Darwin-L Message Log 2: 90–122 — October 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 October 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 2: 90-122 -- OCTOBER 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 October 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 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 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.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:90>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Sat Oct 16 15:21:37 1993

Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1993 16:28:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: October 16 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

OCTOBER 16 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1714: GIOVANNI ARDUINO (or ARDUINI) is born at Caprino, Italy.  As a young man
he will work in the mines of the Adige valley, and will soon became one of the
leading mining specialists in Italy.  From his study of the mountains and
plains of northern Italy Arduino will describe four general geological periods
which he will name Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quaternary.  He will go
on to lay the intellectual foundations for the principle of actualism which
will become one of the central concepts of historical geology: "With the sole
guidance of our practical knowledge of those physical agents which we see
actually used in the continuous workings of nature, and of our knowledge of
the respective effects induced by the same workings, we can with reasonable
basis surmise what the forces were which acted even in the remotest times."

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.
ukans.edu, a network discussion group on the history and theory of the
historical sciences.  E-mail darwin@iris.uncg.edu for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:91>From ANWOLFE@ECUVM.CIS.ECU.EDU  Mon Oct 18 10:36:03 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 11:37:56 EDT
From: ANWOLFE@ECUVM.CIS.ECU.EDU
Subject: Re:  waterbabes
To: Multiple recipients of list <darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu>

  For those interested in the the aquatic ape hypothesis should take a
look at "The Aquatic Ape: Fact or Fiction?"  1991, Souvenir Press
ed. by M Roede, J. Wind, J. Patrick, and V. Reynolds.  Linda Wolfe

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:92>From LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU  Mon Oct 18 11:04:37 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 11:04:37 -0500
From: "JOHN LANGDON"  <LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: waterbabes

In message <9310160106.AA11055@ucmp1.Berkeley.EDU>  writes:
> I have been following (with about one eye) the aquatic ape thread on
> sci.bio on Usenet.  Most of the posts are devoted to yarn-spinning and
> just-so stories pro and con.  I do wonder how proponents of the aquatic
> ape scenario would respond to the following:
>
> According to the DNA clock (and the figure on about p. 20 of _The Third
> Chimpanzee_ by Jared Diamond), the split between the gorilla clade and
> the clade (Homo,(chimpanzee,bonobo)) is set at about 1.7-2.0 Ma.  So how
> could climatic events in the late Miocene (ca. 7-5 Ma) have anything to
> do with autapomorphies of Homo?
>
> Unless, of course, we are willing to admit massive and homoplastic
> reversals in both the gorilla and (chimp,bonobo) clades ...

I am not a defender of the aquatic hypothesis. However, the only sense I can
make out of this question is that you misread the graph. Diamond shows the
human/Pan split at about 7 Myr. (The 1.7-2.0 figure is the % DNA difference.)
There is still enough uncertainty in this date that the strict chronology does
not rule out an extremely (phenomonally) rapid aquatic adaptation, but one that
effectively discards Australopithecus. However, the aquatic ape model (proposed
1960, developed 1972) makes the most sense under the 1970's and earlier
chronology where humans and chimps split 14 Myr. That time scale has since been
discarded.

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

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:93>From LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU  Mon Oct 18 11:13:01 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 11:13:01 -0500
From: "JOHN LANGDON"  <LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: manuscript polymorphism

In message <01H45A4IQD8E8Y5338@psc.plymouth.edu>  writes:
> Another idea crossed my mind, not one necessarily related to manuscript
> polymorphism, but perhaps related to how some gene sequences remain un
> changed for long periods of time.  The example was published someplace
> sometime ago (I can not remember where or when).  It relates to the fact
> that in General Biology textbooks, when the evolution of the horse is
> described, the textbook authors state that Eohippus, one of the ancestral
> forms, was the size of a (an I may have this somewhat wrong) collier/
> terrier, a dog from the coal mines of Wales.  What is interesting, is the
> fact that this dog is no longer a very common breed of dog, yet the
> textbook writers rather than mutating the dog into a modern day form of
> dog, eg, golden retriever, poodle, etc., continue to use the old name
> as referenced in earlier textbooks.

This example comes from one of Stephen Jay Gould's Natural History columns, and
represents a theme he has repeated concerning the transmission and
transmutation of myths and metaphors in the history of science. See

"The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone", Natural History, January, 1988
pp. 16-24.

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

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:94>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Mon Oct 18 11:29:41 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 12:36:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Clarification re: RFD: sci.evolution.human
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

Just a quick note of clarification on "RFD: sci.evolution.human".

Danny Yee's note on sci.evolution.human (which was perfectly welcome here) was
a forwarded copy of a formal "Request for Discussion" he had posted to the
USENET discussion group "news.groups".  "news.groups" is a discussion group on
the USENET network that exists specifically for the purpose of discussing
proposals of new USENET groups, and for formally voting on whether such groups
should be established.  A "Request for Discussion" is a formal document posted
to news.groups, and USENET has a whole administrative structure and set of
procedures for this sort of thing.  The requested discussions are meant to
take place on news.groups itself, and the only postings that have any effect
on the process are those that are made to the news.groups section of USENET.
The USENET administrative structure is something completely independent of
listserv and similar mailing lists.

I realize that many people here don't have access to USENET and may not be
familiar with this procedure, so I thought this note of clarification might be
helpful.  If you are interested in the sci.evolution.human newsgroup and don't
have USENET access you might want to get in touch with Danny Yee directly
(danny@cs.su.oz.au), or ask your local computer center for a connection.

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.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:95>From anemone@uno.cc.geneseo.edu  Mon Oct 18 12:09:26 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 13:12 EST
From: anemone@uno.cc.geneseo.edu (Robert L. Anemone)
Subject: RE:  waterbabes & hominoid cladistics
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Barry Roth recently posted this (edited) message and query:

I do wonder how proponents of the aquatic ape scenario would respond to
the following:

>According to the DNA clock (and the figure on about p. 20 of _The Third
>Chimpanzee_ by Jared Diamond), the split between the gorilla clade and
>the clade (Homo,(chimpanzee,bonobo)) is set at about 1.7-2.0 Ma.  So how
>could climatic events in the late Miocene (ca. 7-5 Ma) have anything to
>do with autapomorphies of Homo?

I'm certain that I'm not the only Biological Anthropologist who noticed the
obvious mistake in the date for the split between gorilla and human-chimp
clades purported to come from Diamond's work. A quick look at the text of
"The Third Chimpanzee" revealed the mistake to be Roth's, not Diamond's.
The phylogenetic tree presented by Diamond as his Figure 1 (p. 21) has two
different Y axes. The Y axis on the right side of the tree has units of
millions of years ago (mya) while that on the left has units of percentage
difference in DNA (%DNA). Roth mistakenly read the figure of "about 1.7-2.0
Ma" off the left axis (%DNA). The phylogenetic tree actually suggests that
the percentage difference in DNA between gorilla and human-chimp clades is
on the order of 2%, and that the time of divergence of these two clades was
on the order of 10 mya.

In his Figure legend, Diamond states:
"...the common and pygmy chimps differ in about 0.7 percent of their DNA
and diverged around three million years ago; we differ in 1.6 pecent of our
DNA from either chimp and diverged from their common ancestor around seven
million years ago; and gorillas differ in about 2.3 percent of their DNA
from us or chimps and diverged from the common ancestor leading to us and
the two chimps around ten million years ago."

Please don't misconstrue my intent as providing some support for the
"Aquatic Ape" Hypothesis. However, the split between humans and some great
apes may very well have occurred during the Late Miocene.

Bob Anemone
Department of Anthropology
SUNY at Geneseo

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:96>From SMITGM@hawkins.clark.edu  Mon Oct 18 20:07:41 1993

To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: "Gerard Donnelly Smith"  <SMITGM@hawkins.clark.edu>
Organization: Clark College, Vancouver WA, USA
Date: 18 Oct 93 18:03:25 PST8PDT
Subject: textual polymorphism

An obnoxious myth that was only dismissed several years ago involved
Galileo's discovery that the Earth revolved around the Sun.  After
600 years, as you recall, the Catholic Church finally admitted he was
correct and posthumously allowed him to be a Catholic again. Talk
about over-representation of an error in later texts. It would be a
curious study to see how long the Church's sanctioned science texts
retained the error.

Another study which might bear fruit would be an analysis of the
changing rhetoric of creationism as it confronts more and
more irrefutable evidence. Of course faith can move mountains, and
even cause spatial and temporal distortions.

I must say that any study of, or creation of, a theory of textual
polymorphism (I'd like to move the discussion beyond manuscripts),
should include ideology and its role in both substantive and
non-substantive emendations in the text.  Scientific texts, history
texts, religious texts (obviously) arise from and conform to the
ideologies surrounding them.  While I am not sure which part of the
genetic process to compare ideologies with, I would imagine the DNA
represents the cultural code of which I speak.  Errors or changes in
locus, though a minor adjustment to the overall paradigm, are
interesting phenomenon; however, those major adjustments in the
"logos" of the text are more analogous to evolutionary changes or
mutations we might see over several generations of a species being
genetically manipulated.

