[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomy notes the new X-ray telescope eROSITA.
• Centauri Dreams notes evidence of a recent collision between planets in the system of BD +20 307.
• D-Brief notes the appearance of a strange new sort of storm on Saturn.
• Bruce Dorminey notes the discovery by astronomers of a set of orbits that can direct comets into the inner solar system.
• Drew Ex Machina’s Andrew LePage shares some vintage Skylab photos of his native Massachusetts.
• Far Outliers notes how, in 1786, the United states was uninclined to pay tribute to the Barbary States.
• Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky reports on a new fossil discovery showing how quickly mammals took over after the Cretaceous.
• The Island Review shares an essay by photographer Alex Boyd about his new book Isles of Rust, drawing from Lewis & Harris.
• JSTOR Daily looks at sustainable butchery.
• Language Hat notes that Sumerian cuneiform is now in Unicode.
• Victor Mair at Language Log notes how the Indo-Iranian “don” so commonly forms part of the hydronyms for major European rivers.
• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money calls for an in-depth investigation of Donald Trump, not necessarily an impeachment.
• The LRB Blog examines the background of the mass protests in Santiago and wider Chile.
• The Map Room Blog shares an illuminating cartogram depicting the #elxn43 results in Canada.
• Marginal Revolution looks at how the government of China has been using the NBA to buy social peace.
• The NYR Daily interviews Naomi Oreskes about her campaign to have the science behind global warming, and the actions of the scientists involved, understood.
• The Russian Demographics Blog links to a paper concluding that traditional gender specializations in British families no longer provide a reproductive advantage.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why the speed of gravity must equal the speed of light, if general relativity is to work.
• Window on Eurasia examines the rapid and uncontrolled growth of urban populations in Kazakhstan.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams notes the astounding precision of the new Habitable Planet Finder telescope.
• D-Brief notes that the lack of small craters on Pluto and Charon suggests there are not many small bodies in the Kuiper Belt.
• Far Outliers notes the many and widely varying transliterations of Bengali to English.
• JSTOR Daily notes the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.
• Language Log examines the emergence of the Germanic languages in the depths of prehistory.
• Anna Aslanyan at the LRB Blog considers the eternal search for a universal language.
• Noah Smith shareshis Alternative Green New Deal Plan at his blog, one that depends more on technology and market forces than the original.
• Mitchell Abidor at the NYR Daily writes about the incisive leftism of journalist Victor Sorge.
• Out There notes the reality that the worlds of our solar system, and almost certainly other systems, are united by a constant stream of incoming rocks.
• At the Planetary Society Blog, Emily Lakdawalla examines the data transmitted back by OSIRIS-REx from that probe’s Earth flyby.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel examines cosmic conditions at the time the solar system formed 4.56 billion or so years ago.
• Towleroad notes the censorship of many explicitly gay scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody in its Chinese release.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the many ways in which the social norms of North Caucasian men are converging with those of the average Russian.
• On St. David’s Day, Arnold Zwicky pays tribute to the daffodil and to the Welsh.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• At Anthropology.net, Kamzib Kamrani looks at the Yamnaya horse culture of far eastern Europe and their connection to the spread of the Indo-Europeans.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the predicted collision of China’s Tiangong-1 space station. Where will it fall?
• James Bow notes a Kickstarter funding effort to revive classic Canadian science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.
• Centauri Dreams notes the impending retirement of the pioneering Kepler telescope, and what’s being done in the time before this retirement.
• D-Brief notes how nanowires made of gold and titanium were used to restore the sight of blind mice.
• Russell Darnley takes a look at the indigenous people of Riau province, the Siak, who have been marginalized by (among other things) the Indonesian policy of transmigration.
• Dead Things reports on more evidence of Denisovan ancestry in East Asian populations, with the suggestion that the trace of Denisovan ancestry in East Asia came from a different Denisovan population than the stronger traces in Melanesia.
• Hornet Stories paints a compelling portrait of the West Texas oasis-like community of Marfa.
• JSTOR Daily notes how indigenous mythology about illness was used to solve a hantavirus outbreak in New Mexico in the 1990s.
• Language Log praises the technical style of a Google Translate translation of a text from German to English.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that, under the Shah, Iran was interested in building nuclear plants. Iranian nuclear aspirations go back a long way.
• The LRB Blog looks at the unsettling elements of the literary, and other, popularity of Jordan Peterson.
• Marginal Revolution notes the continuing existence of a glass ceiling even in relatively egalitarian Iceland.
• The NYR Daily looks at the unsettling elements behind the rise of Xi Jinping to unchecked power. Transitions from an oligarchy to one-man rule are never good for a country, never mind one as big as China.
• Drew Rowsome writes about Love, Cecil, a new film biography of photographer Cecil Beaton.
• Peter Rukavina celebrates the 25th anniversary of his move to Prince Edward Island. That province, my native one, is much the better for his having moved there. Congratulations!
• Window on Eurasia looks at a strange story of Russian speculation about Kazakh pan-Turkic irredentism for Orenburg that can be traced back to one of its own posts.
• At Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Frances Woolley takes the time to determine that Canadian university professors tend to be more left-wing than the general Canadian population, and to ask why this is the case.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• The Big Picture shares shocking photos of the Portuguese forest fires.
• blogTO notes that, happily, Seaton Village’s Fiesta Farms is apparently not at risk of being turned into a condo development site.
• Centauri Dreams notes a new starship discussion group in Delft. Shades of the British Interplanetary Society and the Daedalus?
• D-Brief considers a new theory explaining why different birds’ eggs have different shapes.
• The Frailest Thing’s Michael Sacasas commits himself to a new regimen of blogging about technology and its imports. (There is a Patreon.)
• Language Hat notes the current Turkish government’s interest in purging Turkish of Western loanwords.
• Language Log’s Victor Mair sums up the evidence for the diffusion of Indo-European languages, and their speakers, into India.
• The LRB Blog notes the Theresa May government’s inability post-Grenfell to communicate with any sense of emotion.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen wonders if the alt-right more prominent in the Anglophone world because it is more prone to the appeal of the new.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw wonders if Brexit will result in a stronger European Union and a weaker United Kingdom.
• Seriously Science reports a study suggesting that shiny new headphones are not better than less flashy brands.
• Torontoist reports on the anti-Muslim hate groups set to march in Toronto Pride.
• Understanding Society considers the subject of critical realism in sociological analyses.
• Window on Eurasia notes how Russia’s call to promote Cyrillic across the former Soviet Union has gone badly in Armenia, with its own script.

