Darwin-L Message Log 1: 241–279 — September 1993

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 September 1993. 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 1: 241-279 -- SEPTEMBER 1993
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DARWIN-L
A Network Discussion Group on the
History and Theory of the Historical Sciences

Darwin-L@ukanaix.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 September 1993.
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 archives of Darwin-L by
listserv@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu.  For instructions on how to retrieve copies of
this and other log files, and for additional information about Darwin-L, send
the e-mail message INFO DARWIN-L to listserv@ukanaix.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.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:241>From sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu  Tue Sep 28 17:52:38 1993

To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: On directionality in linguistic change
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 18:56:18 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

John Langdon asks if there is any "external influence determining
which [linguistic] changes" take place -- whether there's anything
in linguistic change that's analogous to "true natural selection
[, which] is given direction by an external influence -- the
inclusive environment".

  There may be, depending on what counts as environment.  Markedness
theory in linguistics (not confined to historical linguistics) makes
predictions that have relevance for linguistic change, about (for
instance) what sounds and sound sequences are easiest to pronounce
and to hear; such factors could be interpreted as (a crucial part of)
the environment in which language exists.  And the external social
environment in a language contact situation is *really* external, not
tied to the speaker/hearer; in that domain too certain predictions
can be made, and retrodictions, about what kind of situation must
have obtained in order to produce the observed results.  Rough
predictions, to be sure, but predictions nonetheless.

 Sally Thomason
 sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:242>From PGRIFFITHS@gandalf.otago.ac.nz  Tue Sep 28 18:32:59 1993

To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: PGriffiths@gandalf.otago.ac.nz
Organization: University of Otago
Date: 29 Sep 1993 11:38:11GMT+1200
Subject: Re: Cultural evolution and heritability

Elihu Gerson (28.9.93) has reservations about developmental systems theory
because he can't quite see what cultural 'developmental resources' are meant
to be.  Here are some clarificatory remarks.

Gerson notes that "there is more to culture (or society, or institutions)
than the socialization of children".

DST terminology can give the impression that the theory is only concerned
with early ontogeny, but this is a mistake.  The developmental process is
identified with the whole life-cycle of the organism.  Any lineage-typical
character of that life-cycle is explained by the interaction of various
developmental resources.

Gerson cites the different table manners of British and Americans as
cultural traits, and suggests that they aren't formally analogous to genes,
organisms or phenotypic characters.

What they are analogous to are extended phenotypic characters like birdsong
or nests. The elements in birdsong acquired by exposure to the song of the
rest of the species are precisely a 'cultural trait' of this sort.  In birds
with the right sort of developmental system they even form local dialects in
just the same way (the interaction of cultural transmission and more
conventional inheritance of elements in birdsong comes in bewlideringly many
forms).

Gerson notes of his table manner characters "Both ways clearly have a common
historical ancestor, and I suspect it wouldn't be all that difficult
to trace the connections in a fairly detailed way-- perhaps it's
already been done. Is this the sort of thing we're talking about when
we say "Cultural evolution?"  Yes it is.

One important way to start studying cultural evolution would be to get trees
(or reticulate diagrams) for cultural characters, and then map them onto
trees/diagrams for more conventional characters. Congruence suggests that
the cultural character set may include developmental resources that help to
shape the species-typical life-cycle.  Methods like this can help us to
'bootstrap' our way into an evolutionarily meaningful set of characters for
culture. This is how I interpret attempts to map language trees onto
cladograms for humans.

Once we have a set of characters that seems to be evolving with the rest of
the developmental system we can look into the ontogenetic production of
those characters to discover what the critical cultural developmental
resources for humans actually are

One last, connected, point. A lot of the recent discussion on language
evolution has stressed the horizontal transmission problem.  Why this is any
worse for evolutionary theory of language than the degree of hybridisation
in many plant lineages?

Paul E Griffiths, Philosophy, University of Otago, New Zealand.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:243>From TREMONT%UCSFVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU  Tue Sep 28 19:13:29 1993

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 16:56:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Elihu M. Gerson" <TREMONT%UCSFVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Cultural evolution and heritability
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Griffiths mis-takes my point about developmental systems. When I said
there's more to culture than the socialization of children, I meant
that explaining the properties of individuals is not the point,
because that is not what anthropology and sociology are about. Nor
is cultural evolution a matter of individual performances. Rather,
it is a matter of institutionalized or conventional or standardized
performances.

We don't explain cross-cultural differences in table manners by pointing
to the way individuals learn table manners. How does developmental
systems theory (which is great becasue it stresses the interactional
and processual character of things) help us explain why Americans
switch forks from hand to hand, and Europeans don't? Make up a scenario
just to see of it can be done at all. Where's the developmental
resource here?

I also don't understand Griffiths' suggestion that we "get trees
(or reticulate diagrams) for cultural characters, and then map them onto
trees/diagrams for more conventional characters"  Suppose, for
example, that people with big noses tended to refrain from eating pork.
Is that an example of what's meant?

Elihu M. Gerson
Tremont Research Institute
458 29 Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
415-285-7837  tremont@ucsfvm.ucsf.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:244>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Tue Sep 28 20:29:52 1993

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 21:32:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Evolutionary/cultural theory vs. evolutionary/cultural history
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

My esteemed colleague and friend Dr. Gerson writes concerning cultural
evolution:

>...individual people qua individuals do not appear in [the] picture; i.e.,
>social science does not deal with individual people and their properties.

And further:

>When I said there's more to culture than the socialization of children, I
>meant that explaining the properties of individuals is not the point,
>because that is not what anthropology and sociology are about.  Nor is
>cultural evolution a matter of individual performances.  Rather, it is a
>matter of institutionalized or conventional or standardized performances.

But explaining the properties of individuals as individuals *is* what history
(evolutionary or cultural) is about.  The American Revolution is an
individual thing that happened only once, and to "explain" it (that word
becomes problematic here -- "understand" might be better) we tell its
history; we produce a narrative.  Likewise "Vertebrata" is an individual, a
unique whole entity (a clade) that has happened only once.  To understand the
Vertebrata we likewise tell its history.  Similarly with the Indo-European
languages, which also constitute a unique historical individual; all the laws
in the world wouldn't allow someone to put first-century Latin in at one end
and get modern French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, with all their
vocabularies, dialects and geographical distributions out at the other.
(Unless one is fond of Leibniz's omniscient calculator, I suppose, but that
seems sufficiently far removed from the real world to be irrelevant.)  To
understand the evolution of Indo-European, we tell its history.

Many evolutionary biologists (in particular systematists, students of
evolutionary history) are not necessarily interested in how organisms "in
general" evolve; the whole point of their work is to find out how _some
particular organisms_ evolved, whatever they may be; in other words, the
point is to find out the organisms' history.  And for me as a student of
evolutionary history such historical accounts are in no sense incomplete or
partial because they "fail" to discern general evolutionary laws; that was
not their aim.  Indeed, from the historical point of view one might say that
evolutionary _theory_ "fails" because it doesn't tell us the history of one
single organism.  (Remember Darwin's evolutionary tree in the _Origin_ is a
hypothetical tree, not a real one.).  As someone (Haldane?) said,
evolutionary theory is fine as far as it goes, but "how we come to have
horses and tigers and things is outside the mathematical theory" -- it is
instead in the domain of historical narration (or at least historical
chronicle).

What do cultural/linguistic/social _historians_ think: is sociological or
anthropological _theory_ of any use or interest to them?  Do they use this
theory in their historical reconstructions?

Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)
Center for Critical Inquiry and Department of Biology
100 Foust Building, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:245>From GA3704@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU  Tue Sep 28 21:50:21 1993

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 21:49:06 CST
From: "Margaret E. Winters" <GA3704@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: directionality of change

In an article published in 1945, J. Kurylowicz talks about
prediction and language (specifically analogical) change.  He
comments that directions of change may be compared to various
paths which rain water may take - there are sewers, gutters,
pipes of various kinds, BUT, if it doesn't rain, they are
not used.  As Sally Thomason said, directionality statements
are reasonably rough predictors of paths (words for body parts
become prepositions ahead, at the back of, in front of...,
but not vice versa). But other factors in language (internal
gaps, contacts...) may or may not favor the change in question.