Discussing manuscript errors, though an interesting analogy, can not
move beyond analogy and into possible application.  Unless I am
missing something, errors in transcription or even changes in single
words or rhymes usually do not change the meaning of texts all that
much.  However, errors which occur in translating one language to the
next can create quite significant errors.  When these errors are
purposeful, as in censorship or disinformation, they represent a
genetic attempt by the cultural DNA to adjust to environmental
imperatives and contraints.

So, the cultural/ideological DNA of the Catholic Church ensured
through the process called inquisitional censorship that the peasants
of the 12th and 13th centuries did not experience the evolutionary
shift in the paradigm until centuries after the discovery.  We might
call these peasants and priests, cultural or ideological Neanderthal's
who could not, or were not allowed to adapt to change, ergo
extinction.

How might we apply this to current models of cultrual/ideological
transmission?  How might "survival of the fitest" be used to discuss
cultrual transmission through texts?  What scientific myths refuse to
die, because there are just enough chromosomes encoded with that
informations still out there in our mental soup?

I see I've rambled too long.

Dr. Gerard Donnelly-Smith    e-mail: smitgm@hawkins.clark.edu
English Department       phone:  206-699-0478
Clark College
Vancouver, WA  98663

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:97>From CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU  Mon Oct 18 20:53:33 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 13:41:10 BS3
From: charbel nino el-hani <CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: a reference in altruism
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Here is the reference i forgot in my first e-mail to darwin-l and one
more article related to the debate on altruism:
   Nowak, M. A. & May, R. M. 1992. NATUre, vol. 359:826-829 (see also
the news and views, by karl sigmund, *on prisoners and cells*, on page
774.
   nowak, m. a. & May, r. m. 1993. the spatial dilemmas of evolution.
international journal of bifurcation and chaos, vol. 3, no. 1:35-78.

      Charbel nino el-hani
   msc in education/institute of biology
  federal university of bahia, salvador, bahia, brazil
   research area: historical epistemology
      address: charbel@brufba

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:98>From WILLS@macc.wisc.edu  Mon Oct 18 21:55:21 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 21:58 CDT
From: Jeffrey Wills <WILLS@macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: mauscripts and genetics--Why care?
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

[First: I missed a day of Darwin (by digest), so I apologize if I overlap with
another poster.]

A few contributors have politely asked what the point is of pushing the
manuscript/genetics analogy so far.  Intellectual ambits can always be widened,
but hasn't this analogy gone far enough?
	A year ago I would have agreed, but I was very impressed with the
results (not just theory) of the O'Hara-Robinson experiment last year.  As
several of you know, with the use of a cladistics program O'Hara was able in a
matter of minutes to take a binary data set of manuscript variants and produce
a stemma (a historical tree of the manuscripts) which was fairly accurate (as
judged against Robinson's lengthy work by hand).  It is now quite clear to me
that the evolutionary biologists have some handy devices which we can use in
stemmatics, but we need to know more about them to learn how to improve their
accuracy or adapt them to our needs. The fruits of detailed discussions about
ms./genetic transmission processes and selections will be in our improved use
of such programs--at the very least.
	What do biologists have to gain from the conversation? Someone else
would have to speak to that. Since there are many more biologists with much
more research money, my suspicion is that the benefits are decidedly lopsided
toward the manuscript side. On the other hand, the nature of the linguistic or
manuscript record has some comparative advantages. Occasionally for manuscripts
there is external data that lets us know where they were, who copied them and
when. This allows us an external check on our method of reconstruction. This
evidence about specific mutations between items in our manuscript trees is not
really availabe for the fossil record, I suspect.  It is not just more fossil
evidence, it is a different type of evidence. Likewise the linguistic record
has many problems, but sometimes we have enough material to go back more
closely and confirm or reject a reconstruction of dialect spread, for example.

Jeffrey Wills
wills@macc.wisc.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:99>From WILLS@macc.wisc.edu  Mon Oct 18 22:14:03 1993

Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 22:15 CDT
From: Jeffrey Wills <WILLS@macc.wisc.edu>
Subject: manuscripts, populations, horizontal transmission
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Bob O'Hara wrote recently:

"There are many differences between manuscript transmission and both
linguistic and biological evolution, most notably that manuscript
transmission is not a populational phenomenon (it is closer to being
clonal, with a fair bit of horizontal transmission), but I will leave those
issues for a later discussion so as to emphasize the particular issue of
ploidy/polymorphism."

Perhaps "The time has come, the Walrus said . . ." to speak of population
phenomena and horizontal transmission.  Let me ask what "population phenomena"
and "horizontal transmission" mean?  I assume population refers to the fact
that species or languages on a tree represent group phenomena whereas
manuscript trees have discrete single entities as their "individuals" on the
tree. Although this is usually true, in large manuscript lineages we do refer
to clusters of similar manuscripts as families and occasionally treat the group
as a single entity. On those occasions however we usually start to feel there
is too much contamination to even draw a tree so we don't. As a result most of
the manuscript trees you will see are of closed traditions and tidy data sets.
This tends to bias the way we represent the manuscript history. Also, unlike
biologists who are interested in the whole tree, paleographers are usually
interested just in the best witnesses and later descendants are less studied
and often not represented on trees at all. This may blind us to issues we would
see if we studied the whole tree.

	The other term (horizontal transmission) is a familiar term in the world
of manuscripts and is used to describe the influence of a manuscript (s) other
than the parent manuscript on a copy. Does the term have a separate meaning in
biology?
	The suggestion that manuscript copying is clonal makes good sense: one
manuscript goes in, the same manuscript and another one come out. But as Bob
points out there is also coded material which is not from the source code and
is not random. How can something be part clonal and part not?
	This may seem bizarre, but I think we need to put the scribes into the
tree too. It's a terribly uneven sort of hybridization, but I think it has some
explanatory value. Example 1: I am copying along a passage in Virgil's Aeneid
which goes "de nomine Phoebi" (by the name of Apollo) and I write "de nomine
Christi" (by the name of Christ). This is not a mutation like transposing
letters or omitting a word, in which the scribe can be seen as a faulty
mechanic.  In the case of "de nomine Christi", the scribe has entered new code
into the tradition which is nowhere else attested in any manuscript of the
Aeneid.  Example 2: I am copying the copy generated above, which reads "de
nomine Christi". I know this is nonsense; the passage is talking about the
temple of Apollo; Virgil died before Christ, I think I remember the line, etc.
so I change this to "de nomine Phoebi".  Where did this "new" reading come
from? It was not in the text in front of me, and it is not random; in fact it
is ancestral. I must be carrying another copy of the text inside me.
	The reality is that texts are recorded in memory as well as in writing.
Potentially each scribe has a polyploid version of the text in memory.  Is it
impossible to consider each copying of a manuscript not as a cloning but as a
mating between the scribe's memory and the manuscript at hand? Although of
different natures apparently, both have a copy of something in the same code.
In most instances, the manuscript is so dominant and the scribe so recessive
that the issue of this mating looks almost entirely like the manuscript.  But
when I copy a manuscript some of that text is also copied into my memory. When
I next copy a manuscript of the same text, the physical manuscript may not be
so dominant and my internal version may not be so recessive. Or if I come
across a hole (lacuna) in the manuscript, my linguistic resources will be
dominant.
	Traditionally, paleographers (scholars of manuscripts) see the tree as
constantly branching (a closed tradition) and are very embarrassed/confused by
any effort to connect nodes on the tree (called "contamination" or "horizontal
transmission").  Yet how does the code leap across from branch to branch if the
mutation process is strictly clonal?  I am very innocent of what "clonal" means
to a biologist, but I think it is the great mistake of our manuscript trees
(and our language trees, but that is a topic for another day) to assume they
are clonal. It boxes us into a process which is inherently faulty. It is true
that once we say manuscripts intermate with memories we have really grafted the
manuscript trees onto the language tree and that is a mess. But I think it is
what happens.
	In the past decade, for various literary projects thousands of megabytes
of text have been entered in machine readable-form. Experience has shown that
scanning is not good enough (because the cost of error-correction is too high)
and double manual entry (keyboard entry by two separate people whose results
are then matched for differences) offers the best results by price.  It is also
clear that the less the keyboarders know the language the better (we have
entered hundreds of megabytes of Greek texts through companies in the
Phillipines or Singapore). Accidental human error in copying always exists, but
those sources of error must be distinguished theoretically from "intelligent"
error.  Possibly there is no biological counterpart for this intelligent error,
but I think it is given some account by a view at mating rather than cloning.

Jeffrey Wills
wills@macc.wisc.edu

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:100>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Tue Oct 19 00:30:18 1993

Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 01:37:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: October 19 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

OCTOBER 19 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1605/1682: Sir THOMAS BROWNE, antiquary, author, and sometime physician, born
on this day in 1605 in St. Michael's Parish, Cheapside, London.  He will die
on the same date in 1682.  After education at Oxford and travel on the
Continent he will settle in Norwich, England.  The discovery of several
ancient burial urns in Norfolk will lead Browne to think about reconstructing
aspects of the past that are not recorded in textual sources, and he will
express these thoughts in one of the most graceful and imaginative documents
of the antiquarian period, his _Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall_ (1658): "What
Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among
women, though puzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture.  What time the
persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous Nations of the dead, and slept
with Princes and Counsellours, might admit a wide solution."

