Hot Nun knows a species when she sees one. Obey the Sister.

After the smashing success of my Multiple Orcasms post which still brings considerable daily traffic to the blog from furries looking for orca and vore themed pornography, I couldn’t resist tiptoeing around cheeky references to bestiality once again; but this time the human interest in animal sex is strictly like-on-like and the link to pornography is in the tricky means of defining concepts that are both familiar and yet abstract.

Trying to define what is necessary and sufficient to designate a “species” is rather like the problem the US Supreme Court ran into when trying to define pornography.  In the decision for Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Stewart coined a now famous phrase when trying to draw a line between protected speech and unprotected obscenity:

In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable… I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within [hardcore pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Many definitions, while concrete, are rather relative and not absolute. Darwin failed to define species in his Origin of Species:

Nor shall I here discuss the various definitions which have been given of the term species. No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.

He goes on to say just how blurred that line can be:

I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties.

The “species debate” is a problem that existed before Darwin and which continues today.  The current tone of the debate has been most significantly influenced by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr whose definition of a species graces most modern textbooks:

species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups

I had a laugh when I read Ernst Mayr’s essay “What is a Species, and What is Not?” published in Philosophy of Science in 1996:

The term ‘species’ refers to a concrete phenomenon of nature and this fact severely constrains the number and kinds of possible definitions. The word ‘species’ is, like the words ‘planet’ or ‘moon,’ a technical term for a concrete phenomenon. One cannot propose a new definition of a planet as “a satellite of a sun that has its own satellite,” because this would exclude Venus, and some other planets without moons. A definition of any class of objects must be applicable to any member of this class and exclude reference to attributes not characteristic of this class.

It doesn’t help Mayr’s point that the International Astronomical Union had no formal definition for ‘planet’ at the time of his essay or for a complete decade after it. When they did finally vote on one in 2006, the former planet Pluto got downgraded to a dwarf planet leaving every science textbook published in the preceding 80 years obsolete and violating Mayr’s apparent rule that one can not propose a new definition that would exclude an existing member of a class. Pluto was declared a planet upon its discovery in 1930 and now it’s not even the largest “plutiod”–that honor falls to Eris, which was discovered in 2005 and found to be larger than Pluto which prompted Astronomers to actually look at the definition of what makes something a planet versus something else.

If you take a moment to look around the blogosphere this week, you’ll realize that the uncertainty of this issue is present just beneath the surface of numerous topics of conversation:

Retrieverman asks if the Island Fox is a valid species which must be understood within the context of the greater Canid complex several species of which would violate the basic Mayr definition of a species, but his post on the Polar Bear is also framed by the species debate as genetic analysis shows that Polar Bears can be considered a variety of Brown Bear and the two can and do form fertile hybrids.

The Dog Zombie looks at Canid DNA to question the recipe of different flavors of “Canid Soup.”

Jess at Desert Wind Hounds picks up on the food metaphor at Dog Zombie and asks what the recipe is for a “purebred” and how one goes about creating one.  This is ultimately just a more zoomed in analysis of the species debate: how much distance in time, space, genetics and niche constitutes a different breed, a different type, a different landrace, or a different species?

Stephen Bodio asks the same question with a simple image comparison of two dogs.

Razib Khan shows that the species debate is applicable to humans, and the notion that Neanderthals or Denisovians were somehow not human falls when you realize that their genes are still in us (Border Wars is written by a 2.7% certified Neanderthal):

In my post below I argue that it’s most useful to reconceptualize “human” as an ecological niche, rather than a descent group. All the confusion as to whether Neandertals, or any other group of divergent hominins, were, or weren’t, “humans like us,” exists in the context of the idea that “humans like us” are a very specific and sui generis  cladewith special traits. I think “we” need to get a little off our high horse here.

You’ll notice that the notion of “niche” becomes more and more important as we realize just how blurry the lines between interfertile species really is.  Niche is what separates Polar Bears from Brown Bears and it’s also what separates Dogs from Wolves:

The co-evolution between social canids and primates is I think not a random chance event. To some extent I think “man’s best friend” was a necessary outcome of evolutionary forces. Barring the total extermination of one lineage or the other, some sort of cooperative relationship is I suspect something that will naturally reoccur. Dogs are not simply a specific derived lineage of wolves, they’re an ecological niche created by the existence of hominins with social complexity.

Dave at Prick-Eared has a post which documents another canid rapidly invading the very niche that once brought man and wolf together to co-evolve.

There are no hard and fast answers here, no absolute definitions, no minimum standards or list of traits that are both necessary and sufficient to differentiate one “thing” from another “thing” in a meaningful way.  This is the place where the objectivity of science meets the subjectivity of philosophy and those questions like “what is a dog” start to look a lot like “what is an ideal Afghan Hound.”

There are some questions that are worth answering “I don’t know and I probably never will, but that won’t stop the investigation.”

All of these conditions are genetic disorders and all of them are definitive sine-qua-non features of some breeds, often in combination.  These disorders aren’t accidental and unwanted, they are written into the breed standards.  The breed wardens don’t want to breed these conditions out, they demand they breed true.