           Margaret Winters
           <ga3704@siucvmb.siu.edu>

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:246>From dpolicar@MIT.EDU  Tue Sep 28 22:20:57 1993

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 22:55:13 EST
From: dpolicar@MIT.EDU (David Policar)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution

> (Correct me if I am wrong-- I am an evolutionary anthropologist, not a
> linguist.) True natural selection is given direction by an external
> influence-- the inclusive environment-- even if that direction is not
> predictable.

Well, I'm just a layman, but I'll toss my two cents in -- certainly,
there are differences between languages in terms of what can be said in
them, and how quickly and easily they adopt new words for the things
that *cannot* be said in them.  Since there is an external environment
that contains things to talk about of varying value, it is
(theoretically) possible to compare languages in terms of the positive
and negative selective value of talking about the things that it is
easier and harder to talk about in it.

But yes, if there is no mechanism whereby the environment exerts
pressure on a language's development, then that development is more
analogous to genetic drift than evolution.

--dave policar

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:247>From TREMONT%UCSFVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU  Tue Sep 28 22:34:15 1993

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 20:11:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Elihu M. Gerson" <TREMONT%UCSFVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Evolutionary/cultural theory vs. evolutionary/cultural history
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Bob O'Hara is (of course) perfectly correct when he takes me to task for
speaking as if species, languages, societies, etc were not individuals.
Of course they are-- my usage of "individual" to mean "instance of the
species H. sapiens" was very sloppy.

His comments also gracefully return us to our subject-matter, and away
from the issue(s) of reductionism in various forms, for which I am
profoundly grateful.

Certainly, many scholars are interested in how particular individuals
evolve or change, and there's certainly no "failure" when their research
doesn't produce general laws of nature.  But natural history (whether
conducted on animals, plants, rocks, or social organizations) also
seeks to generalize as well-- it may be that horses and tigers and
things like that are out of the model, but we can still say something
about horses-and-tigers without referencing particular instances of
the species. They're warm-blooded, for example, suckle their young, and are
hairy.

Elihu M. Gerson
Tremont Research Institute
458 29 Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
415-285-7837  tremont@ucsfvm.ucsf.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:248>From ronald@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu  Wed Sep 29 00:11:53 1993

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 19:15:29 HST
From: Ron Amundson <ronald@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Comments on Gerson

I have a couple of comments on the extended and (over?) elaborate
discussions surrounding Elihu Gerson's criticisms of
cultural/biological evolutionary comparisons.  Sorry, but I can't
supply detailed messages references -- I'm relying on recollection.

After taking an excursion in "evolutionary epistemology" myself, I've
come to have some similar doubts to Gerson's regarding the need and/or
usefulness of applying biological evolutionary modes of explanation on
cultural processes -- at least when applying them in a genuinely
contentful way (i.e. not simply defining 'evolution' as 'change' and
bustling on from there.)

First, I (like others) disagree with Gerson's earlier assertion that
natural selective explanations became interesting only after Mendelian
mechanisms became known.  In fact, that position is inconsistent
(well, not logically inconsistent, but at least dissonant) with what I
consider a much more insightful recent comment.  In the middle 19th
century, in Darwin's day, and ever since Darwin (to coin a phrase)
there have existed known patterns of distribution of biological traits
among species and larger groups which cry out for explanation.
Descent with modification is a (large) part of that explanation even
aside from natural selection, but natural selection is a strong
contributor to certain of those features also.  These features include
geographical distribution, comparative anatomy and embryology, and all
the other stuff well dercribed in Ruse's _Darwinian Revolution_.
Natural selection did not require a detailed understanding of
transmission genetics to play a strong explanatory role, though the
Modern Synthesis (including Mendel in evolutionary biology) did allow
theorists to eliminate many contenders to natural selection.

The more recent Gerson point is that cultural studies simply do not
seem to have patterns of data which cry out for explanation in the
ways that geographical distribution, comparative anatomy, etc. cry out
for explanation.  I fully agree with this point, and it is the reason
I am (now) left cold with attempts to impose Darwinian methods on
cultural subject matters.  It seems to me that in well-thought-out
scientific debates, the explananda are identified prior to cooking up
potential explananses.  That is, the problem is understood prior to
the proposal of a solution.  (The problems were already understood in
the 19th c. biology case, and the partial solutions offered by natural
selection were valuable even in the absence of Mendel.)

So, as I see it, the problem with applying Darwin-like concepts to
cultural change is not that we don't yet know what counts as (is
analogous to) "genes" and "phenotypes" and (interactors and
replicators and all that jazz).  The problem is that the only reason
people are even _looking_ for analogs to natural selection is that
natural selection (or its analog) looks like a great solution to a
problem of cultural change, but NO ONE YET KNOWS THE PROBLEM IT IS A
SOLUTION TO!

Some recent suggestions are geared towards finding appropriate
problems for Darwinish cultural theories to solve.  Well, ok.  But I'm
frankly skeptical about the robustness of a phenomenon which has been
discovered by someone who's only looking for something for his
favorite theory to solve.  It's a bit like buying a new wrench and
then trying to find something broken on your car which that wrench
will fix.

I certainly don't intend this as a general critique of the purposes of
DARWIN-L.  There is plenty of interest in the (generically described)
historical sciences which doesn't rely on trying to apply a Darwinish
mechanisms, like a cookie cutter, on every problem domain.  (E.g. I'd
like to learn a lot more about how early philology influenced
biological thinkers, Darwin or no Darwin.)

Ron Amundson
ronald@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:249>From lgorbet@triton.unm.edu  Wed Sep 29 00:23:53 1993

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 23:27:26 -0600
To: Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: lgorbet@triton.unm.edu
Subject: Re: Language, Evolution, Linguistics

Seeing Dave Policar's post tonight made it dawn on me that some tendencies
we linguists have might be a bit surprising and misleading to  colleagues
in other disciplines.  Specifically, I suspect that it is easy to
underestimate the responsiveness of linguistic systems to their
environments in part because much of the academic linguistic world is
inclined to regard any aspect of language that *is* responsive as (ipso
facto) trivial and uninteresting.

So, for example, changes in vocabulary, in the complex phrases that
communities make conventional, in the finer points of meaning for
linguistic forms are not "where it's at" in linguistics or even in
historical linguistics.  Rather, it's linguistic *form* which is "really
linguistic".  Not that form is not also responsive to various kinds and
levels of selection on the basis of functioning, both individual and
social, as a growing body of work attests .

But the picture that tends to get painted in linguistic scholarship is one
that is systematically biased against anything that responds to external
forces.  It's as those the rule were "if it can be changed readily, it's
superficial and unimportant".  In a sense, of language as a biological
phenomenon, this is true.  But as several posters have remarked previously,
what has evolved (in a strictly biological sense) is the capacity for such
a responsive system.  And surely, the tendency for all those "superficial"
changes in language is part of the fodder that aided its (biological)
evolution to the present state.
*  *  *

Larry Gorbet
University of New Mexico
Anthropology Department    (but I'm really in Anthro
Albuquerque, NM 87131-1086  *and* Linguistics!)

lgorbet@triton.unm.edu
(505) 277-4524  OFFICE
(505) 883-7378  HOME

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:250>From LBRYNES@vax.clarku.edu  Wed Sep 29 01:36:42 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 02:40 EST
From: GIVE PEAS A CHANCE <LBRYNES@vax.clarku.edu>
Subject: Re: Evolutionary/cultural theory vs. evolutionary/cultural history
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Nice rap Bob, Thanks!...
	Reminded me of Raup Extinction and killing...
	Or as Lonesome George of the Galapagos muttered
	And I alone Suvived to tell the Tale...

Is anyone on DARWIN-L intersted in Lynn Margulis' work?
VERY different "metaphors" for cultural interpretation.

Lois

Lois Brynes
New England Science Center
lbrynes@vax.clarku.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:251>From TREMONT%UCSFVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU  Wed Sep 29 06:46:25 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 04:35:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Elihu M. Gerson" <TREMONT%UCSFVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Comments on Gerson
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

I agree with Ron Amundson's list of objections to using Darwinian theory to
explain cultural phenomena. I really have to object to his version of
what I said about historical reposnses to Darwin.

I never said (as far as I know, *nobody* ever said) that the natural
selection model became interesting only after Mendelian mechanisms
became known. I said (a) that the natural selection model was not widely
accepted by biologists before the 20th century.  This is standard
history-- nobody I know of, including Ruse, disagrees with it.  I also
said (b) that part of the reason for increasing acceptance in the 20th
century was the development of at least some material causes for heritable
variation-- specificaly, knowledge of the role of chromosomes. Certainly,
this is not the whole story of the success of the natural selection model
in the 20th century, but it is part of it.