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.
ukans.edu, a network discussion group on the history and theory of the
historical sciences.  E-mail darwin@iris.uncg.edu for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:101>From 72350.1764@CompuServe.COM  Tue Oct 19 13:40:47 1993

Date: 19 Oct 93 14:31:29 EDT
From: Earth Magazine <72350.1764@CompuServe.COM>
To: charbel nino el-hani <CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: a reference in altruism

I believe that there was another News and Views on Nowak and May's work in
Nature last summer.

It reported that Nowak and May found that if they make the cells in their
grid fallible -- that is made them sometimes think that the other cells had
defected when in fact they had cooperated -- another strategy did better than
Tit For Tat. I think they call the new strategy Win Stay Lose Switch. But even
with fallibility was still possible for a cooperative strategy to spread
through the grid.

Tom Waters

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:102>From hantuo@utu.fi  Tue Oct 19 17:43:12 1993

To: Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: hantuo@utu.fi (Hanna Tuomisto)
Subject: water babies
Date: 	Wed, 20 Oct 1993 00:46:41 +0200

Iain Davidson wrote:
>Elaine Morgan raises some really interesting problems for which her
>elaboration of the theory seem to offer a plauible explanation, but
>plausibility is not really enough.

Maybe, but as long as the alternatives are much less plausible, Morgan's
explanations remain (in my opinion) a better choice for a working
hypotheses.

P.E. Griffiths wrote:
>Morgan's argument for the aquatic ape hypothesis is typical of a class of
>adaptationist arguments which try to increase the plausibility of an
>hypothesised adaptive phase by listing a large number of traits which it
>can simultaneously explain. It does this quite impressively.

>Bob O'Hara (1988) has drawn attention to the dangers of giving adaptive
>explanations of character states without paying attention to the cladistic
>relationships of those states.

>In this particular case, the argument falls down unless the proposed
>'adaptive character suite' emerges in the same general area of the tree for
>primate lineages. If, instead, it is a collage of traits from different
>portions of the tree then it cannot be a response to a single adaptive
>phase.

All the traits that are discussed by Morgan are apomorphies of Homo
sapiens. At least they are not shared with any other known primate species,
present or extinct, with the exception of those that are supposed to be our
immediate ancestors. When non-primate mammals (or birds, for that matter)
are considered, the "human" 'adaptive character suite' appears in several
non-related species, and then it must obviously be the result of convergent
evolution: adaptation of separate evolutionary lineages to shared
environmental conditions. It just so happens that all these species live in
aquatic environments.

JOHN H. LANGDON wrote:
>There is still enough uncertainty in this date that the strict chronology does
>not rule out an extremely (phenomonally) rapid aquatic adaptation, but one
>that effectively discards Australopithecus. However, the aquatic ape model
>(proposed 1960, developed 1972) makes the most sense under the 1970's and
>earlier chronology where humans and chimps split 14 Myr. That time scale has
>since been discarded.

The evolution of humans may indeed be characterized as extremely rapid. Now
why did humans evolve more rapidly than the other apes? Usually rapid
evolution is supposed to be connected with rapid environmental changes that
impose new selection pressures to a species, and that is the standard
explanation of the savanna hypothesis, too. However, the forest-savanna
boundary does not seem like a drastical enough environmental change to
provoke so fundamental morphological and physiological changes as humans
have, especially since these traits make no sense in the savanna
environment. An (semi)aquatic phase in human history explains nicely both
the rapidity of the evolutionary change and the peculiarly marine character
of those traits that distinguish us from other primates.

Hanna Tuomisto
Department of Biology
University of Turku
FIN-20500 Turku, FINLAND

Phone +358-21-6335634
Fax   +358-21-6335564
e-mail  hantuo@utu.fi

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:103>From D.Oldroyd@unsw.edu.au  Tue Oct 19 18:01:32 1993

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 09:11:59 +1000
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: D.Oldroyd@unsw.edu.au
Subject: Nowak and May reference/Tom Walters

Dear Tom Walters,
      I was interested to see your brief note about tit for tat
strategies and a reference to something in Nature.  One of my students has,
I suspect, produced a somewhat similar result as a result of his computer
simulation of the prisoners' dilemma.  He has done this more or less for
his own amusement, rather than as a research project.  I am not an expert
on such matters.  Could you, or any other contributor to Darwin-l, kindly
provide me with the reference to the Nature article and the Nowak and May
reference?  We would find it interesting, I'm sure.
    Thank you in anticipation,
    Sincerely,
    David Oldroyd,
    University of New South Wales
    D.Oldroyd@unsw.EDU.AU
David Oldroyd,
School of Science and Technology Studies,
University of New South Wales

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:104>From LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU  Wed Oct 20 10:45:45 1993

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 10:45:45 -0500
From: "JOHN LANGDON"  <LANGDON@GANDLF.UINDY.EDU>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: water babies

In message <93Oct20.004643eet.144261-4@utu.fi>  writes:

> Iain Davidson wrote:
> >Elaine Morgan raises some really interesting problems for which her
> >elaboration of the theory seem to offer a plauible explanation, but
> >plausibility is not really enough.
>
> Maybe, but as long as the alternatives are much less plausible, Morgan's
> explanations remain (in my opinion) a better choice for a working
> hypotheses.

Why are the alternatives much less plausible? Are you familiar with them?

> All the traits that are discussed by Morgan are apomorphies of Homo
> sapiens. At least they are not shared with any other known primate species,
> present or extinct, with the exception of those that are supposed to be our
> immediate ancestors. When non-primate mammals (or birds, for that matter)
> are considered, the "human" 'adaptive character suite' appears in several
> non-related species, and then it must obviously be the result of convergent
> evolution: adaptation of separate evolutionary lineages to shared
> environmental conditions. It just so happens that all these species live in
> aquatic environments.

I would argue that this is not true. Some of the traits she cites, particularly
aspects of reproduction which was a major thrust of her first book, are not
apomorphies. More recent primatology has found that pair bonding,
estrous/menstrual patterns, extended sexual receptivity (tolerance?), etc., do
not distinguish humans from other animals.

Many of the list of apomorphies belong to single adaptive complexes that
require only a single explanation. Rather than considering them independently
as evidence, they should be lumped.

Evolutionary convergence does not necessarily imply adaptation to the same
environmental conditions. Convergence with other species, especially distantly
related ones should be examined carefully and in phylogenetic as well as
functional context.
For example, reduction of hair, increase in fat, increase in sweating, changes
in  cutaneous innervation and circulation all relate to a thermoregulation
strategy. While some of these are paralleled in aquatic animals, others
(sweating, circulation) do not make sense as aquatic adaptations and are not
paralleled in aquatic animals. Replacement of hair with fat was a convergence
for humans, pigs, and whales as a more efficient solution to heat loss. Whales
are aquatic. Should we assume that pigs are too? Humans and pigs are
terrestrial and show it by their concern with heat dissipation as well-- pigs
wallow and humans flush and sweat. Why are whales a better model for humans
than pigs?

Bipedalism is not much of an adaptation for aquatic life. Seals and otters are
not bipedal. Standing in the water allows you to exploit water up to five feet
or so in height. (For Lucy, maybe up to four feet.) If you really wanted to
collect shell fish from water this shallow, wait until the tide goes out like
clam rakers do. If you are going to swim in deeper water, why be bipedal.

On the other hand, if you are going to become bipedal, then you may be
secondarily adapted for swimming (as we are), because both utilize powerful
lower limbs.

Are we really well adapted to the water? What other aquatic species looses as
many of its members in drowning accidents?

> JOHN H. LANGDON wrote:
> >There is still enough uncertainty in this date that the strict chronology
> >does not rule out an extremely (phenomonally) rapid aquatic adaptation, but
> >one that effectively discards Australopithecus. However, the aquatic ape
> >model (proposed 1960, developed 1972) makes the most sense under the 1970's
> >and earlier chronology where humans and chimps split 14 Myr. That time scale
> >has since been discarded.
>
> The evolution of humans may indeed be characterized as extremely rapid. Now
> why did humans evolve more rapidly than the other apes? Usually rapid
> evolution is supposed to be connected with rapid environmental changes that
> impose new selection pressures to a species, and that is the standard
> explanation of the savanna hypothesis, too. However, the forest-savanna
> boundary does not seem like a drastical enough environmental change to
> provoke so fundamental morphological and physiological changes as humans
> have, especially since these traits make no sense in the savanna
> environment. An (semi)aquatic phase in human history explains nicely both
> the rapidity of the evolutionary change and the peculiarly marine character
> of those traits that distinguish us from other primates.

What I meant in this comment was that if we had to place the aquatic adaptation
AND its reversal in this narrower time frame (between 7 and 5 Myr), then this
would be impossibly rapid. There was indeed a climatic change in eastern Africa
at the end of the Miocene and into the Pliocene. That very likely correlates
with speciation and rapid evolution of our lineage in the conventional models
for terrestrial evolution. Evolutionary mechanisms, not chronology, make the
aquatic diversion unlikely.

If this critique of the aquatic hypothesis is spotty, it is because there are
so many angles to attack that I hardly know where to begin-- evolutionary
improbability, the plausibility of conventional models, the lack of parsimony
of Morgan's model, errors in it (some only apparent in light of more recent
knowledge).