Mix and match your genetic dwarfism disorders.

Most of the toy breeds are ateliotic dwarfs: Chihuahuas, Boston Terriers, Italian Greyhounds, Maltese, Miniature Pinschers, Miniature Spaniels, Pomeranians, Toy Poodles, Yorkies, etc.  This form of dwarfism is caused by a deficiency in somatropin which results in stunted growth of all somatic cells in the body.  Ateliosis is a recessive allele.

If you’re a self-styled expert with a bad case of illusory superiority who has written more books than he’s read, you might say, “‘Achondroplasia’ literally means ‘an absence of good shape,’” but that’s not what the literal Greek means. “Chondro” is Greek for cartilage and “Plasia” means growth or change from the Greek word for moulding.  Thus, the literal meaning of Achondroplasia is “Defective growth of cartilage” and that’s pretty much what it is.  In general, it serves as the name for a cluster of similar disorders of the cartilage and bone (osteochondrodysplasias).

The most obvious effects of Achondroplasia occur in the long bones of the leg and “micromelic” means short limbs.  Micromelic breeds include: Basset Hounds, Bulldogs, Corgis, Dachshunds, Lhasa Apsos, Scottish Terriers, Shetland Sheepdogs, etc. Micromelic Achondroplasia is a dominant allele with incomplete penetrance.

Another form of Achondroplasia that doesn’t lead to what we commonly consider to be dwarfism but which likewise results in insufficient growth of bone is Brachycephalic Achondroplasia which shortens bones in the skull.  In dogs, shortening of the mid-face and maxilla and shortening of the lower jaw are inherited separately.  Boxers have a shortened upper jaw, but their lower jaw is normal and they are normal sized in all other respects; whereas Boston Terriers have both upper and lower brachycephalism and are also ateliotic dwarfs, so they are proportional but small with smooshed faces.

Bulldogs have midface and upperjaw brachycephaly so their lower jaw juts out and they have trouble breathing, and they also have micromelic achondroplasia so their legs are short and bowed while their trunk is not significantly

Miniature Dachshunds carry both forms of body dwarfism, but their faces are unaffected.

And what do you get when you combine all three disorders? A Pug.

The most completely achondroplastic dog breeds are the toy imports of East Asia origin (bracycephalic + micromelic achondroplastic + ateliotic): the Pekingese, the Shih Tzu, and the Pug. The body-forms of these triply achondroplastic breeds represent the simultaneous superposition of all three varities of achondroplasia–micromelic, maxillary, and mandibular–on a midget frame. Thus, the Pug’s disproportionately stumpy legs, tending to bow (genu varum), result from micromelic achondroplasia. The Pug’s bulging forehead (frontal bossing); large, staring eyes (exophthalmos); pronounced stop (recessed nasion); and short midface (midface hypoplasia) all reflect maxillary achondroplasia. The Pug’s short lower jaw expresses mandibular achondroplasia. The Pug’s extraordinarily flat face and crowded dentition are accidence of the simultaneous operation of maxillary and mandibular achondroplasia.
- For the Love of Dachshunds, Robert Hutchinson

None of these disorders exist without other health complications like luxating patellas, arthritis, cataracts, and shortened lifespans.  But, none of these disorders can be removed from breeds without fundamentally altering the breed itself.  The Miniature Dachshund would simply be a Dachshund if you removed the pituitary dwarfism, but most of the other dogs no longer have a perfect corresponding wildtype breed.

For that reason, if the disease is to go, the breed is to go.  I won’t count on that happening any time soon, if ever.

Diseased Dwarf Dog images provided courtesy of Cartoonize My Pet.

Tron: Best In Show, appearing now in an arena near you

Wherein I propose that the Tron films can be read as a metaphor for dog culture and a criticism of the kennel club system.

If there was one day of the year that parents would not have to take the kids to the movies to entertain them, you’d think it’d be Christmas day where weeks of planning and big budgets would keep the rugrats busy playing with their haul of new toys.  But apparently parents suck at picking gifts or the toys the kids want never live up to the hype and a movie is the perfect way to shut them up from all the complaining.

So if you didn’t want to watch Patton, Valkyrie, or Inglourious Basterds on cable (what’s with the Nazi theme on Christmas?), you might have seen Tron: Legacy this holiday.

Although you might miss it if you don’t have dogs on the brain, I can’t help but see the plot as a critique on the same issue that is plaguing the culture of canine kennel clubs: the pursuit of perfection via genetic purity.

In the original film, Kevin Flynn is a laid off programmer trying to prove that his intellectual property is the code behind ENCOM corporation’s business success and revolutionary new virtual world.  The evil CEO of the company has not only kicked Flynn out but has installed an oppressive new “Master Control Program” which has so far prevented Flynn from accessing his original files and proving his authorship.

So instead of filing a lawsuit, Flynn attempts to hack the ENCOM computers with successive generations of a program he has written and which he tries to improve to a level that will finally overcome the MCP.  He names this program Clu, and it’s an expression of Flynn’s talent and ego in digital form, and “hacking” is represented by various gaming simulations that are reminiscent of Pong and  Battle Tanks.