My point in making that argument was that explanations which do not
include material and efficient causes aren't very satisfactory.
I could have as easily pointed to the history of the "drifting continents"
debate as an example.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:252>From HOLSINGE@UCONNVM.BITNET  Wed Sep 29 07:39:26 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 08:29:21 -0500 (EST)
From: "Kent E. Holsinger" <HOLSINGE%UCONNVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

> I'm willing to go along with the hypothesis of descent-with-modification
> as an explanation for the resemblances among languages and language
> families.  But not with natural selection.

I never intended to suggest that natural selection was a component of the
explanation.  What we *do* have is a reasonable explanation for the *pattern*
of relationships among major language groups (at least Indo-European language
groups).  Notice that this theory actually makes some pretty strong claims:

1) All Indo-European languages are lineal descendants of a single common
 ancestral tongue, just as French, Italian, and Spanish share Latin as a
 common ancestor.

2) The diversity of language groups is accounted for largely by descent with
 modification, i.e. local language groups diverging from one another.

The second of these is a particularly strong claim because many languages,
like English, show extensive borrowings ("hybridization") from languages in
other parts of the family tree.  The claim is that divergence among local
language groups has been more important in producing the diversity among
Indo-European languages than has borrowing among them.

-- Kent

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Kent E. Holsinger    Internet: Holsinge@UConnVM.UConn.edu |
|  Dept. of Ecology &     BITNET: Holsinge@UConnVM     |
|  Evolutionary Biology, U-43              |
|  University of Connecticut               |
|  Storrs, CT 06269-3043               |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:253>From HOLSINGE@UCONNVM.BITNET  Wed Sep 29 07:47:57 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 08:43:02 -0500 (EST)
From: "Kent E. Holsinger" <HOLSINGE%UCONNVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Sally Thomason makes an important point:

> [Descent with modification] is not the way to look at *all* resemblances
> among language families --- there are other sources of similiarities,
> including structural principles common to all human languages, easy-to-learn
> sounds and sound sequences, and other typological factors that do not in
> themselves provide evidence for descent with modification ....

This is clearly the case.  A biological systematist (more precisely, a cladist)
might describe this as saying that only uniquely derived features shared
between two or more languages provide evidence of common ancestry.

Since I know nothing about linguistic evolution, I'd be curious to know whether
there is evidence for independent origin of certain language features or if
common features of otherwise unrelated languages always represent borrowing.

-- Kent

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Kent E. Holsinger    Internet: Holsinge@UConnVM.UConn.edu |
|  Dept. of Ecology &     BITNET: Holsinge@UConnVM     |
|  Evolutionary Biology, U-43              |
|  University of Connecticut               |
|  Storrs, CT 06269-3043               |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:254>From PICARD@Vax2.Concordia.CA  Wed Sep 29 08:55:28 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 09:59:50 -0500 (EST)
From: MARC PICARD <PICARD@Vax2.Concordia.CA>
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

	Since linguistic evolution seems to be in the air these days, I thought
non-linguists might be interested in a book which purports to be "non-technical
in style and accessible to the reader with no previous knowledge of linguistics
"This is Jean Aitcheson's LANGUAGE CHANGE: PROGRESS OR DECAY? (Cambridge
University Press, 1991). Here's the gist of it:

"This book gives a lucid and up-to-date overview of language change.  It
discusses where our evidence about language change comes from, why and how
changes happen, and why and how languages begin and end.  It considers not only
changes which occurred many years ago, but also those currently in progress.
It does this within the framework of one central question - is language change
a symptom of progress or decay?  It concludes that language is neither
progressing nor decaying, but that an understanding of the factors causing
change is essential for anyone involved with language alteration."
Marc Picard

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:255>From wigtil@oerhp01.er.doe.gov  Wed Sep 29 10:44:42 1993

From: David Wigtil <wigtil@oerhp01.er.doe.gov>
Subject: Re: drift
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 11:49:37 EDT

One item that needs to be noted here is the
wide variability of linguistic forms within
a single community and even within a single
speaker, the phenomenon of allophones and of
alternative syntactic/morphological patterns.
If I pronounce the phoneme /k/ sometimes as
a palatal stop (or is the term apical? anyway,
positioned where French positions its
-gn- nasal), sometimes as a velar, sometimes
virtually as a guttural, or if I occasionally
neglect to aspirate it, or if I sometimes
release it in word-final position and
sometimes do not release it, then these varia-
tions might be viewed as the neutral changes
of linguistic evolution, might they not?
Similarly, the alternation in German of
subject-object-verb word order in indirect
statement with subject-verb-object order, or
the English use of both S-V-IO-DO order and
S-V-DO-prepositional phrase to denote the
indirect object, are these part of the drift
of language change, or are they only some of
the causative factors of historically observ-
able drift?
I suspect that it is too easy to assign an
existence as independent as a biological
organism to a "language", when the latter is
a far less identifiable entity, qua entity.
--DNW

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:256>From junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu  Wed Sep 29 11:35:52 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 11:54:19 EDT
From: junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu (Peter D. Junger)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Cultural change and historical ("Darwinian") explanations

    Since my work does not necessitate that I have an understanding
of how biological species or individuals evolve, I am not in a position
to comment on most of the recent postings on heritability and cultural
evolution.

    But I would like to say that a major problem in understanding
how various legal institutions (such as heritability ;-) function within
a "legal system" lies in our tendency to see legal institutions and
systems either as being intentionally designed to function the way that
they do or as being deducible from first principles (or reducible to
differential equations) without regard to the direction of time or the
environment in which they developed.

    I am convinced that as long as we attempt to understand legal,
and other cultural, institutions in either of those ways we are doomed
to failure.

    The solution, if there is one, to that problem would seem to be
to attempt to understand such institutions in terms of their historical
development, in terms of their historical interactions with their
environment.  That is, the solution is to see cultural institutions as
the product of "Darwinian" or "evolutionary" processes.

    And it does not require one to have much of a theory as to what
those "Darwinian" or "evolutionary" processes are for them to function
as an antidote to the equally empty "theories" that cultural
institutions are the product of human design or of logical deductions
from first principles.

Peter D. Junger

Case Western Reserve University Law School, Cleveland, OH
Internet:  JUNGER@SAMSARA.LAW.CWRU.Edu -- Bitnet:  JUNGER@CWRU

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:257>From PICARD@Vax2.Concordia.CA  Wed Sep 29 12:13:14 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 13:17:29 -0500 (EST)
From: MARC PICARD <PICARD@Vax2.Concordia.CA>
Subject: Drift
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

    There has recently been a discussion centering on the concept of drift
in historical linguistics .  Following is a definition of this concept which I
found in Raimo Anttila's HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS (John
Benjamins, 1989, p.194), and which might prove helpful to future participants:
"In linguistic change, and observable tendency toward a goal is known as DRIFT.
As in biology, it takes a form of complex synchronization, for example, loss of
inflection with increased use of prepositions and word order in English.  It is
also understandable why two related languages can go different ways.  If they
both start out from a particular imbalance, say, a 'hole' of some kind in any
level of grammar, one may fill it, one may eliminate the odd term.  Or they can
independently resort to the same remedy, and the result will look as if they
had been inherited in both."
Marc Picard

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:258>From peter@usenix.org  Wed Sep 29 12:33:55 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 10:25:51 PDT
From: peter@usenix.org (Peter H. Salus)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re:  Drift

As Marc Picard has cited Raimo Anttila's excellent book and his
(RA's) definition of drift, I think it worth pointing out that
this teleological view has been anathema to those working
within the TG paradigm, but has resulted in brilliant work, of
which Anttila and the two volumes by Michael Shapiro _The
Sense of Grammar_ (IU Press, 1983) and _The Sense of Change_
(IU Press, 1991) are the most impressive works.  Some of
Esa Itkonen's work and E.L. Battistella's _Markedness_
(SUNY Press, 1990) may be thought heretical, but illuminating, too.

To me, however, the most interesting aspect of this is the
overarching importance of CS Peirce.