I made a similar reply on the anthro-l list recently. I append it below to
flesh out some of these points.


From: "JOHN LANGDON"  <LANGDON>
Date: Fri, Oct 8, 1993 1:09 PM
To: dhanson@osteon.win.net ANTHRO-L@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu
Subject: Re: The Aquatic Ape - news (fwd); replies to Douglas Adams please

As a paleoanthropologist, I cannot let this discussion pass by without comment.
The first questions I would ask in critiquing the aquatic theory are:

   What does the aquatic theory explain better that the more conventional
(terrestrial) models?
   Can the individual hypotheses of the aquatic theory be better explained by
conventional models?
   What other predictions/expectations are to be derived from the aquatic
theory? Can these be used to test the theory?
   Is it reasonable in light of our larger understanding of primate and human
evolution and of evolutionary theory?

I suspect that it has been dismissed with little published examination largely
because it fails these questions.

> His guess was that the reason it was not taken seriously was that most of the
> people working in this field were used to looking to the fossil record for
> evidence, and there simply isn't any - but then it is fairly astonishing that
> we have any evidence for anything in the fossil record.

Don't sell the fossil record short. Blanket statements such as this are
commonly found in creationist literature. The fossil record can tell us quite a
bit. For example, the skeletal anatomy of Australopithecus from 3.0 myr is
reasonably well known, even if we are not in agreement on how to interpret it.
The highly fragmentary fossils earlier than that indicate the presence of
Australopithecus afarensis (or at least its teeth) in inland habitats a couple
of million years previously. This narrows the temporal window for the aquatic
phase and its reversal.

> For instance: EM makes much of the fact that man, uniquely amongst
> terrestrial mammals, is bipedal. She argues that there is a very great
> difference  between an anatomical structure which is essentially quadrapedal
> but allows for bipedal locomotion on occasions, and an anatomical structure
> that is exclusively bipedal. She maintains that there is no argument in
> favour of an animal making the huge anatomical changes and sacrifices
> necessary that wouldn't apply equally to many other animals, none of which
> have made that change. (The argument which says that man, uniquely, became
> bipedal in order to carry tools implies that man intended to become
> toolmakers which is obviously ridiculous, but nevertheless seems to slip past
> people's defences with surprising ease.)

[Incidentally, since her first book presented the model in a rather strident
feminist rhetoric, I presume that Morgan would prefer gender-neutral
terminology. Humans, not just men, are bipedal.]

I am in agreement with her criticism of the cultural models for bipedalism. One
cannot comfortably use arguments to explain unique human traits that apply just
as easily to other species. An explanation for human bipedalism must build on
the unique context of our ancestors before bipedalism as we recognize it
evolved, not afterwards.

Cannot the same criticism be leveled at the aquatic hypothesis? Why are there
no other bipedal aquatic tetrapods (aside from birds, which don't count).
Humans can and do exploit coastal resources, but I doubt they could have
survived just on those that lie in water shallow enough for us to stand up and
breathe. One would expect that humans adapted for the water would have been as
reliant on swimming as muskrats and otters. I don't find this a convincing
reason for becoming bipedal.

> I looked up bipedalism in the CEHE, but while it went into the mechanism of
> bipedalism in some detail, it passed over the question of how it could
> possibly have arisen rather briefly and vaguely (p79), which surprised me.
> Isn't the evolution of a completely unique and expensive feature like
> bipedalism rather significant?

I think it is significant. I don't want to speak for the CEHE, which I have not
read, but I believe bipedalism to have been one of the first and most
fundamental adaptive shifts which distinguishes the hominid lineage. Is there a
better explanation for it? I think so. As several anthropologists (including
myself) have argued in print, the alternative to human bipedalism is not the
efficient quadrupedalism of most mammals, but the specialized arboreal climbing
anatomy of modern apes, who are not spectacularly efficient on the ground. A
climbing ape committing itself to terrestrialism, would do well to make
whatever anatomical adjustments were necessary to increase its locomotor
efficiency. Good monkey-like quadrupedalism is one possibility, but given the
tendency for upright posture and substantial hindlimb weight-bearing,
bipedalism was an equally viable strategy.
Why did our ancestors "choose" bipedalism? Many authors have argued that it was
because of cultural behaviors (e.g. food carrying) that we preferred that
alternative. [This argument is far different from the simplistic model that
says we left an efficient, well-adapted quadrupedal posture for cultural
reasons.] I prefer to consider the possibility that we took the bipedal
alternative by fortuitous chance.

> >EM also makes much of our hairlessness, also an almost unique feature
> amongst terrestrial mammals. How did that arise? I looked in the CEHE but
> there was no entry for 'hair' in the index. I would have thought that the
> evolutionary signicance of hair in the only terrestrial mammal to have
> dispensed with it was worth a mention. So I tried to track the subject down
> by following various other leads from EM's chapter on hair.
> For instance she talks at length about the relative functions of eccrine and
> apocrine glands in other animals and in ourselves. She says that whereas we
> might expected to have apocrine scent and sweat glands all over our bodies
> like our ancestors, ours have atrophied and are only found in limited areas
> of the body. Instead we now sweat dilute salt water from modified eccrine
> glands which other animals use to secret moisture on to their paws to get a
> good grip. Whatever the reason for this change, (and EM, of course, argues
> that it flows directly from our alleged aquatic period) something must have
> caused it. If not an aquatic period, then what? I looked up eccrine and
> apocrine glands in the CEHE and found almost nothing, certainly no sense that
> there was anything here that needed to be investigated or explained. Is EM
> right that our arrangement is highly unusual? If it is highly unusual isn't
> that significant? If it is significant, then what is wrong with the
> consequent arguments made by EM? Maybe a lot - I just can't find out what.
> >The CEHE mentions eccrine glands in the entry about sweat on page 48. It
> >says that our sweating mechanism is particularly effective because it pours
> >copious quantities of weakly saline water on to our skin to cool us down.
> >This means of course that we have to pour copious quantities of water back
> >into ourselves. It doesn't make clear why this profligate expenditure of
> >moisture (which often drips off us before it has a chance to cool us by
> >evaporation) is better for us than the more economical systems used by other
> >terrestrial mammals. The entry states that 'our lack of body hair also
> >ensures that sweat provides very efficient cooling as it evaporates from the
> >heated skin.' If this is true, then why is it that every other terrestrial
> >mammal uses fur as an insulator against both heat and cold, while humans
> >have to wear clothes to cope with either? I wouldn't like to have to wander
> >round the savannah during the day protected only by my sweat glands. Or at
> >night, for that matter. There is no entry in the index for 'clothes'. EM
> >also says that human skin is unusual in having an abundance of subcutaneous
> >fat, which is characteristic of marine rather than terrestrial mammals. From
> >all this she draws a variety of conclusions which support her thesis in a
> >pretty logical and straightforward way. P49 of the CEHE makes the only
> >mention of subcutaneous fat, but doesn't say whether we have more or less of
> >it than other mammals. It notes that 'Fat is particularly beneficial in cold
> >water, because neither fur nor clothing provides significant insulation in
> >these conditions.' It doesn't follow this line of thought anywhere, though,
> >other than to say that successful Channel swimmers are usually the fatter
> >ones.

She is right in describing modern human anatomy. The characteristics she
observed make a consistent picture: Humans are adapted for sustained high
levels of energy expenditure, particularly in hot environments. Sweating
permits us to cool down more efficiently; it also serves as a supplement to the
waste-filtering system of the kidneys. Relying on fat for insulation rather
than hair permits us to bypass that insulation with the bloodstream when
necessary, so that excess heat can be dumped through the skin.
Typical furry mammals in hot climates use their insulation as much to keep body
heat in as to keep solar heat out. This means they have a narrower range of
thermal tolerance and thus a limited ability to shift to high metabolic gear
for very long. Louis Leakey demonstrated this by running some fast savannah
species to exhaustion.
Aquatic species (e.g. hippos) have pursued a strategy resembling ours for a
different reason: water generally penetrates fur and neutralizes its ability to
insulate. Thus fat is better for them.

Clothes were undoubtedly a more recent cultural invention to cope with climates
outside of the tropics. (Even Morgan would have to concede that our ancestors
did not put on bathrobes as soon as they came out of the water.
Yes, there are limits to running around in the tropical sun. People generally
don't-- only mad dogs and Englishmen, as the saying goes.

To me, human skin is reasonably explained. I am investigating parallel
adaptations in other body systems. The aquatic theory offers nothing in this
line that we don't already have.

> So is it the idea that an animal might have been forced into an aquatic
> environment, started to adapt, and was then forced back into a land
> environment?

I happen to find this a very unlikely scenario, given the very narrow time
period allowed for it.

> >The underlying assumption is that the place at which we have arrived is the
> >one towards which we have always been inexorably heading. To think anything
> >else makes us feel insecure of our very existence.
> >The Aquatic Ape Theory, by contrast, gives us picture of a world which
> >happened to tip a few of us into the water and then happened to tip us back
> >out again when we were half-done.