When Clu fails, Flynn retools the program and sends him into the ring again.

Besides fending off attempts to reveal the charade, the MCP also seeks to improve itself and the virtual world by determining which programs are optimal and which are deficient.  Deficient  programs are discarded in a form of blood sport where they are pitted against each other in gladiatorial combat.

All programs in the world have their vital information stored in a data disc which they wear on their backs.  This is both a weapon and a shield from attacks.  When a program loses their data disc, they don’t die but they are prevented from meaningful interaction with the world.

When Clu proves ineffective in vanquishing the MCP, Flynn himself is accidentally digitized and sucked into the virtual world, taking over for Clu in the fight against the MCP.  Flynn succeeds and the movie ends with him in control of ENCOM.

ENCOM’s MCP is the kennel club. It is large, oppressive, and seeks to gain control of all the individual types of programs that it can.  It thinks that the more programs it appropriates, the smarter and more powerful it is.  It also believes that it is smarter due to this monopoly than the individual programs are: it inexplicably knows more about actuarial science than the actuarial program does.  Rebels are cast out and good ideas are appropriated and promptly botched in execution.

The Master Control Program’s goal is the collection of breed standards.  It dictates the Platonic ideal of what a program should be.  The competitive methods used to test programs against the ideal don’t really make sense at all, but since the MCP is already large and growing it bull dozes over any who would rebel against it.

The gladiatorial games are the breed ring.  This is where the actuarial program fights the tax software in a game of digital Jai Alai or Frisbee Tag to prove which one is worthy of further existence.  Never mind that one could easily test the actuarial program against real data or test the tax software against the real work it’s supposed to do… Dodge Ball is deemed a perfectly good test to measure which programs get to propogate their code and which are stripped of their data discs.

The data discs are the pedigrees: the record of past success, current ability, and the ticket into the game.  No pedigree, no entry.  In many cases, the disc is more valuable than the program itself.  Some programs use their disc to knock the ground out from under other programs, not defeating the programs themselves but slanting the environment in their favor.

The programs are the dogs.  They are the genetic code rewritten over generations from previous iterations by the “user” sent out to compete for the user’s benefit.  Real functional programs don’t have to bother with the games, they actually get work done, but the programs that once worked but no longer do get to play games in the ring and pretend that it’s a good measure of their worth.  We never actually see the programs that win in the games go back and do real work.  In fact, we don’t see much work being done at all and the going religion is that the “users” who ask the programs to work, are actually a myth.

The victory of the Jeff Bridge’s character in the game and out signals that it’s really all about the “users” anyway, the programs are just a side show.

Although dogs certainly weren’t featured in the original Tron, I think the analogy is pretty solid.

Tron Dog: User's Best Friend

In the sequel, this extended metaphor becomes even more blatant and critical of dog culture.  Not only do we have the addition of a literal rescue dog to the story, we also have dialog which links the dog to one of the main characters in a relevant manner.

After wrestling control of the virtual world from the MCP, Kevin Flynn resurrects his Clu program and promises it that together they shall build a “perfect” virtual utopia.  This is our hero’s tragic fault: the quest for perfection.  In his desire to perfect Clu (his breeding program) and perfect the virtual world (the kennel club), Flynn fails to appreciate that perfection is unattainable and subjective but computer programs are deterministic and objective.  Minor flaws in human understanding can become critical flaws in the code (genetic or otherwise).  In the original film Flynn beats the MCP by having it try to solve an unsolvable problem.  This confuses and slows the machine and gives Flynn the crucial advantage.

What’s novel about the sequel is that it also deals with new genetic variations.  Whereas all the original programs are the products of human “users” and later programs arise from this first generation of programs, and at some point new code manifests itself in the virtual world ab nihilo in the form of “isomorphic algorithms.”

Isomorphism has a specific meaning in science: literally “same form” in Greek, the term is applied to objects that have the same fundamental properties.  The two sides of an equation are isomorphic, as you can apply rule to both sides to change their appearance but the relationship is maintained.  Isomorphisms also connect symbols with their real world counterparts, and as such they represent the meaning we find between reality and abstraction.

Analogizing the content of the movie to represent the real world kennel club is a proposed isomorphism.  The more similarities we find between the symbols in the movie and the reality of dog culture, the more meaning the analogy has.

This concept is detailed in Gödel, Escher, Bach where Douglas Hofstadter discusses how isomorphisms bring meaning to systems composed of otherwise meaningless elements.

In Legacy, the isomorphic algorithms (ISOs) are viewed by Kevin Flynn as keys to expanding knowledge and finding truth, but Clu determines that they are imperfect and without merit.  He’s jealous of the attention and value that Flynn places on these organic programs.

The ISOs are the dogs that exist outside of the kennel club system: purpose built dogs, dogs of unknown pedigree, land races, hybrids, mutts, and new mutations.  As isomorphs, they have meaning not in seeking perfection but in existential value, rational value.