P
________________________________________________________________

Peter H. Salus	#3303	4 Longfellow Place	Boston, MA 02114
	+1 617 723-3092

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:259>From millerk@starbase.mitre.org  Wed Sep 29 14:53:45 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 15:56:59 -0400
From: Keith Miller <millerk@starbase.mitre.org>
To: wigtil@oerhp01.er.doe.gov
Subject: Re: drift

> On Wed, 29 Sep 1993 10:46:03 -0500, David Wigtil <wigtil@oerhp01.er.doe.gov>
said:

 David> One item that needs to be noted here is the
 David> wide variability of linguistic forms within
 David> a single community and even within a single
 David> speaker, the phenomenon of allophones and of
 David> alternative syntactic/morphological patterns.
 David> If I pronounce the phoneme /k/ sometimes as
 David> a palatal stop (or is the term apical? anyway,
 David> positioned where French positions its
 David> -gn- nasal),

That would be palatal (an apical /k/ would be an evolutionary step, indeed).

 David> sometimes as a velar, sometimes
 David> virtually as a guttural, or if I occasionally
 David> neglect to aspirate it, or if I sometimes
 David> release it in word-final position and
 David> sometimes do not release it, then these varia-
 David> tions might be viewed as the neutral changes
 David> of linguistic evolution, might they not?

I wouldn't label these as linguistic evolution at all, but rather as
linguistic variation.  Linguists distinguish betweeh synchronic (the
examples that you just presented) and diachronic (historical/evolutionary)
variation.  Actually, the example you present might not even be classified as
synchronic variation (except for the released/unreleased distinction), simply
because the variants of /k/ you mention are phonologically conditioned.  That
is, they are not in a state of flux, and do not vary greatly (in principle)
from speaker to speaker.  For example, the /k/ in /kiwi/ will be slightly
advanced toward the palate, whereas the /k/ in /kuku/, `cukoo', would be
velar.  (Most English speakers, of course, do not realize this, because
both are allophones of what we perceive to be the same phoneme /k/.**)  To
consciously try to pronounce these /k/'s otherwise would prove a great effort,
and unconscious switching is unlikely to occur, except in the case of a
performance error.  Thus, the various forms of /k/ do not show dialectal
variation, nor do they show variation within the speakers ideolect.  They
merely show differences in phonological conditioning environments.  I have the
same argument for aspiration -- it is not a conscious choice, and many English
speakers, even when pressed in foreign language classes, find it extremely
difficult to produce _unaspirated_ voiceless stops.  I doubt that pronuncitaion
of an unaspirated /k/ would be a possibility for many English speakers, even by
hazard (unless we are again talking about language contact, in which case the
story would change a little.)

(** To say that velar and palatal /k/ are allophones of the same phoneme
basically means that English has no words that are distinguished only by the
fact that one has a velar /k/ while the other has a palatal /k/.)

 David> Similarly, the alternation in German of
 David> subject-object-verb word order in indirect
 David> statement with subject-verb-object order, or
 David> the English use of both S-V-IO-DO order and
 David> S-V-DO-prepositional phrase to denote the
 David> indirect object, are these part of the drift
 David> of language change,

These, I would say are part of the drift, as was suggested by an earlier poster
(sorry, I've already archived the message).

 David> or are they only some of
 David> the causative factors of historically observ-
 David> able drift?
 David> I suspect that it is too easy to assign an
 David> existence as independent as a biological
 David> organism to a "language", when the latter is
 David> a far less identifiable entity, qua entity.
 David> --DNW

              -----  Keith J. Miller
              millerk@guvax.georgetown.edu
              millerk@starbase.mitre.org

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:260>From sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu  Wed Sep 29 16:14:15 1993

To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 17:17:51 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

Kent Holsinger asks "whether there is evidence for independent origin
of certain language features or if common features of otherwise
unrelated languages always represent borrowing."

 The former is correct: there is LOTS of evidence for independent
origin of certain language features.  For instance, if we consider only
well-established language families, there are dozens in the world,
i.e. groups that are (as far as we can tell from our chronologically
limited methods) unrelated to each other.  In comparing all these
families one finds similar features that cannot be accounted for by
either inheritance or borrowing.  This is true even when we allow
for universals of grammar that (some would argue) may be hard-wired
genetically in the human animal.  So, for instance, the fact that the sounds
[p t k s m n i e a o u] occur in unrelated languages all over the world is
probably not to be attributed to historical links among languages
but rather to the fact that that particular set of sounds is easier
to learn and/or easier to perceive, and thus likely to arise
independently.  More interestingly, one finds identical linguistic
changes that occur independently in many languages; an example is
the palatalization of [k] to "ch" (as in English church), before front
vowels (e.g. the vowels in beet, bit, bet, bat); another
example is the voicing of [p t k] to [b d g] between vowels; still
another example is the agglutination of unaccented postpositions (like
prepositions, but appearing after the noun instead of before it) onto
the preceding noun (that is, they become suffixes), ...and so forth.

 It has often happened that someone looks at a group of languages and
says, gee, these languages share a lot of features, so they must be
related -- and then it turns out that they aren't related, or rather
that there is no solid evidence that they are related.  It's easy to
be misled by "accidentally" shared features, i.e. features that don't
provide evidence of historical connections among languages.  Historical
linguists' methodology for establishing family relationshiops -- the
Comparative Method -- depends on systematic correspondences throughout
the grammar and lexicon, but especially sound/meaning correspondences;
using this method, it's easy to rule out accident when languages are
closely enough related that they still show such correspondences.
(And if they aren't closely enough related for that, then you can't
establish the relationship at all.)  It's also possible, by this
method, to distinguish borrowed from inherited features.

 (Apologies if I'm repeating myself from an earlier post! I
can't remember what all I said in my last couple of comments.)

  Sally Thomason
  sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:261>From sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu  Wed Sep 29 16:40:44 1993

To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: drift
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 17:44:24 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

About David Wigtil's comment that a language isn't like a
biological organism: actually, the right biological unit
to compare a language to is a species, not an organism.
And species *are* fuzzy in some of the same ways languages
are-- lots of variation, for instance; comparable kinds of
difficulty in deciding whether you're dealing with two
species/languages or mere subspecies/dialects; the problem
of hybridization; etc.  Again, it has to be emphasized that
the analogies aren't perfect, but there is nevertheless
a lot that can usefully be compared.

 Sally Thomason
 sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:262>From John_Wilkins@udev.monash.edu.au  Wed Sep 29 18:38:41 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 09:36:29 +0000
From: John Wilkins <John_Wilkins@udev.monash.edu.au>
Subject: RE: Heritability and cultural evolution
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Reply to:
     RE>Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
Kent E. Holsinger <HOLSINGE%UCONNVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU> wrote:
  Sally Thomason makes an important point:

  > [Descent with modification] is not the way to look at *all* resemblances
  > among language families --- there are other sources of similiarities,
  > including structural principles common to all human languages, easy-to-
  > learn sounds and sound sequences, and other typological factors that do not
  > in themselves provide evidence for descent with modification ....

  This is clearly the case.  A biological systematist (more precisely, a
  cladist) might describe this as saying that only uniquely derived features
  shared between two or more languages provide evidence of common ancestry.

  Since I know nothing about linguistic evolution, I'd be curious to know
  whether there is evidence for independent origin of certain language features
  or if common features of otherwise unrelated languages always represent
  borrowing.

This is a good question. I too would like to know the linguists' answer to
this. There are undoubtedly homologies in language as well as convergent
traits. Thomason's point, though, does not invalidate an evolutionary tree
model, it merely pushes back the homologous innovation (perhaps into the
biological realm -- many similarities of language must be the result of
biological mechanism, although not as far as Chomsky insists necessarily). The
key word is "independent" -- cultural independence is not absolute, if homo sap
arose from a  band of primates. All cultures are lineal descendents of an
aboriginal culture, and a biological pool of traits.

John Wilkins - Manager, Publishing
Monash University, Melbourne Australia
Internet: john_wilkins@udev.monash.edu.au
Tel: (+613) 565 6009

Monash and I often, but not always, concur

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:263>From ARKEO4@FENNEL.WT.UWA.EDU.AU  Wed Sep 29 19:31:09 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 8:35:40 +0800 (SST)
From: ARKEO4@FENNEL.WT.UWA.EDU.AU
Subject: RE: Cultural change and historical ("Darwinian") explanations
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

On Wed, 29 Sep 1993, Peter D. Junger raises an issue which I believe is of
*central* importance to those people interested in DOING cultural
evolutionary studies:

>   But I would like to say that a major problem in understanding
> how various legal institutions (such as heritability;-) function within
> a "legal system" lies in our tendency to see legal institutions and
> systems either as being intentionally designed to function the way that
> they do or as being deducible from first principles (or reducible to
> differential equations) without regard to the direction of time or the
> environment in which they developed.
[ . . . ]
>   And it does not require one to have much of a theory as to what
> those "Darwinian" or "evolutionary" processes are for them to function
> as an antidote to the equally empty "theories" that cultural
> institutions are the product of human design or of logical deductions
> from first principles.

