified notion language change which piggybacks on human population
emigration patterns (i.e. lineage constrained diffusion). As long as the
populations don't mix (the issue of creoles has been raised), language
dynamics can ride along within those lineages. So languages are like
streams of paint, prevented from mixing because the are in carried in
canals that never cross. They retain integrity thanks to the canals. But
that doesn't give languages any kind of self-sustaining integrity.

        To make the strong analogy stick, it seems that we would want to
argue that there are internal language dynamics that resist being mixed
(e.g. syntactic rules that resist certain modifications and support a
particular constellation of linguistic regularities). These internal
dynamics might then serve a role analogous to the developmental regulatory
hierarchy in biology. There might be the additional claim that the
environment interacts with the language offering a kind of adaptationist
analogy, selecting certain features and thus underwriting a notion of
convergence.

        In evolutionary biology we study lineages. Factors that covary with
lineages (morphology, mate recognition systems, language(!), ...) are the
modifications used to infer the actual branching pattern of descent. While
there are knockdown-dragout fights when someone wants to base species
concepts on one of these covarying factors there is strong general
agreement that the lineage is "real" (ontologically) and important(1). It
is important because, "Common descent is, ..., one of the main explanations
of the existence of extraordinarily homogeneous classes that do _not_ share
a common real essence (Dupre 1993 endnote 2 pg 272)." Sometimes this
expresses itself in the claim that species are individuals(2).

        Kent would like mutual comprehensibility (see quote above) to serve
as interbreeding does in lending cohesiveness to groups within a
reproductive species concept.

        Let's see what kind of work the strong analogy must do. To claim
analogy with evolutionary biology can mean a number of things;

        i. languages have a history.
        ii. languages have common ancestors.
        iii. languages are dichtomously branching.
        iv. language change is explained by natural selection. Longterm
language dynamics is nothing more than the cumulative result of local
selection. This is the adaptationist program as applied to languages,
requiring; a) richness of variation (spontaneous, persistent (i.e.
heritable), abundant, small and continuous (or nearly so) in its effects),
b) nondirectedness of variation, c) a nonpurposive "sorting" mechanism
(Amundson 1989).
        v. language change is explained by developmental constraints,
contingency, varying rates of change (exhibiting periods of stasis). The
reaction (from the 70s - present) to the adaptionist program as applied to
language. This includes what Kelly Smith calls structuralism (Smith 1992)
and it is crude to call this a reaction to the adaptationism as its roots
are much deeper and its articulation predates the neo-Darwinian synthesis
that cemented selectionism centered adaptationism.
        vi. language change is explained by founder effects, disruptive
selection, shifting balance equilibria, neutralism, random fixation and a
whole cornucopia of ideas borrowed from biology

While this list is not exhaustive it is a good start and will allow me to
make my main points. Let's visit these one at a time.

        i. I take it that there is overwhelming consensus for there being a
past. And languages surely traverse that past. Need we say more? Nothing
really biological here, any more than there is an analogy with geology or
cosmology.

        ii. This point is more problematic. Oliver Sachs in describing deaf
siblings that built an almost grammerless, gestural system mentions several
studies that indicate that only two generations are necessary for the leap
into a full grammar and syntax (Sachs 1989 footnote pg 45). This suggests
that the language instinct is strong enough to offer a substrate for
"spontaneous generation" of languages. The common ancestor in this case
is... what? Maybe Chomsky's "innate structure that is rich enough to
account for the disparity between experience and knowledge."

        In any case we have at least two options. Assume that the
"spontaneous generation" counter example is not crucial or find a slightly
different analog. De novo languages may be possible, but we could claim
that this is an irrelevant feature when tracing Farsi and Spanish back to
proto-indo-european... or whatever. Alternately, if we recast the analogy
in ecological terms we may do better. We often claim that foodwebs can get
reestablished after strong climatic change. Now the analogy with language
is not one of "species" but of trophic actors - herbivores, predators,
etc... These ecological kinds are of crucial relevance to theoretical
understanding in ecology, being the basis of an ecological hierarchy(3).

        iii. The topology of branching seems to be (at least so far in the
discussion) solely due to the isolation of human populations. No claim has
been made that after isolation and diffusion that subsequent reticulation
is ruled out or even strongly inhibited. This strikes me as strongly at
variance with many examples in evolutionary biology. Though some
angiosperms may offer a model here (Grant 1981). There are many examples of
hybrids in flowering plants (see the diagram of _Clarkia_ in Futuyma 1986,
pg. 229). But is this really what people mean when they analogize language
and biological evolution?

        iv. Initially I thought that the main focus of discussion would be
here. I expected to find a series parallels (and frankly a series of
just-so stories). Why did I think this? To many people adaptationism is
synonymous with evolution and natural selection is often thought to exhaust
the explanatory scaffolding for the adaptionist narrative. Yet the
discussion has not gotten here... so much for the best laid expectations.