One hot Isomorphic Algorithm, Quorra. That dog can hunt.

Clu sees Flynn’s appreciation of the ISOs as a flaw, an imperfection, and so humans are imperfect.  Thus, humans and ISOs must be removed from the equation.  Clu believes that perfection is real and attainable and he institutes policies to achieve it.  Like humans who have tried to construct utopias, this results in a massive Draconian bureaucracy.  Clu overthrows Flynn, who becomes trapped within the virtual world and left marginalized hiding “off the grid” while Clu institutionalizes “perfection” and plots to bring his vision out into the real human world as well.

He carries out a genocide of the ISOs and only one ISO survives in the form of the delicious Quorra who is protected and shepherded by Flynn in his secret home off the grid.  Despite Clu’s repeated attempts to kill her, Quorra is superior to his perfect programs.  Clu tries to capture and use Flynn’s biological son, Sam, to bridge the gap into the imperfect human world where he can not only attain absolute power over the virtual realm to destroy both Kevin Flynn and Quorra, he can also cleanse the human world of imperfect humans.  The key to bridge the worlds is Kevin Flynn’s data disc (the perfect Platonic form).  If Clu can capture that disc, he can literally know the mind of god and escape the virtual realm.

The resolution of the plot speaks harshly against the kennel club culture:

• The pursuit of perfection above all is the villain’s tragic flaw.
• The villain installs a Draconian bureaucracy to enforce this “perfection.”
• This heartless world is thus governed by a rigid and unthinking document instead of rational but imperfect human beings.
• The arbitrary games eventually destroy almost all those who enter the ring.
• The imperfect humans prove superior at every turn to the examples of programmed perfection.  The programs only succeed because they have a situational advantage.
• Choosing to resolve problems in the artificial world instead of the real world is the flaw which launches the drama in the first film.
• Neglecting his own biological son in favor of his virtual clone Clu is the sin which launches the drama in the second film.
• The humans defeat the programs at their own game by choosing not to play the game at all.
• The downfall of both the MCP and Clu comes about when they outgrow their original purpose and seize too much power.
• Both villains suffer from logical absolutisms: MCP seeking absolute power through acquiring all programs of merit and Clu seeking absolute perfection through purging of the imperfect.
• The hero of the first film finds but a temporary victory from conquering the MCP from within; it’s only after the distorted philosophy is conquered and the virtual world itself is abandoned that the threat is abated.  A corrupt philosophy even freed from the initial despotism inevitably lead to a new and destructive despotism.
• The happy ending of both films involves breaking free and living outside of the oppressive system.  To live in the real world governed by nature’s laws not in the carefully constructed but artificial utopia.
• Flynn’s biological son, not his ideal clone-like program proves not only superior but the fitting legacy to his life and values.
• Interaction with the “perfect algorithms” damages Quorra’s body, making her lame.  They repair her by fixing her corrupted digital DNA.  The system can’t do this, only the user who is not bound by the system’s rules can.
• The biological son and Quorra find their happy ending not in the ideal utopia where they can play gods, but in the dirty and imperfect real world.
• Sam Flynn’s initial attack on the blind corporatism of ENCOM was represented by an image of his “rescue dog,” a virus that negated ENCOM’s monopoly on operating system software.
• Later, Quorra refers to herself as a “rescue” like Sam’s dog; saved from the genocide carried out against the imperfect ISOs by Kevin Flynn.
• The older, organic technics in the film prove superior to the newer models built for perfection and aesthetic appeal, especially when piloted by the biological son Sam and the “new blood” ISO Quorra.  The LightCar in particular proves to be more adaptable and contain more reserve code that can be applied to varied terrain and challenges versus the new LightBikes which are only of value on-grid.
• It’s only Sam and Quorra who are valuable enough to save in the end.  Kevin, for his sins, must pay the ultimate price and the MCP and Clu are destroyed.

Rewatch Tron: Legacy with dogs on the brain and you’ll appreciate how it’s a pretty strong indictment of not only the folly of seeking Platonic ideals but of the rejection of the organic, the imperfect, and the complex.  No meaning, only suffering, is found in the pursuit of the ideal.  Meaning comes only from connecting symbols with reality.  It’s also not enough to change a regime from within if you maintain the bogus philosophy which constructed it in the first place.  Even with the best intentions, corrupt thought leads to tragedy.

Part 3. The Future. Wherein the Author describes Dog’s presence in the babble and first words of children.

The primordial connection we feel towards dogs is more than the superficial replacement for meaningful human contact that cat people claim we are experiencing. In fact, recent research shows that owning a pet is actually a catalyst towards greater social contact. But the human-canine bond is deeper than simple coexistence and date-bait. Our relationship with dogs has influenced the very formation of human language. Our growth from vine swinging apes to blog spinning humans has been shepherded by dogs.

In the first part of this series I got around to discuss dogs at the end. The takeaway observation is that dogs hold a prestigious place in the short list of man’s oldest words. We’ve been talking about dogs since we began talking, and we haven’t slowed down since.