While we might have very abstract arguments about the minutia of the THEORY
of cultural evolution, all of the "negative" statements about it leave the
practictioner in a bit of a bind -- being told that one's method of study
is somehow inherently flawed doesn't get us very far, does it?  Being told
that, ultimately, there is nothing to explain in my area of study makes me
want to take up something useful for a living.

Like Peter, I am ATTEMPTING Darwinism in my work simply because the options
stink.  ALL of the other approaches in the social sciences seem inherently
flawed and, worse, totally incoherent when viewed from the point of view of
a person interested in looking at human culture in terms of a natural,
mechanistic (dare I say it? -- scientific) notion of causation.

The problem boils down to a fairly simple one -- is the PATTERN seen over
time and space in culture explainable in what most of us would understand
as scientific terms.  Are the OBSERVABLE SPECIFIC DIFFERENCES (NOT the
general, underlying similarities) explainable?  WHY should the SPECIFIC
subsistence systems, kinship systems, ethical sytstems, etc etc found
around the world have the forms they actually have?  Why should we have
been basically hunter/gatheres for about 99% of our history?  Why should it
have ever changed??  Was the reason the same in each case, or was each case
unique and is it understandable ONLY in terms of the specifics of the place
and time?  Or to move to the apparently trivial: Why should the ceramic
paste used to make pots change at a given point in time?  Or why should
flakes and cores of different dimensions be found in different areas in a
settlement?  General comments on whether culture fits somebody or another's
definition of "hereditable" seem to pale into insignificance in the face of
these larger, more important questions (no kidding!).  I treat culture AS
IF it WERE hereditable because it is *necessary* for me to do so if I am to
even ATTEMPT an answer to the questions which are of concern to me.

We (or at least *I*) want answers to real problems about real events; I
honestly DO want to know WHY we have the cultural patterns we HAVE, and not
OTHER patterns. These are very important questions in my corner of academe
and discussions of the minutia can raise more than its fair amount of
steam: You should hear the arguments that can develop around the reasons
for a change in the design on a pot, or why shell came to replace grit as a
the temper in the paste!  I am sure that a lot of these arguments would
seem rather silly to an outsider and they would find it kind of amazing
that a dispute could even exist.  But then again, most anthropologists I
know are certain that the reason WHY peococks have long tails is to attract
peahens.  And they would likely be very surprise to find that there could
be any disputes ongoing in the discussions about sexual selection (and the
heat generated by problems like the cost of miosis would leave them
reeling!).

The simple fact is that "explanations" for cultural change and, more
importantly, for the observable specifics of cultural behaviour that have
been dished up so far seem pretty lame. At least I end up feeling queasy
with the idea that cultural change occurs because "it is time for it" or
because "culture has reached that appropriate level of development" or
because "it was adapative" or because "some genius thought of it" or
because "it was in the interests of the ruling class" or (. . . well you
get the picture).  Those of studying culture itself are not doing our work
in an intellectual vacuum.  We have to compare the alternative paradigms
(yuck! how I have come to hate that term!!) in chosing the method and the
theory we choose to adopt and APPLY. In intellectual disputes, too, fitness
is a relative term.

Dave,
contemplating a life doing something useful . . .

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:264>From CRAVENS@macc.wisc.edu  Wed Sep 29 19:58:11 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 20:01 CDT
From: Tom Cravens <CRAVENS@macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: synchrony and diachrony in language
To: DARWIN-L@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

A footnote to Keith Miller's response to David Wigtil is that although
linguists do make a distinction between synchrony and diachrony, we often
lose track of the elemental observation that synchrony is a convenient
(some would say inconvenient) fiction which obscures the fact that we all
live in time, and that language, even at the level of the individual, but
most certainly at the societal level, is in continuous flux.

Phonetically-conditioned allophony (different realizations of the
psychologically "same sound"; compare the pronunciations of "key" and
"coat", with much more aspiration in the first) are unremarkable,
phonetically predictable and banal, in themselves, but can lead to
change over time. Compare Italian cento (with "ch"), and coda (with
"k"); both started out as sort of "k", but heavy aspiration and further
development of the first led to a restructuring. Cento is no longer
"kento" which happens to have the pronunciation "ch"--like key which
happens to have a pronunciation with heavy aspiration, but "chento".
This is the sort of common development that Sally Thomason refers to.

Variation need not lead to phonological restructuring to be of interest,
though. Beginning mostly with the work of William Labov, sociolinguists
have revealed, amongst other things, that what might appear at first
glance to be incoherent or random variation can be (not necessarily is)
evidence of realignments of variation along social lines (gender and
socioeconomic level most saliently), which appears in the long run to
evidence language change. A brief example:

In Central Tuscany, stereotypically centered on Florence, /k/
between vowels is pronounced [h], so 'la coca cola' is [la hoha hola],
'la casa' "the house" is [la hasa]. If a consonant precedes, the
pronunciation is [k]: 'in casa' has [k], not [h]. This appears to have been
spreading out from Florence since at least the 1500s. In the eastern
periphery of the region, this appears to be an innovation. Reports from
past decades say it didn't exist, but today it does, in variation with
[k], and native [g]. Recordings of speakers of different ages and
status show that young people use it more than older people, and
amongst the young, white-collar males are in the vanguard in the
use of [h] and blue-collar females use it least. The interpretation,
in a nutshell, is that the [h] pronunciation isn't random at all in
Eastern Tuscany, and isn't *just* variation. The distribution suggests
a change in progress, in competition with high prestige [k] and low
prestige [g], along fairly clear gender and class lines.

Certainly not all variation is of this sort, but it's beginning to appear
that more of it is than once thought. If there's a relevant point here
to the recent thread of discussion, it might be that there does appear to be
a culturally-conditioned selection in at least some of linguistic change.

End of footnote, with apologies if otiose.

Tom Cravens
Dept of French and Italian
University of Wisconsin-Madison

cravens@macc.wisc.edu
cravens@wiscmacc.bitnet

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:265>From GA3704@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU  Wed Sep 29 21:43:26 1993

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 21:37:30 CST
From: "Margaret E. Winters" <GA3704@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: language change

Perhaps a short summary would help!  It is useful in some ways to
consider the possible explanations for resemblances between languages:
  1. sheer coincidence (the word for `man' in Dinka, a Nilo-Sudanic
   language, is `man'.)
  2. universals and universal tendencies - of the kind Sally
   Thomason talked about - there are physical and cognitive
   structures that we share as human beings and which, there-
   fore shape languages around the world.  There are, for
   example, no languages which have sounds made by vibrating
   the tip of the tongue against the pharynx (I've had near
   accidents in class while students try - DON'T) by virtue
   of our anatomy.  On the other hand, a large number of
   languages from many families and geographic areas derive
   spatial adverbs and prepositions from body parts.
  3. genetic relationship - we've been talking a great deal
   about language families and I won't say more.
  4. contact - this can range from lexical borrowing (the
   word for `baseball' in Japanese and Hebrew is taken
   directly from American English) to the spread of full
   grammatical structures through long-term geographic
   proximity (Greek and Rumanian lack infinitive forms -
   Greek through a complex history involving sound changes
   and reanalysis, Rumanian through being in the same part
   of the world - to simplify).
How much this does or does not fit with biological evolution is
far beyond my knowledge, but that, of course, is why I keep reading
and enjoying the list!
        Margaret  <ga3704@siucvmb.siu.edu>

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:266>From eam2e@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu  Wed Sep 29 22:15:30 1993

From: Eric Miller <eam2e@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 23:17:56 EDT
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Linnaeus and literature

I'd like to post a general inquiry to the Darwin list-- a technically
pre-Darwinian inquiry (unless we choose to consider Erasmus Darwin).  Can
anyone out there give me any information on the impact of Linnaean
classification on 18th and 19th century literature?  By literature, I mean
more than belles-lettres, though I include that (Erasmus Darwin's "The
Botanic Garden"); any work influenced by Linnaean ideas in philosophy,
political theory, etc., would hold interest for me.  Whether it's English,
French, German or whatever is immaterial for my purposes.  I suppose my
inquiry is left deliberately vague, in the hopes that such vagueness is more
compatible with fresh answers.  (I'm aware of Gilbert White and John Clare--
a 19th century figure who had things to say about Linnaeus.)