I find the aquatic hypothesis as guilty of this teological thinking as Darwin.
It focuses entirely on modern anatomy, asking how we got here and ignores the
really essential consideration of any evolutionary explanation: What did we
start with and how did that influence our pathway? Nor does she really make any
use of what we know of the fossil record. The fossils give no hint of any such
aquatic diversion in the transition from semi-arboreal apes to terrestrial
humans.

Morgan's other main body of argument comes from reproduction. It also offers no
improvement on conventional models and incorporates some of the same problems.
In short, I fail to see where the aquatic theory has anything to offer that is
better than more conventional ones, and there is no direct evidence in support
of it. She says swimming predisposed us to bipedalism. Isn't it equally likely
that bipedalism predisposed us to swimming?

All of this is not disproof, but it argues that the aquatic hypothesis is
superfluous and unparsimonious. I suggest this is a major reason
anthropologists have generally ignored it. I could go on, but I am out of time.
My class started nine minutes ago.

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

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:105>From 72350.1764@CompuServe.COM  Wed Oct 20 12:08:26 1993

Date: 20 Oct 93 12:56:24 EDT
From: Earth Magazine <72350.1764@CompuServe.COM>
To: "INTERNET:D.Oldroyd@unsw.edu.au" <D.Oldroyd@unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Nowak and May reference

David Oldroyd,

The News and Views was "Cooperation wins and stays," by Manfred Milinski, Vol.
364, page 12. The issue was dated July 1, 1993. It discussed a Nowak and May
paper, "A strategy of win-stay, lose-shift that outperforms tit-for-tat in the
Prisoner's Dilemma game," Vol. 364, page 56.

The latest News Scientist (Oct. 9) has a news item on a criticism of May and
Nowak's work made by Robert Huberman of Xerox PARC. Huberman says that M&N's
model only works if all of the cells in the grid revise their strategies
simultaneously. M&N say this isn't so. Huberman apparently has a paper in
PNAS, vol 90, page 7716.

I'm interested in hearing whether anyone thinks that May and Nowak's work is
consonant with Kropotkin's views as expressed in "Mutual Aid," a book which
sits I'm afraid unread on my shelf. (By the way, Kropotkin was well known for
his work on glacial history and physical geography before he became a
revolutionary. He was born Dec 21, 1842, a potential entry for "Today In
Historical Sciences.")

Tom Waters

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:106>From princeh@husc.harvard.edu  Wed Oct 20 14:27:32 1993

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 15:05:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: Patricia Princehouse <princeh@husc.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: mss polymorphism/dog breeds
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

On Mon, 18 Oct 1993 LARRYS@psc.plymouth.edu wrote:

> that in General Biology textbooks, when the evolution of the horse is
> described, the textbook authors state that Eohippus, one of the ancestral
> forms, was the size of a (an I may have this somewhat wrong) collier/
> terrier, a dog from the coal mines of Wales.  What is interesting, is the
> fact that this dog is no longer a very common breed of dog, yet the
> textbook writers rather than mutating the dog into a modern day form of
> dog, eg, golden retriever, poodle, etc., continue to use the old name
> as referenced in earlier textbooks.
	This may stray a bit too far from the subject, but as a dog
fancier, I would be very interested in any reference you could provide as
to this collier/terrier breed used in coal mines. The only reference I
know on the textbook subject is Gould's Nat Hist column from @ 1987 which
shows the change going from fox (as in Vulpes) to Fox Terrier (a breed
still very much around today) and continuing as Fox Terrier in generations
of text books. I'm familiar with many rare terriers but have never heard
of one from Welsh coal mines. If you can think of any possible reference
at all, I'd be eager to hear of it. (by the way, there's nothing new about
the Golden Retriever and Poodle. Like the Fox Terrier, these breeds have
been around much longer than the taxon Eohippus or even Hyracotherium).

Thanks,
	-Patricia Princehouse

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:107>From hantuo@utu.fi  Wed Oct 20 15:02:49 1993

To: Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: hantuo@utu.fi (Hanna Tuomisto)
Subject: water babies
Date: 	Wed, 20 Oct 1993 22:05:55 +0200

>Why are the alternatives much less plausible? Are you familiar with them?

Yes, I'm familiar with them, I've traced back quite a few of the original
publications. Elaine Morgan has given an excellent answer to why they are
less plausible in her book "The Scars of Evolution. What our bodies tell us
about human origins". But I have not kept an eye on what has been published
during the last two years, so if you (or anyone else) know of any new
papers that are relevant to the topic, I'd be grateful to hear about them.

>> All the traits that are discussed by Morgan are apomorphies of Homo
>> sapiens. At least they are not shared with any other known primate species,
..(stuff deleted)

>I would argue that this is not true. Some of the traits she cites,
>particularly aspects of reproduction which was a major thrust of her first
>book, are not apomorphies. More recent primatology has found that pair
>bonding, estrous/menstrual patterns, extended sexual receptivity (tolerance?),
>etc., do not distinguish humans from other animals.

Sorry for my sloppy usage of terminology here. I was thinking of those
traits Morgan discusses in The Aquatic Ape and in The Scars of Evolution.
Her first book, The Descent of Woman, was not written to advocate the
aquatic theory. It was written to draw attention to the fact that at that
time (sixties-seventies) human evolution was written about as if it were
just male evolution, with females passively following along. It's in the
two last books were she elaborated the aquatic ape theory, and that's where
the sharpest arguments are found. I would like it to be otherwise, but hers
are the only texts I've seen so far that really weight the different
theories on the basis of their scientific merits.

>Many of the list of apomorphies belong to single adaptive complexes that
>require only a single explanation. Rather than considering them independently
>as evidence, they should be lumped.

You said it! This precisely is a very strong argument in favor of the
aquatic hypothesis. Put all the characteristics together that are
apomorphies in humans, and what do you get? The aquatic syndrome, many
traits of which are known from both birds and mammals.

>Evolutionary convergence does not necessarily imply adaptation to the same
>environmental conditions. Convergence with other species, especially distantly
>related ones should be examined carefully and in phylogenetic as well as
>functional context.

Sure, but if phylogeny does not give the answers, you're left with the
environmental explanation.

>For example, reduction of hair, increase in fat, increase in sweating, changes
>in  cutaneous innervation and circulation all relate to a thermoregulation
>strategy. While some of these are paralleled in aquatic animals, others
>(sweating, circulation) do not make sense as aquatic adaptations and are not
>paralleled in aquatic animals.

Humans are not aquatic now, and no one has suggested that they have ever
been fully aquatic. Obviously sweating makes no sense for a fully aquatic
mammal, because there's no evaporation when you're submerged. On the
contrary, there are lots of land mammals that cool themselves by sweating
(e.g. horses), but the difference between them and ourselves is that they
don't waste salts and water. When humans sweat, most of the water does not
even evaporate, it drips off. Someone living close to a permanent source of
salt and water, like a seashore, could afford that kind of a system, but
both substances are difficult to find in the savanna. The only savanna
mammals to my knowledge that sweat as copiously as humans are the hippos,
and they leave the water only at night.

>Replacement of hair with fat was a convergence
>for humans, pigs, and whales as a more efficient solution to heat loss. Whales
>are aquatic. Should we assume that pigs are too?

No.

>Humans and pigs are terrestrial
>and show it by their concern with heat dissipation as well-- pigs wallow and
>humans flush and sweat. Why are whales a better model for humans than pigs?

Whales are NOT a better model. Both animals show equally well the
thermoregulation point: when a mammal lives in an environment that keeps it
wet, it gets rid of its hair and develops subcutaneous fat instead. Whales
are fully aquatic, humans are not. Pigs are mud-dwellers, humans are not.

>Bipedalism is not much of an adaptation for aquatic life. Seals and otters are
>not bipedal.

They did not evolve from primates either, so their bodies did not have the
flexibility that enabled our ancestors to stand up.

>Standing in the water allows you to exploit water up to five feet
>or so in height. (For Lucy, maybe up to four feet.) If you really wanted to
>collect shell fish from water this shallow, wait until the tide goes out like
>clam rakers do.

You may want to go into the water to avoid terrestrial predators, or to
cross a river. You need much less energy for wading if you have most of
your body out of the water. There are two other primates who habitually
wade in a bipedal position: the Japanese macaque and the proboscis monkey.

>If you are going to swim in deeper water, why be bipedal.

In deep water the important thing is not that you're bipedal, but that
you're streamlined. The most streamlined position for a primate is to
stretch the legs backwards parallelly to the spine. Retain that posture
when you go to land, and you become bipedal.

>On the other hand, if you are going to become bipedal, then you may be
>secondarily adapted for swimming (as we are), because both utilize powerful
>lower limbs.

I'd say it went the other way round. Bipedalism is a very difficult way of
walking and has necessitated impressive changes in our anatomy and
physiology. With the support of water, that change could take place
relatively painlessly.

>Are we really well adapted to the water? What other aquatic species looses as
>many of its members in drowning accidents?

What other PRIMATE loses so many in drowning accidents? None, since they
would not play in water like humans do. Except perhaps the Japanese
macaques and the proboscis monkeys.

>Evolutionary mechanisms, not chronology, make the
>aquatic diversion unlikely.

Why?

>If this critique of the aquatic hypothesis is spotty, it is because there are
>so many angles to attack that I hardly know where to begin-- evolutionary
>improbability, the plausibility of conventional models, the lack of parsimony
>of Morgan's model, errors in it (some only apparent in light of more recent
>knowledge).