Modern English hints that dogs are a reflection of god, and anyone who has ever found that once in a lifetime pup would agree. Dogs worship us, they refresh our souls, they hold no conditions, and they never lie. They ask little and give much. They aren’t perfect, but man doesn’t deserve perfect and dogs are probably more than we deserve as well. For all the slandering the humble dog has taken in the various religious tomes, and even the lingering pejorative treatments of dogs in clichés and euphemisms, dogs endure and they don’t hold what we say about them against us.

As with any obsession, we might be saying more about the man-dog bond than we realize. “Dog” is the 310th most commonly used word in English based on the American National Corpus. We talk and write about dogs more than we talk about horses (311), birds (312), cats (673) or even our friends (323). More than rock (353) and roll (676), more than the moon (520) and stars (420), more than cause (532) and effect (998), and even more than death (953).

We honor dogs with more lip service than art (799), science (875), industry (894) and even God (779). We value them more than dollars (866), money (374), riches (865) and gold (662). And even our concern for the poor (688) doesn’t come close, nor does our quest for power (486).

We respect them more than Kings (390), Presidents (726), and the rule (483) of law (717). And recent press should confirm that we’d rather dish on dogs than discuss soldiers (825) at war (387), despite a plethora of war correspondents and not a single dog correspondent on any newspaper’s payroll.

Dogs are more genuine than truth (366) and impervious to lies (853). They give us more direction than North (372) , South (385), East (741) and West(581). We are for (13) dogs more than we are against (368) anything (514). Heck, we’ll even take dogs over hope (633) and love (531).

I suspect that we talk sex (???) more than we do dogs, but sex doesn’t even rank on the list. I think that it’s been edited from my source since even the Brits talk about sex (83 times per million words) just a little bit more than they do dogs (80 per million), and the Brits are renowned sexual prudes.

Other than sex, it’s certain we talk about just a handful of things more than dogs. Water (84), oil (88), land (171), work (107), and school (212). Home (173), family (299), mother (192), father (213) and children (253). Music (302) and song (296) and, of course, Animal House (187-188).

And really, that’s exactly the way it should be.

[ Part 1. The Ancient. ] [ Part 3. The Future. ]

The Ancient, Modern, and Future Language of “Dog.”

Part 3. The Future. Wherein the Author describes Dog’s presence in the babble and first words of children.

I ran across a border war today while reading up on an article I will discuss in the third part of this series. Like many of the conflicts that pique my curiosity, this one has a dog at its center. You can tell that an issue is likely a border war when you search for a topic (in this case “global etymologies”) on google and the first page is filled with rants against the fundamental idea instead of links to the original content.

Anthropologists study the history of human groups and migrations by examining the common genetic elements of those groups, searching for the most recent common ancestors (hypothetical ‘Eve’s). Interdisciplinary historical linguists study the history, migration, and interaction of language (and thus people) by comparing common sounds and word meanings between languages, and in doing so classify language families and construct proto-languages. The mother of all such languages is called the Proto-World Language.

I suspect that the Proto-World Language is like the Holy Grail for historical linguists. It’s more of a guiding concept than a reality. Many don’t believe it can be found, others don’t believe that it ever existed in the first place, and anyone who turns up a clue or a possible path is resoundingly attacked by everyone else. Some attack because they are atheistic to the idea, others because they too are on the hunt and another’s success is their failure.

Like many border wars, this one seems to fall in the “techie vs. fuzzy” mold, although to an outsider the differences between the two groups seem trivial, making the narcissism of minor differences a distinct possibility. The fuzzy linguists want to tell a good story, bask in romantic histories, ask how the languages feel about each other, and do it this way because they’ve always done it this way; this is the comparative method.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
– Sir William Jones 1786; Quoted by Lehman 1967 and Szemerenyi 1996:4

The techie linguists aren’t scared of letting numbers tell the story, of using new techniques to inform old debates, using old techniques with new tools, or of looking at data before they reach conclusions instead of telling a story and then looking for “data.” Their method of choice is called multilateral or mass lexical comparison. The obvious criticism from the fuzzies is that numbers can confuse coincidence for correlation, but any techies know that correlation does not imply causation. The fuzzies say that random coincidence is “quite high” although without doing an analysis of the expected random coincidence vs. the observed random coincidence (decidedly techie), I don’t know what basis the fuzzies have to state that such coincidence is tainting the techie’s results. The mass lexical comparison method seems pretty straight forward and sound to me:

If then, we find a mass of resemblances between different languages, resemblances that are not onomatopoetic in nature and do not appear to be borrowings, we must conclude that the similarities are the result of a common origin, followed by a descent with modification in the daughter languages.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 43.

In my usual interdisciplinary stance, I figure there is room for both methods and perhaps the two methods can inform each other. Not too many people agree.