Thank you.   Eric Miller

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:267>From mayerg@cs.uwp.edu  Thu Sep 30 08:18:10 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 08:20:18 -0500 (CDT)
From: Gregory Mayer <mayerg@cs.uwp.edu>
Subject: Re: Language, Evolution, Linguistics
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

On Wed, 29 Sep 1993 Larry Gorbet (lgorbet@triton.unm.edu) wrote:

>      ... Specifically, I suspect that it is easy to
> underestimate the responsiveness of linguistic systems to their
> environments in part because much of the academic linguistic world is
> inclined to regard any aspect of language that *is* responsive as (ipso
> facto) trivial and uninteresting.

	I think there is a similar distinction made in biology between
aspects that are responsive to the environment, and those that are not.
In biology, those aspects of an organism that respond quickly via natural
selection to changes in the environment are not thought to be trivial and
uninteresting, however, but rather are the subject of a great deal of
study and interest.  What they are often considered to be not useful for,
though, is phylogenetic reconstruction, because such characteristics may
acquire similarities based on similar functional constraints.  This is the
phenomenon of convergence.  Convergent similarities are misleading,
because they do not flow from common ancestry.  It may be that linguists
find these responsive aspects of language uninteresting because they are
concerned with tracing the historical interconnections of languages, and,
like in biology, these responsive aspects of the language may be
misleading as regards their history.  In biology, there has long been a
dual interest in both aspects, and in fact they were among the patterns of
data known in the 19th century which, in Ron Amundson's phrase, "cry out
for explanation." Darwin was quite familiar with them, and they were the
two primary patterns he set out to explain.  As he put it in the
Introduction of the Origin:

	"...a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic
beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution,
geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion
that each species had not been independently created, but had descended,
like varieties, from other species.  Nevertheless such a conclusion, even
if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the
innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to
acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly
excites our admiration."

	Patterns of the first type, which in their morphological aspects
are referred to as "Unity of Type", are explained by descent; the second
pattern, which Darwin referred to as the "Conditions of Existence", are
explained by modification.  Some aspects of organisms are explicable on
the basis of the former principle, others on the latter.  The materials of
which vertebrate wings are made and the arrangement of bones within them
are explained by descent (compare a bird with a bat); their shape,
however, is largely explicable on the basis of engineering principles,
without specific reference to their history.  Peter Junger has mentioned
a similar duality of explanation in law: some aspects are deducible from
first principles, but others, he insists, can only be understood as the
end result of an historical process.

	Since I began composing this message several linguists have posted
messages touching on what I've discussed here, with, for example,
convergence due to accident and ease of pronunciation being mentioned.  As
a biologist, I am learning much from this discussion.  It seems that in
both linguistics and biology there is a recognition that certain things
are explicable by timeless design principles (e.g. wings for flight), but
others are explicable only within a historical context (e.g. feathers vs.
skin).  Whewell was right.

Gregory C. Mayer
mayerg@cs.uwp.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:268>From LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU  Thu Sep 30 08:24:34 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 08:24:34 -0500
From: "JOHN LANGDON"  <LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Cultural change and historical ("Darwinian") explanations

In message <930930083540.2660562d@FENNEL.WT.UWA.EDU.AU>  writes:

> The problem boils down to a fairly simple one -- is the PATTERN seen over
> time and space in culture explainable in what most of us would understand
> as scientific terms.  Are the OBSERVABLE SPECIFIC DIFFERENCES (NOT the
> general, underlying similarities) explainable?  WHY should the SPECIFIC
> subsistence systems, kinship systems, ethical sytstems, etc etc found
> around the world have the forms they actually have?

> I treat culture AS
> IF it WERE hereditable because it is *necessary* for me to do so if I am to
> even ATTEMPT an answer to the questions which are of concern to me.

I have argued previously that natural selection cannot be literally applied to
culture; the best one can do is make analogy between the processes of culture
change and natural selection. There is nothing wrong with doing that, if it
appears to answer some of these excellent questions. But explanation by analogy
is merely description. The next step seems to me to be to devise an independent
theoretical justification within cultural anthropology for a selection-like
model. That is, culturalists must erect their own self-contained model for
change that is an explanation and not a description. Failure to do that leads
to all sorts of errors, subtle or ludicrous (depending partly on your
perspective) such as those which are rampant in sociobiological literature:

e.g. biological selectionist explanations for masturbation, neckties,
homosexuality, and toddlers waking up in the night.

The fallacy here is that these are perfectly explainable behaviors from what we
know about "first principles" of behavior and do not require specific
selectionist explanations such as a gene for neckties. These are cases where
analogy, improperly or overenthusiastically applied, breaks down.

JOHN H. LANGDON      email LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU
DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY    FAX  (317) 788-3569
UNIVERSITY OF INDIANAPOLIS   PHONE (317) 788-3447
INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46227

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:269>From HOLSINGE@UCONNVM.BITNET  Thu Sep 30 08:48:42 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 09:44:23 -0500 (EST)
From: "Kent E. Holsinger" <HOLSINGE%UCONNVM.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Sally Thomason replied to my earlier inquiry about examples of the independent
acquisition of language features with some interesting examples.  Now I have
a further question.

Biologists have often attributed the independent origin of similar forms (wings
in bats and birds, for example) to natural selection for efficient solution of
a similar problem.  More recently explanations have often been sought in terms
of internal constraints that limit the possible solutions.  Do linguists
regard "the fact that [a] particular set of sounds is easier to learn and/or
easier to perceive" as an internal constraint or an externally imposed problem?
Is the question even meaningful?  (If it's not, maybe we biologists can learn
something from our linguistic colleagues.)

-- Kent

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Kent E. Holsinger    Internet: Holsinge@UConnVM.UConn.edu |
|  Dept. of Ecology &     BITNET: Holsinge@UConnVM     |
|  Evolutionary Biology, U-43              |
|  University of Connecticut               |
|  Storrs, CT 06269-3043               |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

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<1:270>From anka@mack.uit.no  Thu Sep 30 11:59:38 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 18:03:10 +0100
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: anka@mack.uit.no (Anka Ryall)
Subject: Re: Linnaeus and literature

>I'd like to post a general inquiry to the Darwin list-- a technically
>pre-Darwinian inquiry (unless we choose to consider Erasmus Darwin).  Can
>anyone out there give me any information on the impact of Linnaean
>classification on 18th and 19th century literature?  By literature, I mean
>more than belles-lettres, though I include that (Erasmus Darwin's "The
>Botanic Garden"); any work influenced by Linnaean ideas in philosophy,
>political theory, etc., would hold interest for me.  Whether it's English,
>French, German or whatever is immaterial for my purposes.  I suppose my
>inquiry is left deliberately vague, in the hopes that such vagueness is more
>compatible with fresh answers.  (I'm aware of Gilbert White and John Clare--
>a 19th century figure who had things to say about Linnaeus.)
>
>Thank you.   Eric Miller

A good source is Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte (Suhrkampf
1978) which contains a chapter called "Der Wissenschaftler als Autor"
dealing with Linnaeus and his French contemporary Buffon.

Anka Ryall

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<1:271>From sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu  Thu Sep 30 13:24:34 1993

To: HOLSINGE%UCONNVM.BITNET@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 93 14:27:51 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

Kent Holsinger asks if linguists regard ease-of-learning/perception
as an internal constraint (or, rather, tendency, because there are
always exceptions) or an externally imposed problem.  Certainly
linguists' terminology differs from biologists' terminology here:
for a historical linguist, internally-motivated/caused change is
anything that comes from within the language & its speakers,
including changes that arise in the acquisition process (first-language
acquisition, that is); change that has to do with contact, whether
between dialects of one language or between different languages, is
externally-motivated change.  But I'm not sure what the implications
of this terminological difference are, if any.