If you know a more parsimonious theory than Morgan's, please tell me. All
I've seen is a bunch of statements about single characteristics, most of
them contradicting each other. I've never seen a coherent terrestrial
theory. I am very interested in that recent knowledge that shows errors in
the aquatic one.

>Cannot the same criticism be leveled at the aquatic hypothesis? Why are there
>no other bipedal aquatic tetrapods (aside from birds, which don't count).

Why don't they count? The penguins walk on land in a remarkably similar
position than humans do, in spite of the fact that non-aquatic birds have
their spines horizontally when they walk. (I know that geese have their
spines horizontally. But they don't dive, they float.)

>Good monkey-like quadrupedalism is one possibility, but given the tendency for
>upright posture and substantial hindlimb weight-bearing, bipedalism was an
>equally viable strategy.

Except that lifting the spine into a vertical position is a totally new
construction for the entire mammalian lineage. Quadrupedalism could have
been attained by a simple reversal to the original way of locomotion.

>I find the aquatic hypothesis as guilty of this teological thinking as Darwin.
>It focuses entirely on modern anatomy, asking how we got here and ignores the
>really essential consideration of any evolutionary explanation: What did we
>start with and how did that influence our pathway? Nor does she really make
>any use of what we know of the fossil record. The fossils give no hint of any
>such aquatic diversion in the transition from semi-arboreal apes to
>terrestrial humans.

Dear John Langdon:
You cannot have read Morgan's books. She devotes entire chapters to the
fossil record. We seem to be talking about entirely different theories.

Let's make a deal: send out the references to the papers/books that
describe The orthodox Terrestrial Theory, so I can learn what exactly you
are defending. Then you read Morgan's books so you know what I'm defending.
Otherwise we just keep arguing without getting anywhere.

Hanna Tuomisto
hantuo@utu.fi

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:108>From CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU  Wed Oct 20 15:39:19 1993

Resent-Date: Wed, 20 Oct 93 18:36:37 BS3
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 13:41:10 BS3
Resent-From: Charbel Nino El-Hani <CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: a reference in altruism
Resent-To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Here is the reference i forgot in my first e-mail to darwin-l and one
more article related to the debate on altruism:
   Nowak, M. A. & May, R. M. 1992. NATUre, vol. 359:826-829 (see also
the news and views, by karl sigmund, *on prisoners and cells*, on page
774.
   nowak, m. a. & May, r. m. 1993. the spatial dilemmas of evolution.
international journal of bifurcation and chaos, vol. 3, no. 1:35-78.

      Charbel nino el-hani
   msc in education/institute of biology
  federal university of bahia, salvador, bahia, brazil
   research area: historical epistemology
      address: charbel@brufba

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:109>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Wed Oct 20 23:29:54 1993

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1993 00:35:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: New book on statistics in archeology and history
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

This new book notice just appeared on ARCH-L, the archeology
discussion group.  I thought it might be of interest to some
Darwin-L members also.

Bob O'Hara
darwin@iris.uncg.edu

------- Begin forwarded message -------

Version 2 (History and Archaeology) of
Essentials of Statistical Methods
by Dr. T. P. Hutchinson.

There are many excellent introductory textbooks of
statistics available.  But so many of them are 500,
700, even 1000 pages long.  This has real disadvantages.
They are heavy.  They are expensive.  And they are wordy.
But here is a volume light enough to be carried around,
and cheap enough for every student to afford.

A typical introductory statistics course gets as far
as some techniques of inference -- the testing
of hypotheses and the construction of confidence intervals.
That is the subject of Part III of this book.  In
preparation for this, the student needs to know
about data description and about probability.
These are covered in Parts I and II.

In this Version, many of the examples are taken
from history and archaeology.  For instance:
in Part I, the percentages of lead in Bronze Age
sickles, and the price of rice in 18th-century
China; in Part II, the probability of throwing "Venus"
with four astragali, and the occurrence
of wars viewed as a Poisson process; in Part III,
the sizes of shells in a possible Aboriginal
midden, and drought causing the fall of Tiwanaku.

Published September 1993.  A5 format.  Paperback.
xii + 152  pages.  Index of 800 entries.
Price: $17 (Australian currency), $12 (U.S. currency),
7 pounds sterling, $15 (Canadian currency), or Y1300
(Yen).  A price reduction of 35% is offered on orders
for 8 or more copies.

Available from Rumsby Scientific Publishing, P O Box Q355,
Q.V.B., Sydney, N.S.W. 2000, Australia.

------- End of forwarded message -------

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:110>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Wed Oct 20 23:42:54 1993

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1993 00:49:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: Software for comparative linguistics (fwd from LINGUIST)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

New software for comparative linguistics available, forwarded
from LINGUIST.  Perhaps of interest to some members of Darwin-L.

Bob O'Hara
darwin@iris.uncg.edu

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

LINGUIST List:  Vol-4-863. Tue 19 Oct 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 13:04:59 +1000 (EST)
From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Software for PCs

I have uploaded today 19 October at garbo.uwasa.fi into their
directory pc/incoming a software package for classifying and
reconstructing language families from lexicostatistical data
and for simulating lexical evolution and borrowing.
(It will be moved to their linguistics subdirectory in time).

For those of you who have tried lexicostatistics before and
found it wanting, I must emphasize now that the tree reconstruction
method implemented in this package has nothing in common with
glottochronology or lexicostatistics as you remember it. On
the very contrary, it expects vocabulary retention to vary
wildly from language to language and from time to time.

It consists of 5 program files, 3 sample data files, and a documentation
file, zipped into GLOTTO01.ZIP (76780 bytes), being:

 Name    Size     Contents
GLOTMRG.EXE 11088  Program. Merges separate sample wordlists
         into one, in a format that makes cognate
         identification easier.
GLOTPC.EXE   9392  Program. Input is a file containing identified
         cognate groups; output is a file containing
         a table of percentages of shared cognates.
GLOTTREE.EXE  23200  Program. Input is a file containing a table
         of percentages of shared cognates; output is
         files containing reconstructed tree and table
         of theoretical cognate percentages. The proportion
         of vocabulary retained since the preious split
         is shown on every branch of the reconstructed
         tree. The table of theoretical percentages
         gives a means of estimating the reliability
         of the reconstruction.
GLOTED.EXE  24976  An editor for browsing, modifying, and formatting
         tables of percentages of shared cognates for
         printing.
GLOTSIM.EXE 29904  Program. Input is a file containing the
         description of the evolution and diversification
         of a language family or families; output is files
         containing the log of splits, innovations,
         borrowings, and percentages of shared cognates.
GLOTTO.DOC  51800  Instructions for use.
VANUATU.PC  239  Percentages of cognates shared by eight languages
         of Vanuatu, formerly New Hebrides.
VANUATU.SIM   425  Description of the evolution and diversification
         of a language family. Running GLOTSIM with
         VANUATU.SIM as input generates a language family
         with lexicostatistical properties mimicking
         those of the real languages in VANUATU.PC.
UTOAZTEC.PC  2487  Percentages of cognates shared by 32 Uto-Aztecan
         languages (from W.R. Miller 1984)

This package is freeware.

There are three main uses to which you can put it.

1. Classifying languages from sample wordlists.

2. Classifying languages from existing tables of cognate percentages.

3. Testing the validity and accuracy of any classification method
 relying on proportions of shared cognates, including the method
 implemented in program GLOTTREE.

Jacques Guy, Telecom Research Laboratories, 770 Blackburn Road,
     Clayton 3168, Australia
e-mail: j.guy@trl.oz.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:111>From @gps1.leeds.ac.uk:phl6sf@leeds.ac.uk  Thu Oct 21 02:37:45 1993

From: S French <phl6sf@leeds.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: mss polymorphism/dog breeds
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu (Patricia Princehouse)
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 93 8:38:36 BST

Are the textbooks in fact referring to collies, (which are still
very much around of course)?

Steven French
phl6sf@Leeds.ac.uk

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:112>From princeh@husc.harvard.edu  Thu Oct 21 17:42:13 1993

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1993 18:21:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Patricia Princehouse <princeh@husc.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: mss polymorphism/dog breeds
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

On Thu, 21 Oct 1993, S French wrote:

> Are the textbooks in fact referring to collies, (which are still
> very much around of course)?
>
> Steven French
> phl6sf@Leeds.ac.uk

You are undoubtedly right. In my eagerness to find out about an unknown
(to me) rare British coal mining terrier (not an unthinkable item as
surely there were rats in the mines, weren't there?), I overlooked the
obvious possibility that collier was simply a typo for collies (I'm
accustomed to seeing the name as a proper noun, Collie or Colley). I now
remember that Gould ends the article with a word about a new
reconstruction which puts "Eohippus" at @ 50 lbs (roughly Collie-sized) and
he makes some inane remark like "Lassie come home." I believe the Collie
example is his own, not in any textbook.

