{"id":34131,"date":"2011-04-16T22:22:27","date_gmt":"2011-04-16T22:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/african-ur-language-reconsidered-gene-expression\/"},"modified":"2011-04-16T22:22:27","modified_gmt":"2011-04-16T22:22:27","slug":"african-ur-language-reconsidered-gene-expression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/african-ur-language-reconsidered-gene-expression.php","title":{"rendered":"African ur-language reconsidered | Gene Expression"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3090\">Mark Liberman<\/a> at <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3090\">Language Log<\/a> has looked through the <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/332\/6027\/346.abstract\">Science<\/a> paper <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/332\/6027\/346.abstract\">Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa<\/a>. Overall he seems to think it is an interesting paper, but he has some pointed criticisms. Here&rsquo;s the utility of the post: <b>Liberman uses analogies to domains (e.g., genomics) which are comprehensible to me.<\/b> My main issue with linguistic evolution is that I&rsquo;m so ignorant that I barely understand the features being discussed. I may know their dictionary.com definition, but I have pretty much no deep comprehension with which to test the inferences against. By analogy, imagine trying to evaluate a morphological <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cladistics\">cladistic model<\/a> with no understanding of anatomy. Here&rsquo;s the part which may be of particular interest to readers of this weblog:<\/p><blockquote><p>However, <b>this combination of <i>coarse binning<\/i> into ranges<\/b>, for functionally-defined subsets of elements with radically different numbers of members, seems to me to be much more problematic for Atkinson&rsquo;s purposes. It&rsquo;s as if a human genomic survey made geographically localized counts of the number of alleles involved in color vision and in blood physiology, divided each set of counts into a few bins (&ldquo;a little variation&rdquo;, &ldquo;a ...<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/6383e_yVS67URI5HY\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/p><\/blockquote><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/6383e__yrdbXvHquA\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Liberman at Language Log has looked through the Science paper Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Overall he seems to think it is an interesting paper, but he has some pointed criticisms. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/african-ur-language-reconsidered-gene-expression.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}