Brown bear, brown bear, what do you tree? Discordance in linguistic phylogenetics
Carlos Santana (University of Pennsylvania)
This is a talk about the three most important topics in philosophy right now: racism, language, and bears.
What do language trees mean?
- The standard answer is that they’re models of linguistic evolutionary history
I complicate that easy answer by exploring two issues.
- First, the ways language change can fail to be treelike.
- Second, discordance, a phenomenon where different data or models generate non-equivalent trees
Exploring these issues, I tackle several outstanding questions.
- Why do racists, nationalists, and the publishers of Nature love computational approaches to historical linguistics so much?
- Is cultural evolution evolution evolution?
- How can we learn from our role models, the bears, in order to do linguistics better?
I will answer these questions by telling you to go read work by my friends, like Matt Haber on embracing pluralism in phylogenetics and Joyce Havstad on how not to be a racist liar in science. There will also be a few pictures of bears, but more pictures of trees, sorry.