        Language may have a) richness of spontaneous variation. But is it
persistent (i.e. heritable), abundant, small and continuous (or nearly so)
in its effects? Does Kent's notion of "mutual comprehensibility" serve to
make the changes persistent? Is the variation non-directed or do syntactic
structures facilitate  and inhibit variations? In what sense is there a
nonpurposive "sorting" mechanism at work in language change?

        v. Developmental constraints have had a long history in biology. We
are only now getting a reductionist handle (via molecular developmental
genetics) on how genetic variation results in morphological variation. But
long before the molecular biology jugernaut hit town it was known that the
relationship is not simple (Waddington 1957)(4). Is there any parallel in
language evolution? Is there anything to my previous, brief, suggestions
about syntactic structures leading to stability against
infection/colonization from other languages. How important are contingency
in explaining particular languages? Are there many examples of convergence
in languages that face similar selection pressures? What constitutes
convergence or selection pressure when we are discussing languages? How
variable are the rates of language change? Are they so variable as to put
pressure on a deep selectionist commitment?

        vi. Here we actually had an example. Founder effects in language.
How many of the other ideas from ecology and evolution have been mined? For
example, is there anything like Fisher's two stage model of mimicry in
langauge changes for languages with overlapping ranges where it is somehow
dangerous to have a noticeably unique language (discussed wrt butterfly
mimics by Turner 1981)? If all models from biology can not or should not be
lifted can we say what it is about language that makes only some analogies
valuable?

        All of these questions must paint me as quite the strong analogy
skeptic. But I want to reiterate that I think that there is room for cross
fertilization and in a way I hope the analogy doesn't fit too well. We
already have biology as a good example of biological evolution it would be
interesting to have language evolution offer marked differences.

        cheers,

        Jeremy
_____
Endnotes

(1) Many of the disagreements about species stem from the (many!)
exceptions to the perfect correlation between lineage branching and any
single factor. There are other principled objections to some concepts (e.g.
how do you discover "_potentially_ interbreeding" groups?).

(2) Species as individuals (Ghiselin 1974) is a usage that philosophers
love and that for others always sounds a little strained (see discussion in
Ereshefsky 1992). Lineage is an interesting noun and the importance of
lineage a crucial insight of evolutionary biology. (One of the historians
on this list may be able to tell us who first realized the importance.)
Once the "species as individual" is repackaged in terms of lineages much of
the heat seems to dissipate while the light is kept intact.

(3) Niles Eldredge and others has suggested that the tension between the
ecological and genealogical hierarchies are key for understanding
evolutionary dynamics (Eldredge 1995).

(4) Waddington's conception of the intricate relationship between genotype
and phenotype is illustrated by a number of diagram in the 1957 volume that
I reference. My favorite of these illustrations is also on the home page
for Harvard's general Evolution course <http://icg.harvard.edu/~bio17>. You
can view it with most graphical web browsers.
_______
References

Amundson, R. (1989). The Trials and Tribulations of Selectionist
Explanations. In K. Hahlweg & C. A. Hooker (Eds.), Issues in Evolutionary
Epistemology, (pp. 556-578). NY: SUNY Press.

Dupre, J. (1993). "The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the
Disunity of Science." Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Eldredge, N. (1995). Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table
of Evolutionary Theory. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Ereshefsky, M. (Ed.). (1992). The Units of evolution: essays on the nature
of species. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Futuyma, D. (1986). Evolutionary Biology. (2nd ed.). Sunderland, MA: Sinau=
er.

Ghiselin, M. T. (1974). A radical solution to the species problem.
Systematic Zoology, 23, 536-544.

Grant, V. (1981). Plant Speciation. (2nd ed.). New York: Columbia
University Press.

Sachs, O. (1989). Seeing voices: a journey into the world of the deaf.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, K. (1992). Neo-Rationalism Versus Neo-Darwinism: Integrating
Development and Evolution. Biology and Philosophy 7, 431-451.

Turner, J. R. G. (1981). Adaptation and evolution in Heliconius: a defense
of neoDarwinism. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 12, 99-121.

Waddington, C.H. (1957) The Strategy of Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects
of Theoretical Biology, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London.

        Jeremy C. Ahouse
        Biology Department
        Brandeis University
        Waltham, MA 02254-9110
ph:     (617) 736-4954
fax:    (617) 736-2405
email:  ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu
web:    http://www.rose.brandeis.edu/users/simister/pages/Ahouse

_______________________________________________________________________________

<35:30>From MNHVZ082%SIVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU Mon Jul  8 09:23:57

Date: Mon, 08 Jul 1996 10:19:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kevin de Queiroz <MNHVZ082%SIVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: History of systematics (followup to Joe Felsenstein)
To: Darwin-L <darwin-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu>

Given that the Mayr and Provine volume had such a positive effect on
the study of the Synthesis, perhaps a similar volume (on developments
in systematics) would be better than a special issue of _Systematic
Biology_.  And who could possibly be better to edit such a volume
than our own Dr. O'Hara?

Kevin de Queiroz
mnhvz082@sivm.si.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________
Darwin-L Message Log 35: 1-30 -- July 1996                                  End