HENRY

William Thurston on the role of humor in language change in his 1987 book “Processes of Change in the languages of North-Western New Britain”:

Many linguistic innovations arise in the context of humor, a common mechanism for mediating interpersonal relationships. For example, in 1978, during my second trip to work with the Anêm, but Goulden’s first, we had passed weeks without eating an egg. One morning, an Anêm woman proudly presented Goulden with one, and carefully enunciated the phrase nilŋêm texik ‘chicken-egg’ (nil-ŋ2 ‘egg/testicle’, texik ‘chicken’) for Goulden to repeat. (The Anêm apply Pavlovian principles to language teaching.) At this stage, Goulden’s knowledge of Anêm was at the wordlist level. He graciously accepted the gift, but in his fluster to be polite and repeat what he thought he had heard, he uttered biŋêm texik ‘chicken vulva’ instead. Both bi-ŋ2 and nil-ŋ2 belong to the genital class of nouns.

No sooner had the slip left his tongue than he knew his mistake, but it was too late. Goulden’s obvious discomfiture only accentuated the hilarity of the event. Acutely embarrassed, he returned to the house with the egg in hand. In subsequent weeks, Goulden was the recipient of all available eggs in Karaiai and Pudeling villages; each one was presented as biŋêm texik, a lexeme temporarily reassigned a new meaning for the duration of the gag. (pp. 66-67)

“if you cared about money you wouldn’t be a scientist at all would you?” — John Womersley, head of the Science and Technology Facilities Council

A quote from Rod Page, on “The Past and Future of Systematic Biology“:

Beyond my own hobbyhorses, it seems foolish to try and predict the future. Obviously we will have more data, faster computers, clever methods of analysis, and - sadly - fewer taxa left extant to study. My own perceptions of systematics are inevitably colored by events at the time I started to join the field. Rather like stereotypically lumbering dinosaurs unaware of the small mammals scurrying about their feet, arguments about cladistics versus phenetics rumbled on while all about them statistical methods started to blossom. The early work of Joe Felsenstein and others on topics such as maximum likelihood models and simulated annealing has given rise to modern descendants such as fast maximum likelihood methods, and Bayesian approaches, now among the most popular tree building methods.

Yet, the 1980s was also a period of great interest in large-scale patterns in biogeography, diversification, coevolution, palaeontology, morphology, and development. Whereas some of these areas, notably development, have gone from strength to strength, others have not fared as well. Perhaps this is because they are hard, or perhaps they were not posed in tractable ways. But I hope the current generation of systematists will occasionally step back from the animated cursors and Beowolf clusters, and revisit some of the big questions that so engaged the discipline 20 years ago.

Out in PNAS today, the major evolutionary transitions in ant agriculture (doi):

Agriculture is a specialized form of symbiosis that is known to have evolved in only four animal groups: humans, bark beetles, termites, and ants. Here, we reconstruct the major evolutionary transitions that produced the five distinct agricultural systems of the fungus-growing ants, the most well studied of the nonhuman agriculturalists. We do so with reference to the first fossil-calibrated, multiple-gene, molecular phylogeny that incorporates the full range of taxonomic diversity within the fungus-growing ant tribe Attini.

Our analyses indicate that the original form of ant agriculture, the cultivation of a diverse subset of fungal species in the tribe Leucocoprineae, evolved 50 million years ago in the Neotropics, coincident with the early Eocene climatic optimum. During the past 30 million years, three known ant agricultural systems, each involving a phylogenetically distinct set of derived fungal cultivars, have separately arisen from the original agricultural system. One of these derived systems subsequently gave rise to the fifth known system of agriculture, in which a single fungal species is cultivated by leaf-cutter ants. Leaf-cutter ants evolved remarkably recently (8–12 million years ago) to become the dominant herbivores of the New World tropics.

Our analyses identify relict, extant attine ant species that occupy phylogenetic positions that are transitional between the agricultural systems. Intensive study of those species holds particular promise for clarifying the sequential accretion of ecological and behavioral characters that produced each of the major ant agricultural systems.

Wendy Doniger in the London Review of Books:

Nineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some 18th-century hunches, uncovered the connections between members of a large (and rather dysfunctional) family of languages that included ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite (in ancient Anatolia), Vedic Sanskrit (in ancient India), Avestan (in ancient Iran), the Celtic and Norse-Germanic languages and, ultimately, French, German, Italian, Spanish, English and all their friends and relations. They called the family Indo-European…

..has a shock exposé about the truth behind the grand canyon (”it was formed in a couple of days after Noah’s Flood says random wild guess by Bible scholar with no knowledge of geography”), and an exclusive interview with creationist (and jailed fraudster*) Kent Hovind.

Ok. Maybe not - it’s my favorite entry by el Gran Poco in this week’s Photoshop Phriday (”Reverse Magazines”) by the goons at Something Awful (nsfw!).

(* I know - I’m repeating myself)

What can you say, but just.. wow:

From its inception, GenBank has doubled in size about every 18 months. The traditional GenBank divisions contain over 80 billion nucleotide bases from more than 76 million individual sequences, with 15 million new sequences added in the past year. Contributions from Whole Genome Shotgun (WGS) projects supplement the data in the traditional divisions to bring the total beyond 190 billion bases. Complete genomes (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genomes/index.html) continue to represent a rapidly growing segment of the database, with some 200 of more than 570 complete microbial genomes in GenBank deposited over the past year. The number of eukaryote genomes for which coverage and assembly are significant continues to increase as well, with over 190 assemblies now available, including that of the reference human genome.

From: Benson et al, 2008.