I guess I serve as an unwitting cultural analogue of a transcription error
causing a frame shift.
					-Patricia Princehouse

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:113>From KESSEL@ACC.FAU.EDU  Thu Oct 21 20:44:10 1993

Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1993 21:47 EDT
From: Morty Kessel <KESSEL@ACC.FAU.EDU>
Subject: Re: mss polymorphism/dog breeds
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

On Mon, 18 Oct 1993 LARRYS@psc.plymouth.edu wrote:

> that in General Biology textbooks, when the evolution of the horse is
> described, the textbook authors state that Eohippus, one of the ancestral
> forms, was the size of a (an I may have this somewhat wrong) collier/
> terrier, a dog from the coal mines of Wales.  What is interesting, is the
> fact that this dog is no longer a very common breed of dog, yet the
> textbook writers rather than mutating the dog into a modern day form of
> dog, eg, golden retriever, poodle, etc., continue to use the old name
> as referenced in earlier textbooks.

	This may stray a bit too far from the subject, but as a dog
fancier, I would be very interested in any reference you could provide as
to this collier/terrier breed used in coal mines. The only reference I
know on the textbook subject is Gould's Nat Hist column from @ 1987 which
shows the change going from fox (as in Vulpes) to Fox Terrier (a breed
still very much around today) and continuing as Fox Terrier in generations
of text books. I'm familiar with many rare terriers but have never heard
of one from Welsh coal mines. If you can think of any possible reference
at all, I'd be eager to hear of it. (by the way, there's nothing new about
the Golden Retriever and Poodle. Like the Fox Terrier, these breeds have
been around much longer than the taxon Eohippus or even Hyracotherium).

Thanks,
	-Patricia Princehouse

Try this reference:
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1991. Bully For Brontosaurus. Pp155-167.

Morton H. Kessel      InterNet: Kessel@acc.fau.edu
Department of Anthropology  BitNet: Kessel@FAUVAX
Florida Atlantic University SoBell: 407/367-3230
Boca Raton, FL 33431-0991   Fax:  407/367-2744

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:114>From CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU  Fri Oct 22 16:47:12 1993

Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 18:09:31 BS3
From: Charbel Nino El-Hani <CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Kropotkin, Nowak e May
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Tom Waters asked if anyone thinks Nowak and May's work on spatial
prisoner's dilemma has something to do with Kropotkin's book about
mutual aid in biological communities (1902). As I have already written
in Darwin-L, I think their conclusions are, broadly speaking, very similar.
Cooperators survive in the 'struggle for existence' simply because they are
able to form groups and, then, to establish *territories*; a good term for
this behaviour is *population viscosity*, by Hamilton. As soon as I can, I
will try to end an article about the importance of studying the history of
a polemics to differentiate clearly the sides in the discussion. In the
altruism debate, I think the conflict is between the principle of non-
contradiction  and the dialectics  compromise to contradiction. Depending
upon the context in which the selective process takes place, to cooperate and
not to cooperate can both lead to survival. I believe that, if the scientific
method were based upon dialectical logic, we would advance faster in the
production of knowledge. It is only a starting point for a discussion. I
will not go further. I would like, as Tom Waters, also to hear (or, better,
to read in an incredible distance from the hands which wrote it - Have you
thought about the implications of the networks to the scientific enterprise?)
about the possible relations of Kropotkin's book to the work of Nowak and
May.

  Charbel Nino El-Hani, Institute of Biology/MsC in Education, Federal
University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Address: Charbel@BRUFBA.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:115>From CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU  Fri Oct 22 17:34:04 1993

Date: Fri, 22 Oct 93 19:28:00 BS3
From: Charbel Nino El-Hani <CHARBEL%BRUFBA.BITNET@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Generalizations in Biology
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

In September 24, Brook Milligan wrote:
>Over the past year or two I have noticed a series of letters
to the editor in Nature justifying the pursuit of systematics
and taxonomy as being the basis for generalizations about
biological history. It seems that the argument is that by
studying the collections present in museums and herbaria, by
studying new collections, and by organizing the results of these
studies into a historical framework describing which events took
place in the past, that we will be able to make generalizations
about biology.>

 We would like to resume this thread asking, as did Milligan,
what form this generalization would take. We think the problem in
understanding its exact nature is, in part, a problem of defining
precisely both the *historical framework* and the word
*generalization*.
 At first sight, we could think about cladistics as one of the
possible methodologies for the construction of hypothetical
phylogenies, and, historical frameworks for generalizations
about biological history. In our discussion, we will refer mainly
to cladistics, but we expect most of our doubts to apply to other
methods of inferring phylogenies.
 We consider cladograms to be one of our most powerful tools to
understand life's history. It is not so hard to say that they can
be a basis for generalizations about it. New and more difficulty
questions, however, arise from this statement: Is a cladogram always
a hypothesis, or could it originate general conclusions about the
biological history? Or, in other words, is cladistics only a
methodology for the inference of phylogenies, or a commitment to
how things realy occurred in the past? Reification is a common
problem in modern science. The analysis of variance, for instance,
is only a statistical approach to phenomena, a representation of
causes in natural systems as being *primary*, *secondary*, etc.,
what gives rise to interactions of *first order*, *second order*,
etc. Most of the scientists use to reify these numerical components
as real forces acting among real objects. In nature, phenomena arise
from a totality of causes; analysis of variance is only a method
to work with this complexity, and the main causes, the main effects,
etc., exist only in the method, not in the reality, where all causes
act together, influencing one another in such a manner that it is
very difficulty, even impossible, to isolate them. This isolation
can be done in laboratory conditions, but the properties of the
parts in study, when discovered in experimental conditions, are not
the same they have in natural systems, simply because the properties
the parts have are determined also by the whole they are in.
 To answer our question about cladograms, we have to define what is
meant by generalizations. Our question is: Can a cladogram be the basis
for generalizations *about biological history*? We are not discussing,
for instance, the existence of generalizations steps in the construction
of a cladogram. Sure, cladistic analysis involve them. When we propose
that a group is a monophyletic one we have not observed all the specimens
belonging to the group, but only a sample of them; from a particular
context of observation, we deduce a general conclusion. We have to see,
however, that this generalization is based upon a premise, a Principle
of Uniformity. Maybe, this premise can be subject to doubt.
 Now, let's not think, however, about generalizations into the
cladogram, but, on the contrary, about cladograms as generalizations
(or basis for them) about biological history. Eldredge and Cracraft
(1980, *Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process*) wrote:
"the questions arise: to what extent are cladograms to be considered
actual representations of phylogeny? The concept of the cladogram has
been synonymous with 'phylogeny' in some of the prior literature. The
view taken here is that cladograms, in themselves, are not phylogenies,
but rather hypothesis about the pattern of nested evolutionary novelties.*
They differentiate clearly the *representation* from the *reality*. They
do not reify cladograms as being actual phylogenies. In this discussion,
we have to refer to the epistemological problem of the cognitive relation.
Knowledge is produced in a relation where both the subject and the object
interferes. The subject, as an active element in cognitive process,
produces a knowledge about the object which is an image, a representation
of the object as a material entity, but not a copy of it. The scientist
is a real existing man; they have political, ideological positions, they
have economical interests, they have, sometimes, a creed, or, who knows,
some form of metaphysical conjectures, and all of these properties,
qualities of a real man, will influence the scientific knowledge which
is produced. So, it seems, by the very properties of cognitive relation,
by the constraints of knowing the objects by being *in relation* to them,
that we cannot know the world how it really is. We have only images of the
world, which are true because they reflect the material existence of the
objects in the world, but which are, at the same time, not true, because
an image can be a deception, we cannot be sure that the real object is
like the image. Mirrors - says Borges - are like labyrinths; they deceive.
 We cannot reify our images of te world. A cladogram is always a
hypothesis about patterns in the evolutionary history, and never a way
of constructing generalizations, reifications, about this history.
But this is not really a problem, because cladograms, *as hypothesis*,
are very useful for the understanding of patterns and processes in
phylogenetical history. What do you think?
 I would like to discuss these themes. Gerson wrote, in September 27,
*the historical sciences (and the branches of natural history) don't
generalize the same way that the physical sciences do*. We know that
the methods of physical sciences were of great influence in the history
of the methods in all fields of knowledge. But we also know about
the methodological crisis in social and historical sciences. We have,
in Darwin-L, to discuss this. To what extent the Cartesian scientific
method is valid in the historical sciences? What are the possibilities
and limitations of Cartesian method?

     Charbel Nino El-Hani
  Institute of Biology/MsC in Education
 Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
     Charbel@BRUFBA

     Diogo Meyer
  Institute of Biosciences, University of Sao Paulo,
 Sao Paulo, Brazil (today in Stanford University)
     Diogo@lotka.stanford.edu

P.S.: this is an old discussion between Diogo and me. Maybe he disagrees
of some the views expressed here. He haven't read this modification of
a criticism of him about what I have written. Charbel.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:116>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Sun Oct 24 00:22:23 1993

Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1993 01:28:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: A direct application of systematic methods to stemmatics
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

In response to the question "What's the point of comparing systematics and
stemmatics?" Jeff Wills mentioned a project I have been working on with Peter
Robinson, and I thought it might be helpful to give a short description of
that here, since many people will not be familiar with it.