Needless to say, the fuzzy linguists have launched a full scale border war on the techie linguists (numbers lie and are scary, scientific fan-fiction makes you feel good and what feels good must be true). Consistent with my Confederacy of Dunces theory, where the sound and fury from the establishment against a new and provocative idea is entirely inconsistent with the weight of the idea, this border war features a preemptive strike by the comparative f
uzzies. The old school linguists actually published an anti-global etymologies paper (Joseph Salmons, 92) two years before the original global etymologies paper (Bengtson & Ruhlen, 94) was even published.

The essential argument in the Language Log article is research that the group-think fuzzies don’t agree with shouldn’t even be published, because that’s the purpose of “peer-review:” to enforce group think. I especially like the hypocrisy where the author complains that because the referees are anonymous, there can’t be a “public debate” (read: mob lynching) to force them to censor unpopular views (read: antithesis of public debate). The author’s criticism that peer reviewers are unqualified to judge outside of their specialty is code speak for ‘they haven’t been indoctrinated into enforcing the group-think.’

Doctor Merritt Ruhlen and Linguistic expert John Bengtson fall in the techie group and are the target of the above article because they used technical analysis to discern a list of 27 “global etymologies.” These etymologies, also known as cognates, are similar words in different languages that are likely to have a common origin. Critics (read: confederacy of dunces) incorrectly classify these global etymologies as “reconstructions” of the Proto-World Language, and thus they have doubly attacked Ruhlen and Bengtson and any other linguists or anthropologists who use their work. But Ruhlen and Bengtson don’t make that claim and explicitly state so:

For each etymology…we present a phonetic and semantic gloss, followed by examples from different language families. …We do not deal here with reconstruction, and these glosses are intended merely to characterize the most general meaning and phonological shape of each root. Future work on reconstruction will no doubt discover cases where the most widespread meaning or shape was not original.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 14 note 3.

You’ll notice that Dr. William Poser uses “reconstruct*” no less than 25 times in his criticism. Too bad he didn’t make it to 27, it would have provided some nice symmetry to the 27 cognates Bengtson and Ruhlen unearthed. One linguist injected 25 mistaken words into his analysis because he wanted them there, two linguists arrived at 27 words because their technique spat them out. The problem with Dr. Poser is that he doesn’t have an excuse to fall so firmly into the fuzzy mindset, he studied Electrical Engineering along with Classics and Linguistics.

That’s the difference I see here: Bengtson and Ruhlen developed a method (the black box), and then took data and ran it through the box and waited to see what came out the bottom. Criticize the box all you want, substitute your own, but what drops out the bottom is governed only by the rules in the box and those rules are clear and explicit and easy to construct without bias. The fuzzy linguists don’t develop a method and then run data through it, they massage the method until the results make “sense” and tell a story. They don’t let an unbiased method put words together, they find a reason that two words they select make sense together. Untold degrees of intentional and unintentional bias infects the input data and the results when you try and make them say something you understand instead of trying to understand what they are really saying.

And what are those 27 threatening words? The source of the bitter bickering and posturing? The results of the black box and possible links to the holy grail of all languages?

You can tell one hell of a (R rated) story with those 27 words, and perhaps that’s why they are so interesting. They aren’t from a fuzzy story telling method, but a techie method. And before you think all of us techies still live in our Aja‘s basement, have tsuma on our backs and puti on the brain, jealous of prehistoric mano running around kamaing a large dinosaur kata, trying to get to pal base with kunas by bashing them on the head and dragging them back to our k’olo by their tsaku, we’re not. Some of us do shave our backs.

Now Dr. Poser isn’t all bad. He gives a very nice explanation of the ancient words for dog:

Although sound change is the main way in which words change over time, it is also possible for a word to be replaced by an entirely different word. For example, the Proto-Indo-European word for “dog” was something like *kuon. (The star indicates that this is a hypothetical form.) We reconstruct this form from attested (actually recorded) forms like Greek kuon, Sanskrit shvan, and German hund by asking what proto-form would yield the attested forms after undergoing the sound changes observed in the various languages, and also taking into account changes in word-formation. The direct descendant of this word in English is hound. But at some point the common Germanic word for “dog” took on a more specialized meaning and was replaced, as the general term, by dog, a word whose origin we do not know.

This fits nicely with the attention Ruhlen and Bengtson gave to dog in their work:

9. *KUAN—’dog’ — canine; cynic; hound; !Kung /gwi ‘hyena’; Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k(y)n ‘dog, wolf’; Proto-Indo-European *kwon- ‘dog’ > Sanskrit s’van, Phrygian kan, Latin canis, Greek kuon, Germanic hund; Proto-Uralic *küinä ‘wolf’; Old Turkish qanchiq ‘bitch’; Monglian qani ‘wild dog’; Proto-Tungus-Manchu *khina ‘dog’; Korean ka ‘dog’ (< kani); Gilyak kan ‘dog’; Chinese kou ‘dog’ (kh^jwen); Tibetan khyi ‘dog’; Proto-Oceanic *nkaun ‘dog’; Taos kwiane-, Tewa tukhwana ‘fox, coyote’

If we really could assign dates to the mutations in DNA and the changes in our language, we just might find that dogs became biologically distinguished from wolves at about the same time man used one word to describe a wolf and another to describe a domesticated dog.

