The phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales

Barbrook, Adrian C.; Howe, Christopher J.; Blake, N. F.; Robinson, Peter

doi:10.1038/29667

Cited by 128 publications

(55 citation statements)

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“…The standard process in most cases incorporates a reliable dating of artefacts along with a decision process based on similarities (as perceived by an observer) and sometimes available written information that 'connects' two given objects or inventions. The best case scenario is provided by the phylogenetic analysis of written texts [21,22].…”

Section: Technological Evolutionary Treesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Otherwise, the impact combines the structural similarities in (2.1) by taking a weighted sum with l [ f0,1g (figure 2d). Hereafter, we set e ¼ 10 29 and l ¼ 1/2 [21]. This measure of (directed) link strength not only takes into account asymmetric random walk transitions but also represents a good trade-off between accuracy and complexity for smallworld networks [30] having short (average) path lengths (like the PL network, see the electronic supplementary material, S1).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages

Valverde

Solé

2015

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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The analogies and differences between biological and cultural evolution have been explored by evolutionary biologists, historians, engineers and linguists alike. Two well-known domains of cultural change are language and technology. Both share some traits relating the evolution of species, but technological change is very difficult to study. A major challenge in our way towards a scientific theory of technological evolution is how to properly define evolutionary trees or clades and how to weight the role played by horizontal transfer of information. Here, we study the large-scale historical development of programming languages, which have deeply marked social and technological advances in the last half century. We analyse their historical connections using network theory and reconstructed phylogenetic networks. Using both data analysis and network modelling, it is shown that their evolution is highly uneven, marked by innovation events where new languages are created out of improved combinations of different structural components belonging to previous languages. These radiation events occur in a bursty pattern and are tied to novel technological and social niches. The method can be extrapolated to other systems and consistently captures the major classes of languages and the widespread horizontal design exchanges, revealing a punctuated evolutionary path.

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Section: Technological Evolutionary Treesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages

Valverde

Solé

2015

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…Howe et al (2001) describe how different manuscript versions of the same text can be used to reconstruct the evolution of that text. This was demonstrated by Barbrook et al (1998), who used cladistic methods to reconstruct the historical relationships between 58 different manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, improving on previous nonphylogenetic reconstructions. Bentley et al (2004), meanwhile, found that the frequencies of first names and patent applications in twentieth-century United States both conform to a simple model of random copying originally developed in evolutionary biology (Crow & Kimura 1970).…”

Section: Paleobiologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

2006

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We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in "social cognitive neuroscience," although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences.

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“…Descent-withmodification has also been a precept informing studies of manuscript traditions in the genealogical or stemmatological approach since the nineteenth century (Robins 2007), with recent studies applying formal phylogenetic methods (e.g. Barbrook et al 1998) and modelling the survivorship of variants in terms of an underlying birth-death process (Weitzman 1987;Cisne 2005).…”

Section: Introduction: Cultural Transmission and Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary approaches to cultural and linguistic diversity

Steele

Jordan

Cochrane

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Evolutionary approaches to cultural change are increasingly influential, and many scientists believe that a 'grand synthesis' is now in sight. The papers in this Theme Issue, which derives from a symposium held by the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (University College London) in December 2008, focus on how the phylogenetic tree-building and network-based techniques used to estimate descent relationships in biology can be adapted to reconstruct cultural histories, where some degree of inter-societal diffusion will almost inevitably be superimposed on any deeper signal of a historical branching process. The disciplines represented include the three most purely 'cultural' fields from the four-field model of anthropology (cultural anthropology, archaeology and linguistic anthropology). In this short introduction, some context is provided from the history of anthropology, and key issues raised by the papers are highlighted.

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The phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales

Cited by 128 publications

References 1 publication

Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages

Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

Evolutionary approaches to cultural and linguistic diversity

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