The trap we tend to fall in is assuming that our units of classification (useful and necessary as they are) exactly reflect an intrinsic underlying reality.

The way bacteria are able to exchange genetic material either vertically or horizontally are an excellent analogue for cultural evolution.

I always watch these sorts of videos and come away wishing they were three times as long. I still feel like you should do a podcast. You already have a rotation of regulars on the channel.

@gavinrogers5246

Ай бұрын

Look in the info under the video. There are 13 podcasts right there to listen to ...

I really like the distinction that Spanish and Italian might be viewed as dialects of Latin. At one point in time, there were child speakers of a parent language that moved miles away from each other and began the linguistic split into separate languages. But the parent language would have seen these splits as dialects of their own language. In the reverse sense, two languages coming into close contact and evolving together are becoming the same new language.

@joshuaworth9876

Ай бұрын

The French spoken in Canada is now VERY distinct from the French spoken in Europe. Adding to that the "Frenglish" spoken in some parts of Quebec and the East Coast.

@faithlesshound5621

Ай бұрын

We see both processes in the history of English. The Germanic-speaking tribes separated out into the West Germanic speakers including Saxons and Angles and the North Germanic tribes including Danes and Norwegians. The Angles and Saxons got to England first, followed centuries later by the Norsemen and later the Normans. Anglo-Saxon, or at least Anglian, merged with Old Norse and Norman French to form Middle English, in the process abandoning most of the case-endings that differentiated the North and West Germanic components of the triad.

@AtomikNY

Ай бұрын

@@joshuaworth9876 It's not really that distinct. French speakers from both sides of the Atlantic can communicate just as easily as Americans and English people can. If anything, they're becoming more similar, as there is much more cross-Atlantic communication happening than there ever has been. For example, the European uvular pronunciation of the "r" sound has rapidly become dominant in Québec, especially among young people. Using the original alveolar tap sound now makes you sound old and/or rustic.

Recent paleontology/evolution doctorate here. The primary focus on evolution and differentiation from a common ancestor likely follows divergent evolution (in allopatric = same space speciation). The best way to conceptualize this is as a normal (gaussian) distribution slowly becoming a binomial distribution. As a population, trait favoritism towards extremes will slowly divide the population into two smaller populations that either don't interact (=breeding), or that their interaction produces offspring that is not well-adapted to either extreme, and so they are very unlikely to successfully reproduce. I would also say that genus is more of a fake concept than species. We can identify an animal/breeding population and identify them as distinct, but where do we draw the line between a clearly unique population, and other closely related species? Why do some genera have 2 species and others have 80? Because any taxonomic rank (besides species), is purely a form organization that we shoehorn animals into. Same thing would go for a language (I presume), it's favoritism toward extreme/local dialects/vocabulary and as time goes on, they eventually become so different from one another that they are unable to adequately interact with one another.

@brenenwynd2041

Ай бұрын

On the notion of convergent evolution, kangaroos and deer are convergent. They may not be morphologically convergent, but they do the exact same thing ecologically and fill the same niche on separate continents!

@gardenhead92

Ай бұрын

Did you mean “bimodal” instead of “binomial”?

@brenenwynd2041

Ай бұрын

​@@gardenhead92 yes, I did. My mistake. Thanks for catching that.

@dcdcdc556

Ай бұрын

I dunno, I've yet to see a deer in a boxing ring.

@rogersittnikow

Ай бұрын

Thanks for sharing your knowledge. The bimodal thing makes perfect sense!

Would love to see more roundtable discussions in the future, really enjoyed this

13:30 that's a very interesting issue, that happens in all the portuguese variants across the world.

I'm so happy to see this! I'm an evolutionary biologist myself and always overlap both fields in my thought system

I feel like species and genus are much weaker taxa than others. In the one hand, we're very certain which family something belongs to, on the other hand, we're pretty certain which population we're dealing with. But everything in between is kinda hazy and a matter of perspective a lot of the time. When talking about closely related species and how they interact, going down to the population level often simplifies things a lot. It's much easier to say if this group mates with that group than if one species mates with another.

*standard "the volume is too low" comment with the standard "you must be new here" response

@HangrySaturn

Ай бұрын

True 😂

The linguistic center of gravity principle for locating where a language family originated also works for biology

These guests rock!! Thanks for sharing great information guys :)

I definitely want to hear about mammals vs dinosaurs!

After listening to this entire interesting discussion about a comparison I've thought about before myself, this has further increased my desire to see a collaboration between @PolyMathy and @ClintsReptiles about biology, taconomy, and of course Luke and Clint talking about the nomenclature of species and other taxonomical ranks, and how much/little sense their Latin names have.

This was the crossover between studies that I didn't know we needed. Now I want more.

get some sleep Jackson! The way yer carelessly flippin' that blade around is unsettling your guests

This is quite educative. Very academic, scientific, sociological and philosophical. Dear Jackson, why are you always waving your knife there? Greetings from Iceland. Einar K.

was that reference aimed toward the over_look_ hotel? overlook hotel, anyone?

Jackson would win knifey-spooney.

When thinking of linguistic parallels to the development of mitochondria or chlorophyll by consumption and subsequent symbiosis, the first thing that comes to my mind is loanwords and calques. Or if we want to extend it to languages as a whole, something like substrata/superstrata. Dunno how valid that would be, but just a thought.

It's actually "I ain't come from no monkey" 😂

@usergiodmsilva1983PT

Ай бұрын

Trukk not munky!

Pretty cool. Are you going to start debunking Creationist strawmen arguments against evolution as well? Clint from Clint's reptiles did it a bit,the more people fighting against b.s.,the merrier!

I've wondered before if there are niches in linguistic evolution. Could features like tonality or agglutination be explained by languages with those features belonging to similar niches in some sense?