Part 3. The Future. Wherein the Author describes Dog’s presence in the babble and first words of children.

In the first part of this series I got around to discuss dogs at the end. The takeaway observation is that dogs hold a prestigious place in the short list of man’s oldest words. We’ve been talking about dogs since we began talking, and we haven’t slowed down since.

Modern English hints that dogs are a reflection of god, and anyone who has ever found that once in a lifetime pup would agree. Dogs worship us, they refresh our souls, they hold no conditions, and they never lie. They ask little and give much. They aren’t perfect, but man doesn’t deserve perfect and dogs are probably more than we deserve as well. For all the slandering the humble dog has taken in the various religious tomes, and even the lingering pejorative treatments of dogs in clichés and euphemisms, dogs endure and they don’t hold what we say about them against us.

As with any obsession, we might be saying more about the man-dog bond than we realize. “Dog” is the 310th most commonly used word in English based on the American National Corpus. We talk and write about dogs more than we talk about horses (311), birds (312), cats (673) or even our friends (323). More than rock (353) and roll (676), more than the moon (520) and stars (420), more than cause (532) and effect (998), and even more than death (953).

We honor dogs with more lip service than art (799), science (875), industry (894) and even God (779). We value them more than dollars (866), money (374), riches (865) and gold (662). And even our concern for the poor (688) doesn’t come close, nor does our quest for power (486).

We respect them more than Kings (390), Presidents (726), and the rule (483) of law (717). And recent press should confirm that we’d rather dish on dogs than discuss soldiers (825) at war (387), despite a plethora of war correspondents and not a single dog correspondent on any newspaper’s payroll.

Dogs are more genuine than truth (366) and impervious to lies (853). They give us more direction than North (372) , South (385), East (741) and West(581). We are for (13) dogs more than we are against (368) anything (514). Heck, we’ll even take dogs over hope (633) and love (531).

I suspect that we talk sex (???) more than we do dogs, but sex doesn’t even rank on the list. I think that it’s been edited from my source since even the Brits talk about sex (83 times per million words) just a little bit more than they do dogs (80 per million), and the Brits are renowned sexual prudes.

Other than sex, it’s certain we talk about just a handful of things more than dogs. Water (84), oil (88), land (171), work (107), and school (212). Home (173), family (299), mother (192), father (213) and children (253). Music (302) and song (296) and, of course, Animal House (187-188).

And really, that’s exactly the way it should be.

[ Part 1. The Ancient. ] [ Part 3. The Future. ]

Part 3. The Future. Wherein the Author describes Dog’s presence in the babble and first words of children.

Anthropologists study the history of human groups and migrations by examining the common genetic elements of those groups, searching for the most recent common ancestors (hypothetical ‘Eve’s). Interdisciplinary historical linguists study the history, migration, and interaction of language (and thus people) by comparing common sounds and word meanings between languages, and in doing so classify language families and construct proto-languages. The mother of all such languages is called the Proto-World Language.

I suspect that the Proto-World Language is like the Holy Grail for historical linguists. It’s more of a guiding concept than a reality. Many don’t believe it can be found, others don’t believe that it ever existed in the first place, and anyone who turns up a clue or a possible path is resoundingly attacked by everyone else. Some attack because they are atheistic to the idea, others because they too are on the hunt and another’s success is their failure.

Like many border wars, this one seems to fall in the “techie vs. fuzzy” mold, although to an outsider the differences between the two groups seem trivial, making the narcissism of minor differences a distinct possibility. The fuzzy linguists want to tell a good story, bask in romantic histories, ask how the languages feel about each other, and do it this way because they’ve always done it this way; this is the comparative method.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
– Sir William Jones 1786; Quoted by Lehman 1967 and Szemerenyi 1996:4

The techie linguists aren’t scared of letting numbers tell the story, of using new techniques to inform old debates, using old techniques with new tools, or of looking at data before they reach conclusions instead of telling a story and then looking for “data.” Their method of choice is called multilateral or mass lexical comparison. The obvious criticism from the fuzzies is that numbers can confuse coincidence for correlation, but any techies know that correlation does not imply causation. The fuzzies say that random coincidence is “quite high” although without doing an analysis of the expected random coincidence vs. the observed random coincidence (decidedly techie), I don’t know what basis the fuzzies have to state that such coincidence is tainting the techie’s results. The mass lexical comparison method seems pretty straight forward and sound to me:

If then, we find a mass of resemblances between different languages, resemblances that are not onomatopoetic in nature and do not appear to be borrowings, we must conclude that the similarities are the result of a common origin, followed by a descent with modification in the daughter languages.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 43.

In my usual interdisciplinary stance, I figure there is room for both methods and perhaps the two methods can inform each other. Not too many people agree.

Needless to say, the fuzzy linguists have launched a full scale border war on the techie linguists (numbers lie and are scary, scientific fan-fiction makes you feel good and what feels good must be true). Consistent with my Confederacy of Dunces theory, where the sound and fury from the establishment against a new and provocative idea is entirely inconsistent with the weight of the idea, this border war features a preemptive strike by the comparative fuzzies. The old school linguists actually published an anti-global etymologies paper (Joseph Salmons, 92) two years before the original global etymologies paper (Bengtson & Ruhlen, 94) was even published.