 One could certainly try to draw a distinction between "internally-
motivated" changes that happen as a result of [an analogue of]
natural selection for efficient solution of a similar problem; such
changes could be contrasted with changes that arise through specific
imbalances in a linguistic system.  But I think the line would be
hard to draw, because -- to paint in very broad strokes -- you
wouldn't, in principle, expect *any* internally-motivated change
if you didn't have imbalances in the system.  But this is a far-out
hypothetical case; a language is a very complex sort of thing, and
there are always imbalances, as a result of history (even aside
from the kinds of dialect variation that, as someone has already
pointed out, result from earlier changes).  But then, I guess this
too resembles the situation in biological evolution?

  Sally Thomason
  sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:272>From LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU  Thu Sep 30 13:54:45 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 13:54:45 -0500
From: "JOHN LANGDON"  <LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution

In message <8322.749413671@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>  writes:

> Kent Holsinger asks if linguists regard ease-of-learning/perception
> as an internal constraint (or, rather, tendency, because there are
> always exceptions) or an externally imposed problem.  Certainly
> linguists' terminology differs from biologists' terminology here:
> for a historical linguist, internally-motivated/caused change is
> anything that comes from within the language & its speakers,
> including changes that arise in the acquisition process (first-language
> acquisition, that is); change that has to do with contact, whether
> between dialects of one language or between different languages, is
> externally-motivated change.  But I'm not sure what the implications
> of this terminological difference are, if any.

I raised the question of internal vs. external constraints earlier, making the
point that an analogy with natural selection requires a response to an external
constraint (i.e. directionality of change imposed from an external source). If
languages change because of an ease-of-learning constraint, I think this
constraint should be regarded as external to the languages themselves (since it
relates to the structure of the brain and not to any one language).

> you
> wouldn't, in principle, expect *any* internally-motivated change
> if you didn't have imbalances in the system.
>  But then, I guess this
> too resembles the situation in biological evolution?

I think there is an interesting biological analogy. I infer that the changes
for ease-of-learning would only account for a small proportion of language
changes and would not by themselves account for the actual divergence of
languages. Biologically, this would compare to fine-tuning by natural selection
(external constraint) of changes caused by genetic drift (operating from
internal constraints only).

This still leaves open the question of whether the macroevolutionary process of
languages has any component analogous to natural selection.

JOHN H. LANGDON      email LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU
DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY    FAX  (317) 788-3569
UNIVERSITY OF INDIANAPOLIS   PHONE (317) 788-3447
INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46227

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:273>From mayerg@cs.uwp.edu  Thu Sep 30 14:58:35 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 14:58:42 -0500 (CDT)
From: Gregory Mayer <mayerg@cs.uwp.edu>
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
To: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

	It is clear that "internal" and "external" mean different things
in biology and linguistics (and, I would add that their meaning isn't
clear in biology).  Would some linguist be so kind as to explain to the
biologists what "imbalance" means?

Gregory C. Mayer
mayerg@cs.uwp.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:274>From PICARD@Vax2.Concordia.CA  Thu Sep 30 15:03:44 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 15:57:50 -0500 (EST)
From: MARC PICARD <PICARD@Vax2.Concordia.CA>
Subject: Biological and linguistic change
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

   There were two things in Kent Holsinger's comment that struck me in tems
of a parallel between linguistic change and biological change.The first has to
do with "efficient solutions to a similar problem".  Taking the case of phono-
logical change (phonologists tend to do that), we find that much of it can be
attributed to this concept. Many, if not most sound changes, are context-
sensitive in the sense that X>Y will not occur everywhere (i.e. context-free)
but only in specific contexts. In turn, many of these will result from a
tendency on the part of all speakers to make contiguous or adjacent sounds
more similar to each other.
    Here's an example. In any language that has CONSONANT-VOWEL-CONSONANT
(CVC) sequences, e.g. /ata/, /apa/, /aka/, there exists the potential for a
change to /ada/, /aba/, /aga/ respectively. The reason is that in the former,
the consonants are voiceless (no vibration of the vocal cords) while vowels are
intrinsically voiced.  Thus, the speaker has to make an intervocalic voicing
adjustment. By pronouncing /b d g/ instead of /p t k/, however, no such change
in vocal cord vibration is necessary.
    What we find in the study of phonological change, then, are a certain
number of scenarios of this type which yield identical or similar results in
language after language. A particular change never HAS to take place but if
linguist A tells linguist B that language X has undergone a change like inter-
vocalic voicing, then B will have no trouble believing it.  However, if A tells
B that language Y has change /w/ to /s/ before the vowels /i o/, then B will
have every reason to be suspicious. There is just no conceivable phonetic
reason for this to occur.
    Which brings me to Holsinger's second comment, viz. that in biology
recently "explanations have often been sought in terms of internal constraints
that limit the possible solutions". There is an exact parallel in sound change
for it is imperative that we find as many conditions and constraints on phono-
logical change as possible if we hope to reconstruct the phonological histories
of unrecorded languages (or even unrecorded stages of recorded lanhguages).
    In sum, if the forces that govern sound change are ease of articulation
and ease of perception, as they seem to be, one should not think in terms of
the sounds themselves so much as in terms of what preceded and/or follows them
in the speech chain. In regular sound change, expediency is the name of the
game.  The human vocal apparatus prefers certain combinations of sounds, and
that's what speakers unconsciously strive for. However, in changing one thing,
another undesirable sequence may (and often does) arise which will need to be
"repaired", and so on ad infinitum. I don't think historical linguists will
ever be out of work.

Marc Picard

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<1:275>From sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu  Thu Sep 30 17:32:07 1993

To: "JOHN LANGDON" <LANGDON@gandlf.uindy.edu>
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 93 18:35:43 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

John Langdon infers that changes due to imbalances in the system (I
think that's what he had in mind -- my screen cut off part of his
comment, on the right edge) "would not by themselves account for
the actual divergence of languages."

 Why not?  If such imbalances cause changes (creating other
imbalances, which in turn cause changes, creating other imbalances,
etc.) -- as they certainly do -- then all we have to do is wait
long enough, and we'll have separate languages, if we started out
with two identical speech forms.  (O.K., there is no such thing in
the real world; there's always variation.  But there are close
enough analogues; all that's required is two groups of people speaking
what would be considered the same dialect.)  Maybe you wouldn't
get the divergence if you could predict identical changes in identical
dialects; but you can't, because tendencies are merely tendencies,
and if you cut off contact between two halves of one speech
community, different changes will occur in the two groups' speech.

 I think the most you would be able to get historical linguists
to agree to is that, in the total absence of contact with different
dialects and languages (also not a serious possibility in the real
world), language split might be delayed some.  But eventually it
would occur.

 I can't prove this: no test cases.  But it's the reasonable inference
from the facts -- language change affects all living languages, and
changes are not predictable.

  Sally Thomason
  sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:276>From sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu  Thu Sep 30 17:56:03 1993

To: Gregory Mayer <mayerg@cs.uwp.edu>
Subject: Re: Heritability and cultural evolution
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 93 18:58:27 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu>

 What historical linguists mean by "structural imbalances" is
parts of the system that are irregular and therefore harder to
learn than regular things.  The rubric can (with some
stretching) be extended to cover *all* things that are relatively
hard to learn, but the real meaning has to do with irregularities
-- patterns with gaps, patterns with exceptions, that sort of
thing.  I was using it in a pretty casual way, to avoid giving
lists of the kinds of things that are hard to learn; sorry to
be obscure.  Maybe an example will help clarify the notion.

  For instance: In Serbo-Croatian (a Slavic language, the major
language of ex-Yugoslavia), a few hundred years ago, two vowels
merged into one, pronounced [i] (= the vowel in English _beet_).
But this merger caused problems in the system of noun declension,
because a previously regular rule that turned (for instance)
[k] into a [ts] sound originally applied before only one of
the vowels that merged; after the merger, [k]'s appearing before
the [i]'s that used to trigger the [k] --> [ts] rule still turned
to [ts], but [k]'s appearing before the vowel that originally did
NOT trigger the rule remained [k].  If a noun stem ended in [k],
speakers had to remember which particular suffixes beginning in
[i] triggered the rule and which ones didn't.  That's an imbalance
in the system.  So what happened?  Different dialects of the
language did different things: (a) Some dialects just lost the
rule, so that all [k]'s remained [k] before all [i]'s; (b)
some dialects kept the old rule, so speakers had to memorize the
particular suffixes beginning in [i] that triggered the rule;
(c) some dialects extended the rule to apply before *all* [i]'s,
both the [i]'s that had originally triggered the process and
the [i]'s from an original vowel that did not trigger the process.
These constituted other imbalances (well, the same imbalance, in
the case of (b)).  For instance, the (c) case fixed the noun
declensional system, but introduced a discrepancy between noun
declension and verb declension, where the [k] --> [ts] rule still
occurred before certain suffixes.