Peter is a manuscript specialist at Oxford who has been working on the history
of Old Norse texts for some time.  He did his doctoral research on a narrative
poem called Svipdagsmal which is known from about 45 manuscript copies written
from the late Middle Ages to the early 1800s.  For his doctoral work Peter
examined all or most of the Svipdagsmal manuscripts, and since he is also
interested in computing he created electronic versions of these manuscripts
and developed a program called _Collate_ to compare them.  From his study of
the many copies of this text Peter reconstructed a stemma (a genealogical
tree) for Svipdagsmal, showing how all of the known copies are related to one
another.  Once all the data were in hand the actual process of reconstrucing
the stemma took Peter about six months.

Although _Collate_ had made direct comparison of the texts fairly efficient,
reconstructing the stemma was clearly still a very difficult task.  Peter
decided to post a challenge on the HUMANIST list (this was about two years
ago) to see whether anyone else could take his raw data -- a large table of
agreements and disagreements among the Svipdagsmal manuscripts -- and
reproduce his stemma by some other means.  I saw his challenge and recognized
the problem as one very much like phylogeny reconstruction, my own specialty,
so I requested a copy of his data.  Systematists have developed a number of
software packages for cladistic analysis in the last ten years that take
tables of data and estimate evolutionary trees from them, and I ran Peter's
data through one such program -- PAUP, "Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony"
by David Swofford.  In about five minutes I produced a tree that was a
reasonable approximation of the stemma it had taken Peter six months to
reconstruct.  PAUP had been developed specifically for the reconstruction of
evolutionary trees; no thought whatever had been given to manuscript data or
the problems of stemmatics when it was written, and Dave Swofford may not have
even known about them at the time.  Nevertheless, this program was able to
take manuscript data and very quickly approximate the result that Peter had
obtained with considerably more effort.  The use of this software, developed
for research in systematics, now holds considerable promise for stemmatic
research, in particular for the reconstruction of large and complex manuscript
traditions, such as the Canterbury Tales, where the volume of data makes
analysis by inspection very difficult.  I also think it holds promise for the
reconstruction of language phylogeny, though this is yet to be explored in
detail.  Here, then, is once concrete example of the value of interdiciplinary
interaction among the historical sciences.

Peter and I published a preliminary report on our collaboration in the Bryn
Mawr Classical Review, and a fuller treatment is in press in the Oxford series
Research in Humanities Computing.  Full citations are:

Robinson, P. M. W., & R. J. O'Hara.  1992.  Report on the Textual Criticism
Challenge 1992.  _Bryn Mawr Classical Review_, 3:331-337.

Robinson, P. M. W., & R. J. O'Hara.  In press.  Cladistic analysis of an Old
Norse narrative tradition.  _Research in Humanities Computing_, 4.  Oxford:
Clarendon Press.

I have an e-version of the BMCR report, and will try to have it put up in the
Darwin-L archives shortly for people to retrieve if they like.  If anyone is
interested in experimenting with the available systematics software I would
recommend getting a copy of _MacClade_, another such program that permits
interactive analysis of trees and comes with an excellent introductory manual
on cladistic analysis.  (PAUP itself is probably a bit stiff for beginners.)
The citation for MacClade is:

Maddison, Wayne P., & David R. Maddison.  1992.  _MacClade: Analysis of
Phylogeny and Character Evolution_, Version 3.  Sunderland, Massachusetts:
Sinauer Associates.  (ISBN 0-87893-490-1)

For people who haven't worked with programs like PAUP before, I append here a
sample of the output from Peter's data, just to show what it looks like. The
root of the tree (the ancestor) is to the left, and each endpoint (St, J, 11,
Gu, etc.) represents an individual Svipdagsmal manuscript.  The horizontal
length of each branch is proportional to the number of changes taking place
along it; the lengths of the vertical lines are arbitrary, and branches may be
rotated about nodes arbitrarily as well.  This tree is by no means correct in
all details; it is an estimate, and it could have been made more precise with
additional effort on our part.  Our interest in presenting it has just been to
show that even with no special attention to the coding of the data it was
possible very quickly to come close to the result Peter had obtained earlier.

      /---- St
      |         /--------- J
      |        /---70   /----- 11
      |        |  \----69 /--- Gu
      |      /----73    \68---- 682
      |      |   | /- 289
      |      |   \--72------- 4877
    /--84      |    71---- E
    | |   /---77   /------- L
    | |   |  |  74----- 47
    | |   |  |  75 S
    | |  /-----81  \---76 223
    | |  |  | /-------- He
    | |  |  \80      /-- 3633
    | \-83    \-------------79/--- 6
    |  |         78---- 818b
    |  |  /------- 1870
    |  \-82------ 34
    |               /--- Ha
    |              49---- 215
    |             /-51 /--------------- 818
   /-67             |  \50------ 934
   |  |            /-54  /----- 1689
   |  |            |  \---53  /- 5
   |  |         /---------55   \---52- 329
   |  |        /---56    \------- 636
   |  |    /--------57  \------ O
   |  |   /-58   \------- 1872
   |  |   |  \-------------- 2797
 /--48  |   |       /------ 1108
 | |  |   |      /-60 /---- 1111
 | |  |  /---65    /----61  \--59-- 165
 | |  |  |  | /---62   \------ 1869
 | |  |  |  | |  \---- 4
 | |  \-66  \--64   /----- 1609
 /47 |   |    \------63-- 1867
 | | |   \--------- 1491
 | | \------ P
44 |   /--------- 1109
|| | /45-- 773
|| \--46- 1492
|\------- 1868
\---- Ra

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.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:117>From DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu  Sun Oct 24 14:20:17 1993

Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1993 15:26:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: DARWIN@iris.uncg.edu
Subject: October 24 -- Today in the Historical Sciences
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Organization: University of NC at Greensboro

OCTOBER 24 -- TODAY IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

1808: CARL BERNHARD VON COTTA is born at Zillbach, Saxe-Weimar-Eisnach (now
Germany).  Following study at his father's forestry academy and at the
Freiberg Bergakademie, the mining school made famous by Werner, Cotta will
become professor of geognosy and paleontology at the Bergakademie in 1842.
He will travel extensively throughout Europe on geological expeditions, and
will publish a genetic system of petrography in 1866, some elements of which
remain in use today.

Today in the Historical Sciences is a feature of Darwin-L@ukanaix.cc.
ukans.edu, a network discussion group on the history and theory of the
historical sciences.  E-mail darwin@iris.uncg.edu for more information.

_______________________________________________________________________________

<2:118>From wis@liverpool.ac.uk  Mon Oct 25 08:50:18 1993

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 93 13:47:59 GMT
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
From: wis@liverpool.ac.uk (Bill Sellers)
Subject: A quick question...

Here's a quick question: who first used the phrase 'caveman' for describing
ancestral human forms? I've always thought that it was probably some 19th
century palaeontologist, but I'd be really interested in any references
anyone can come up with.

Thanks

Bill Sellers

Dept. Human Anatomy, University of Liverpool

Remember, it's never too late to have a happy childhood!

__________wis@liverpool.ac.uk______________ ( )_( )
               / \. ./
        __________________/ __=.=__
              \  m " m

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<2:119>From rgmc@henson.cc.wwu.edu  Mon Oct 25 10:29:44 1993

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1993 08:32:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: Raymond McInnis <rgmc@henson.cc.wwu.edu>
Subject: Re: A quick question...
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Bill, I trust that you have checked the Oxford English Dictionary. It will
give the earliest recorded use of the term.
Ray McInnis
Western Washington U

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<2:120>From buchignani@hg.uleth.ca  Mon Oct 25 11:28:48 1993

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1993 10:14:36 MDT
From: Norman Buchignani <buchignani@hg.uleth.ca>
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: A quick question...

I'll check my paleo/phys. anth notes for this period and reply later
today; as these notes are in a free form database, it'll be straightforward
to search them for this particular word.

re: the suggestion to check the OED, this can give examples of
early use, but should never be relied upon to be definitive. I can
give a number of examples I know of where it falls far short here.

Norman Buchignani
University of Lethbridge

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<2:121>From peter@usenix.org  Mon Oct 25 12:15:19 1993

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 93 10:18:51 PDT
From: peter@usenix.org (Peter H. Salus)
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re:  A quick question...

Lubbock, Prehist. Times (1865).

for caveman...

Peter H. Salus

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<2:122>From csmem1@abello.seci.uchile.cl  Wed Oct 27 00:27:55 1993

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1993 02:31:15 -0400
From: csmem1@abello.seci.uchile.cl
To: darwin-l@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: DARWIN CHILE

 Hello there

 Recently a big international event took place at the University
 of Chile in Santiago (CHILE). Eminents scientists met to discuss
 the stay of Darwin in Chile, between 1833-1835. A wide range of
 subjects were disscused with emphasis on evolution. The importance
 of Darwin's observations in Chile was analyzed.
 An exhibition is being held with importants materials provided by
 many museums in Chile, Argentina and Great Britain.
 The organizers of the event had the colaboration of professor
 Richard Darwin Keynes of the University of Cambridge.

 For further information please contact Dr. David Yudilevish

Dr. David Yudilevish
Facultad de Medicina
University of Chile

fax: (56) 2-7774890
e-mail: dyudilev@abello.cesi.uchile.cl
    csmem1@abello.cesi.uchile.cl

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Darwin-L Message Log 2: 90-122 -- October 1993          End