Excellent stuff. A nice break from the usual.

Thank you, Gents 😊

This was quite a bit of fun gents, now get some rest! 😂

I'd listen to an hour long rant about why mammals are more interesting than dinosaurs.

11:30 It's called Datsun, but they now go by Nissan. XP

@WGGplant

Ай бұрын

I know this is for a joke, but it actually a great example of how loans can end up very different to the language it was borrowed from. (now in German, theyre called Dackel) In English theyre still widely called dachshund. It's a modern example of many of the Old French words borrowed into English, then changing more drastically in modern French, so they're much more different.

Like Matt, I tend to think species-level classifications are arbitrary. But I can name at least one very distinguished scientist who does not. When I briefly studied under Michael Turelli at UC Davis he was keen to press upon us the biological reality of species and the process of speciation. I would not be so quick to say that "no scientist believes in species" or anything to that effect.

Jackson, you are da man!

As a knife aficionado I am always impressed by your carries. Is that a Combat Troodon? Likely missed you saying it somewhere. First post-HS job I had I got an Infidel, only Microtech I have is the Venomtech, yes, really. Still want a Halo V. Bless states that let you have cool knives to use as very dangerous fidget spinners lol!

@davidlericain

Ай бұрын

I believe he said it was a Microtech Hera 2 in a past video.Yeah, he's addicted to it. lol

@aronjanssonnordberg307

Ай бұрын

it's a bit weird to play with it that close to someone else. it's almost threatening.

Sprachbund or creoles are like hybridization in nature, which can be very common in some taxa.

Team Mammal Supremacy.

"a beef" it's a neat! One neat, two neat, like deer or sheep. Old Norse naut.

There are a lot of biologists out there publishing descriptions of species who would be very surprised to learn that "species" is a "garbage concept"

@brenenwynd2041

Ай бұрын

'garbage taxon' doesn't mean 'garbage concept'. It effectively means that we don't actually know what the reality is, but this current 'bin' adequately describes the phenomenom we are looking to understand. It just means it is a form of lumping that we use to create patterns that either don't exist or are presented as more simplistic than reality.

Doc, I love your videos, but with all due respect, the knife thing gets distracting and even mildly annoying after a while.

Chomsky had a walk-on part here. As I understand it, he thought that the structures of language were innate, presumably coded somehow in our individual brains and expressed in our private thoughts before coming out in speech. That's a very American way of looking at things. Russian psychologists before the war thought language only made sense as a social thing, the means we use to communicate with each other in groups as well as pairs. We use the speech we have shared to communicate with each other also to structure our internal thoughts. We may have our own "idiolects," but we use our speech mainly to talk to other people by means of "sociolects." We may have several of these, and and switch between them depending on whether we are among family, fellow workers, buyers and sellers, strangers, etc. That makes it easier to see how language can change, because we don't use the same words and structures in every situation. We also do different things as we go through life. What comes into our ears changes over time, and so does what comes out of our mouths.

Despite being spelled with "ch," Dachshund isn't pronounced with [x] in German. It's like "Daks-Hund"

@sandra.helianthus

Ай бұрын

.... Oh wait, I think you meant to say it IS pronounced as x=ks? Which would be correct. 😊

@Jonassoe

Ай бұрын

@@sandra.helianthus I meant the phoneme [x], the voiceless velar fricative, like in the German words Buch, Dach, or like in "loch" if you know how Scottish English sounds. German words with ch after a back vowel usually have it pronounced like [x], so I thought Dachshund were pronounced [ˈdaxsˌhʊnt], like Jackson does in the video, but I looked it up and it's actually [ˈdaksˌhʊnt]. In other words, I thought it was Dach+s+Hund, but it's "Daks+Hund"

@sandra.helianthus

Ай бұрын

@@Jonassoe thank you for clarifying 🙏 I am not a linguistic person, so I misunderstood. Yes you are right: other than in "Dach", "Dachs" (badger) is pronounced as "daks". 👍

@faithlesshound5621

Ай бұрын

@@sandra.helianthus So the ancestors of our domestic dachshunds may have been bred to hunt badgers, or at least chase them out of their setts? Chiz chiz. Enuff said.

@sandra.helianthus

Ай бұрын

@@faithlesshound5621 yes. That was their purpose, therefore their shape and traits.

Your volume is a bit low.

@HangrySaturn

Ай бұрын

always is

Politics indeed. Politics certainly has the ability to make two prospective species "separated enough" that mating would become effectively impossible, though not technically impossible in terms of biology. I never expected this obsession of mine to lead so quickly to my other lifelong obsession of ethics & morality. 😂 Ox, Ȣ, 🤘, BȢRȢ, certainly an important animal, it would seem. Pulling the plow, perhaps? Speaking of yolks and yokes... wait a minute, are you saying Beave or Beef? 🤣 I'm hearing: 'a beef is an animal', did I hear'm right? 😅 I love these jokes! 😂 Now, personally, I need my jokes to get through the day. Every day, first thing in the morning, usually with some toast and coffee or juice. 🫠 I'm dying over here. No wonder this sort of nonsense approaches the realm of forbidden language. 🤪🤐 Okay, okay, I made it to the end. I'm proud of myself. Thank you guys for making this a KZread video. It is genuinely among my greatest wishes in life to join you someday and quietly lend a hand to the burning of midnight oil. My academic career was derailed early-on by my decision to focus on computer technology, but perhaps a room full of doctors of philosophy could benefit from the addition of a comic relief? I'm not far away, just say the word and it's road-trip time! 🫵😎🤙 🌜C-Ya Round!

Uh, unsubscribe

@sandra.helianthus

Ай бұрын

Mhm, what didn’t you like? 🤔