#biology
Charles Darwin and the Phylogeny of State Flowers and State Trees
This is a guest post by Rachel Rodman. Photos by Daniel Murphy.
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Every U.S. state has its own set of symbols: an official flower, an official tree, and an official bird. Collectively, these organisms form the stuff of trivia and are traditionally presented in the form of a list.
But, lists…well. As charming as lists can sometimes be, lists are rarely very satisfying.
So I decided to try…
I guess Colorado and South Dakota are bros; I approve
Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (HCF) wrote a paper in 2002 entitled The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? It explicitly introduced an important distinction between the Faculty of Language in the Broad Sense (FLB) and the Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense (FLN).
FLB is made up of all the components used in language, e.g. ability for vocal learning, ability to conceptualise, a sensori-motor system, a computational system (syntax) capable of recursion etc. FLN is a subset of FLB, i.e. everything in FLN is also in FLB but not vice versa. More specifically, FLN contains only those components of FLB which are uniquely human. HCF hypothesise that FLN only contains recursion and that all other aspects of language (i.e. what constitutes the rest of FLB) can be found in non-human species.
You might not agree with HCF in terms of what to assign to FLN, but the general distinction is both useful and perhaps necessary for tackling the issue of language evolution. The first question of HCF’s title (what is it?) involves filling in the FLB category – and obviously we need to know what it is we are trying to explain the evolution of! The second question (who has it?) involves deciding whether something belongs to FLN as well. If we put something in the FLN box, we are saying it is uniquely human. This can be tested (in principle – how easy it is to test is another matter!) and this is one place where interdisciplinary research between biology and linguistics can be very fruitful and informative. Basically, from an evolution of language perspective, we want to know what exactly (if anything) makes human language special. This then leads to the third question – we can ask how the uniquely human part of language evolved, i.e. we can ask how did FLN evolve rather than the much larger question of how did FLB evolve.
Of course, having done all that, FLN might turn out to be empty! Perhaps human language is not qualitatively different, only quantitatively different. But let’s wait to see what we find!
In an attempt to bring up early human’s discovery of cookingwith fire in a discussion about evolution, I fumbled my words and accidentally implied that I believed that humanity gained some evolutionary advantages from eatingfire.
Can you imagine, though.
“All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries when she is a four month old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent 5 months in our grandmother’s womb. And she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born.”
- Layne Redmond, When the Women Were Drummers
Art by Design by Duvet Days
The other day I saw something I’ve never seen before- a Sandhill crane who was missing an eye.
This beauty is still able to carry on with normal crane life, visualized here with her guarding and feeding her very cute little chicks.
Her other eye is normal and functioning, and it seems her mate is happy to keep watch of her blind side for her.
Sandhill cranes mate for life so I hope this pair is able to raise many healthy colts together throughout the years. They seemed a lovely couple.
In honor of Gopher tortoise day (April 10th), here’s one of my favorite patients, Danny Devito the gopher tortoise! He was hit by a car and required long term care to repair the damage to his shell. This involves surgical correction of the shell fractures (hence the screws), along with supportive care and pain medication. This is him enjoying his daily outside time in the sun! After recovery in the hospital this animal was released into the wild near where he was found. Please always watch for tortoises and other reptiles when you’re out there on the road!