 Language is, according to a popular truism, a system of systems,
and all these systems interact in complex ways.  So (another truism!)
a change that regularizes one (part of one) subsystem is all too
likely to complicate some part of the same or another subsystem.
What you find, therefore, is a never-ending process of change,
fixing up a glitch here only to introduce a glitch there.  Historical
linguists aren't likely to find a punctuated equilibrium approach
useful for the study of language change, in other words: no
equilibrium.  (And that in itself, come to think of it, makes our
discipline unhospitable to the notion of a just-right adaptation
to a just-right environment, even if we could decide what we mean
by "environment".)

 Sally Thomason
 sally@pogo.isp.pitt.edu

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<1:277>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Thu Sep 30 19:36:22 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 20:43:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Re: Linnaeus and literature
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Eric Miller asks for appearances of Linnaeus or Linnaean ideas in eighteenth
and nineteenth-century literature.  I think this is a fascinating question and
would like to encourage Eric to post a summary of the references he receives
in a few days.  I can offer one that I came across by accident recently.  This
comes from the minor Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), his "The
Pleasures of Hope", Part I, lines 135-140 (or so I think; I have only a partial
xerox in front of me):

  The Swedish sage admires, in yonder bowers,
  His winged insects, and his rosy flowers;
  Calls from their woodland haunts the savage train
  With sounding horn, and counts them on the plain:
  So once, at Heaven's command, the wanderers came
  To Eden's shade, and heard their various name.

Linnaeus is gracefully cast here as the second Adam, naming the animals as
once they had been named in Eden.

I remember also that Ezra Pound mentions Linnaeus (and also Louis Agassiz,
father of the glacial theory and enemy of Darwin) in his _Cantos_, although
this isn't an example from the earlier periods Eric was asking about.

Bob O'Hara, Darwin-L list owner

Robert J. O'Hara (darwin@iris.uncg.edu)
Center for Critical Inquiry and Department of Biology
100 Foust Building, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina 27412 U.S.A.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:278>From ARKEO4@FENNEL.WT.UWA.EDU.AU  Thu Sep 30 21:12:11 1993

Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1993 10:16:36 +0800 (SST)
From: ARKEO4@FENNEL.WT.UWA.EDU.AU
Subject: Re: Cultural change and historical ("Darwinian") explanations
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

JOHN LANGDON writes on  30 Sep 1993

> In message <930930083540.2660562d@FENNEL.WT.UWA.EDU.AU>  writes:
> > I treat culture AS IF it WERE hereditable because it is *necessary* for
> > me to do so if I am to even ATTEMPT an answer to the questions which are
> > of concern to me.

> I have argued previously that natural selection cannot be literally
> applied to  culture; the best one can do is make analogy between the
> processes of culture  change and natural selection. There is nothing wrong
> with doing that, if it  appears to answer some of these excellent
> questions. But explanation by analogy  is merely description.

Is it? Let me attempt to add a bit of content to the assertions being
made here.

My recent research has concerned itself with an venerable problem in
Australian archaeology.  Since the 50's people have been arguing about the
nature of the original colonisation of the continent by humans.  Two basic,
opposing, positions have arisen:

 (1) that colonisation was "fast" because human culture has the ability
quickly to adapt to local conditions.  Hence, once people arrive in
Pleistocene Australia they were able quickly to occupy the various
ecological zones.

 (2) that colonisation was "slow."  Here, the usual model invokes a slow
adaptation and learning process, usually put in terms in which humans
arrive with a "coastal adaptation."  They first colonise the perimeter of
the continent and only later learn how to survive in the more interior,
desert, regions.  Hence, movement across, and colonisation of the continent
would have been a slow process.

Now it is important to realise that BOTH of these positions are totally
compatable with explanations based upon THE anthropological "first
principle," namely, that culture is an adapative mechanism for humans. Yet,
as may be seen in this case, the first principle gets us *nowhere* in
understanding the details; it tells us nothing about HOW or "WHY" we have
the pattern that might exist in the archaeological record.  In fact, it
leads to two totally contradictory predictions.  This is not particularly
surpising since the "first principle" seems capable of "explaining" just
about ANY outcome.

The approach I have taken to the problem differs from the more traditional
ones in a fundamental manner.  I assume that cultures are always varying --
that behavioural "innovations" can appear at any time or in any place.
However the CONSEQUENCES of cultural variation will differ, and these
consequences will likewise differ by time and place.

The situation I have is an "empty" continent, one in which humans are new
arrivals.  The solution I come up with (I oversimplify the argument to a
point that I HOPE is not incoherent) runs something like this:

Consider two demes:  one deme is "well adapated" to the local environment.
That is, it utilised available resouces efficiently.  In ecological terms,
it is maximizing K.  The other deme is "poorly adapated;" it has behaviours
which do NOT maximize resources in the most efficient manner.  Again, in
ecological terms, it is a K-minimising strategy.

Now, we must consider the two strategies in terms of the selective
consequences in the envirnment we have at hand -- an empty continent. A
moment's reflection will show that the K-minimising strategy has a much
higher probability of being the colonising deme (in fact, its selective
advantage at any moment in time is the square of the differences in r, the
inherent rate of increase associated with each deme). This analysis leads
to series of predictions regarding the archaeological record, many of which
are testable given current techniques (but this is not particularly
relevant to the point being made here).

It is important to recognise that in the approach I take to the problem of
pristine colonisation, I am assuming that I may speak in a coherent manner
about something called "cultural demes:" that these various demes represent
HERITABLE traditions dictating the way people behave (in this case in terms
of subsistence strategy).  The differences in behaviour associated with
these heritable traditions lead to different consequences for the members
of the groups (in this case a different probablity of being the deme which
first colonises the continent).  Hence the pattern in the archaeological
record is to be understood in terms of SELECTIVE DIFFERENCES between the
traditions; differences which have CONSEQUENCES in space and time.
Hereditability is prerequisite to the kind of logic invoked.  And selection
is the ONLY "first principle" involved.  I must stress that without
invoking these two, joined, ideas my argument on the nature of pristine
colonisation simply could not exist.

Is the kind of cultural selection I invoke in this case really an "argument
from analogy"?  Is the result merely "description?" I honestly think not.

Dave

_______________________________________________________________________________

<1:279>From GA3704@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU  Thu Sep 30 21:36:02 1993

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 93 21:29:35 CST
From: "Margaret E. Winters" <GA3704@SIUCVMB.SIU.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Phonological constraints

My name is Geoff Nathan, and I have been reading these debates
over Margaret Winters's shoulder, but as a practicing phonologist
I couldn't help replying to the question of whether the constraints
on sound systems are internally imposed or externally.  If I understand
the question rightly, the answer is that Linguists disagree on this
question.  Some, like myself, consider many of the constraints on
possible sound systems, as well as the constraints on the actual
way that sounds are pronounced (for example, the fact that the
t sound in pretty can be pronounced like a 'd', but that the
k sound in tacky cannot be pronounced like a 'd' (or even like
an analogous sound) are imposed on the speaker by his/her vocal
tract.  The fact that 'dog' is pronounced with a d and a g, of course,
is imposed on the speaker by his/her language.  As is the fact that
the plural of 'foot' is 'feet'.  But the fact that the plural
of 'cat' has an s-sound at the end, but the plural of dog has a
z-sound at the end is again, imposed on the speaker by his/her
vocal tract--it's almost impossible to do it any other way.
I should add that many linguists disagree with this division into
exterally and internally imposed facts--more orthodox generative
grammar would hold that all facts are Internally imposed by some
inherent facts about the mental organization of language.
Those of us who call ourselves Natural Phonologists, however,
make appeal to a contrast between physiologically (and acoustically
driven) constraints and those that are conventionally motivated
(in this context, I guess one should say culturally motivated.)
Thanks for letting me put my two cents'  worth in.
             Geoff Nathan
           (using Margaret Winters's account)
              ga3704@siucvmb.siu.edu

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Darwin-L Message Log 1: 241-279 -- September 1993         End