Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Score Another Accomplishment for Da Vinci

He was one of the driving artistic forces of the Italian Renaissance, an influence on all art that came after, an engineer and scientist, inventor, someone capable of drawing with one hand while writing a treatise backwards with the other, and ... the father of evolution?

Not quite, but apparently Leonardo Da Vinci was so convinced of the close relations between apes, monkeys, and men that he didn't consider it a point that needed argument:
He explicitly says "apes, monkeys and the like" are not merely related to humans but indeed "almost of the same species". In other words, Leonardo, writing simply on the basis of his own observations more than 500 years ago, says pretty much the same thing the modern science writer Jared Diamond, on the basis of DNA evidence, argues in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. Nor is this a stray observation. Leonardo says it again, in a note on internal anatomy: "Describe the various forms of the intestines of the human species (delle spetie umana), of apes and suchlike. Then, in what way the leonine species differ ... "
Next thing you know, someone will find somewhere in his notebooks descriptions of the calculus, quantum physics, velcro, and the smoothie.

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posted by Erik Sherman @ 4:16 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Friday, October 12, 2007

The Evolution of Language

Two papers in the journal Nature this week examine the evolution of language. One measured the frequency at which verbs become more regular (use a simple -ed ending for past tense) over time at a rate inversely proportionate to the square root of their usage frequency. The site Science Codex has an article on the paper with interviews with some of the involved researchers.

The other paper looks at why some words use similar word forms across the entire Indo-European language family while others appear as unrelated forms. According to a press release from Nature:
Mark Pagel and colleagues used a statistical modelling technique to analyse four Indo-European languages: English, Spanish, Russian and Greek, and compared this to a database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 languages. They found that across all 200 meanings, commonly used words, such as numbers, evolve much more slowly, suggesting that the frequency with which specific words are used affects their rate of replacement over thousands of years.
Again, and with some appeal to common sense, the conclusion is that frequent use cements the form more thoroughly through the act of repetition.

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posted by Erik Sherman @ 3:15 AM 0 Comments Links to this post