The evolution of languages
Map of language families of the world todayThe story in the Bible about the “Tower of Babel” was the explanation that the ancient Hebrews gave for why there was so much linguistic diversity in the world around them. Ancient people were curious and obse…
The dearth of diversity in genomics
Citation: Martin, Alicia R., et al. bioRxiv(2019): 441261.One of the curious things about genomics is the field has exploded in the 21st century so fast, with such explosive growth and increase in power, that it is hard to keep up if you blink. The fir…
Why the Amazon Rainforest is species rich
A monkey frog
The Pith: The Amazon Rainforest has a lot of species because it’s been around for a very long time.
I really don’t know much about ecology, alas. So my understanding of evolution framed in its proper ecological context is a t…
The Court Jester and the averaging fallacy
The Pith:Climatic and biological evolutionary pressures on an ecosystem complement at different scales. Neither is “dominant,” as that framing is not even wrong.
Yesterday I alluded to the Court Jester hypothesis of evolutionary change, whi…
Linguistic diversity = poverty
In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a […]