The essential argument in the Language Log article is research that the group-think fuzzies don’t agree with shouldn’t even be published, because that’s the purpose of “peer-review:” to enforce group think. I especially like the hypocrisy where the author complains that because the referees are anonymous, there can’t be a “public debate” (read: mob lynching) to force them to censor unpopular views (read: antithesis of public debate). The author’s criticism that peer reviewers are unqualified to judge outside of their specialty is code speak for ‘they haven’t been indoctrinated into enforcing the group-think.’

Doctor Merritt Ruhlen and Linguistic expert John Bengtson fall in the techie group and are the target of the above article because they used technical analysis to discern a list of 27 “global etymologies.” These etymologies, also known as cognates, are similar words in different languages that are likely to have a common origin. Critics (read: confederacy of dunces) incorrectly classify these global etymologies as “reconstructions” of the Proto-World Language, and thus they have doubly attacked Ruhlen and Bengtson and any other linguists or anthropologists who use their work. But Ruhlen and Bengtson don’t make that claim and explicitly state so:

For each etymology…we present a phonetic and semantic gloss, followed by examples from different language families. …We do not deal here with reconstruction, and these glosses are intended merely to characterize the most general meaning and phonological shape of each root. Future work on reconstruction will no doubt discover cases where the most widespread meaning or shape was not original.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 14 note 3.

You’ll notice that Dr. William Poser uses “reconstruct*” no less than 25 times in his criticism. Too bad he didn’t make it to 27, it would have provided some nice symmetry to the 27 cognates Bengtson and Ruhlen unearthed. One linguist injected 25 mistaken words into his analysis because he wanted them there, two linguists arrived at 27 words because their technique spat them out. The problem with Dr. Poser is that he doesn’t have an excuse to fall so firmly into the fuzzy mindset, he studied Electrical Engineering along with Classics and Linguistics.

That’s the difference I see here: Bengtson and Ruhlen developed a method (the black box), and then took data and ran it through the box and waited to see what came out the bottom. Criticize the box all you want, substitute your own, but what drops out the bottom is governed only by the rules in the box and those rules are clear and explicit and easy to construct without bias. The fuzzy linguists don’t develop a method and then run data through it, they massage the method until the results make “sense” and tell a story. They don’t let an unbiased method put words together, they find a reason that two words they select make sense together. Untold degrees of intentional and unintentional bias infects the input data and the results when you try and make them say something you understand instead of trying to understand what they are really saying.

And what are those 27 threatening words? The source of the bitter bickering and posturing? The results of the black box and possible links to the holy grail of all languages?

You can tell one hell of a (R rated) story with those 27 words, and perhaps that’s why they are so interesting. They aren’t from a fuzzy story telling method, but a techie method. And before you think all of us techies still live in our Aja‘s basement, have tsuma on our backs and puti on the brain, jealous of prehistoric mano running around kamaing a large dinosaur kata, trying to get to pal base with kunas by bashing them on the head and dragging them back to our k’olo by their tsaku, we’re not. Some of us do shave our backs.

Now Dr. Poser isn’t all bad. He gives a very nice explanation of the ancient words for dog:

Although sound change is the main way in which words change over time, it is also possible for a word to be replaced by an entirely different word. For example, the Proto-Indo-European
word for “dog” was something like *kuon. (The star indicates that this is a hypothetical form.) We reconstruct this form from attested (actually recorded) forms like Greek kuon, Sanskrit shvan, and German hund by asking what proto-form would yield the attested forms after undergoing the sound changes observed in the various languages, and also taking into account changes in word-formation. The direct descendant of this word in English is hound. But at some point the common Germanic word for “dog” took on a more specialized meaning and was replaced, as the general term, by dog, a word whose origin we do not know.

This fits nicely with the attention Ruhlen and Bengtson gave to dog in their work:

9. *KUAN—’dog’ — canine; cynic; hound; !Kung /gwi ‘hyena’; Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k(y)n ‘dog, wolf’; Proto-Indo-European *kwon- ‘dog’ > Sanskrit s’van, Phrygian kan, Latin canis, Greek kuon, Germanic hund; Proto-Uralic *küinä ‘wolf’; Old Turkish qanchiq ‘bitch’; Monglian qani ‘wild dog’; Proto-Tungus-Manchu *khina ‘dog’; Korean ka ‘dog’ (< kani); Gilyak kan ‘dog’; Chinese kou ‘dog’ (kh^jwen); Tibetan khyi ‘dog’; Proto-Oceanic *nkaun ‘dog’; Taos kwiane-, Tewa tukhwana ‘fox, coyote’

If we really could assign dates to the mutations in DNA and the changes in our language, we just might find that dogs became biologically distinguished from wolves at about the same time man used one word to describe a wolf and another to describe a domesticated dog.