[LINK] “Mismodeling Indo-European Origin and Expansion”

I mentioned last August a recent computer study claiming that, contrary to current consensus, the ur-heimat of Indo-European languages was located not in the Pontic steppes on the northern shore of the Black Sea but rather in the landmass of Anatolia on the southern shore. I linked in passing to Razib Khan’s GNXP criticism of problems with the model used by the team–Romani’s divergence from South Asian Indo-European languages is much more historically recent than the model claims, notably–but now at Geocurrents, Martin Lewis has a long post with the full title of “Mismodeling Indo-European Origin and Expansion: Bouckaert, Atkinson, Wade and the Assault on Historical Linguistics” taking issue with the basic claims. Five paragraphs are excerpted below.

Our initial response was one of profound skepticism, as it hardly seemed likely that a single mathematical study could “solve” one of the most carefully examined conundrums of the distant human past. Recent work in both linguistics and archeology, moreover, has tended against the Anatolian hypothesis, placing Indo-European origins in the steppe and parkland zone of what is now Ukraine, southwest Russia, and environs. The massive literature on the subject was exhaustively weighed as recently as 2007 by David W. Anthony in his magisterial study, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Could such a brief article as that of Bouckaert et al. really overturn Anthony’s profound syntheses so easily?

The more we examined the articles in question, the more our reservations deepened. In the Science piece, the painstaking work of generations of historical linguists who have rigorously examined Indo-European origins and expansion is shrugged off as if it were of no account, even though the study itself rests entirely on the taken-for-granted work of linguists in establishing relations among languages based on words of common descent (cognates). In Wade’s New York Times article, contending accounts and lines of evidence are mentioned, but in a casual and slipshod manner. More problematic are the graphics offered by Bouckaert and company. The linguistic family trees generated by their model are clearly wrong, as we shall see in forthcoming posts. And on the website that accompanies the article, an animated map (“movie,” according to its creators) of Indo-European expansion is so error-riddled as to be amusing, and the conventional map on the same site is almost as bad. Mathematically intricate though it may be, the model employed by the authors nonetheless churns out demonstrably false information.

Failing the most basic tests of verification, the Bouckaert article typifies the kind of undue reductionism that sometimes gives scientific excursions into human history and behavior a bad name, based on the belief that a few key concepts linked to clever techniques can allow one to side-step complexity, promising mathematically elegant short-cuts to knowledge. While purporting to offer a truly scientific* approach, Bouckaert et al. actually forward an example of scientism, or the inappropriate and overweening application of specific scientific techniques to problems that lie beyond their own purview.

The Science article lays its stake to scientific standing in a straightforward but unconvincing manner. The authors claim that as two theories of Indo-European (I-E) origin vie for acceptance, a geo-mathematical analysis based on established linguistic and historical data can show which one is correct. Actually, many theories of I-E origin have been proposed over the years, most of which—including the Anatolian hypothesis—have been rejected by most specialists on empirical grounds. Establishing the firm numerical base necessary for an all-encompassing mathematical analysis of splitting and spreading languages is, moreover, all but impossible. The list of basic cognates found among Indo-European languages is not settled, nor is the actual enumeration of separate I-E languages, and the timing of the branching of the linguistic tree remains controversial as well. As a result of such uncertainties, errors can easily accumulate and compound, undermining the approach.

The scientific failings of the Bouckaert et al. article, however, go much deeper than that of mere data uncertainty. The study rests on unexamined postulates about language spread, assuming that the process works through simple spatial diffusion in much the same way as a virus spreads from organism to organism. Such a hypothesis is intriguing, but must be regarded as a proposition rather than a given, as it does not rest on a foundation of evidence. The scientific method calls for all such assumptions to be put to the test. One can easily do so in this instance. One could, for example, mathematically model the hypothesized diffusion of Indo-European languages for historical periods in which we have firm linguistic-geographical information to see if the predicted patterns conform to those of the real world. If they do not, one could only conclude that the approach fails. Such failure could stem either from the fact that the data used are too incomplete and compromised to be of value (garbage in/garbage out), of from a more general collapse of the diffusional model. Either possibility would invalidate the Science article.

This is promised to be the first post of a few criticizing the paper.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Andrew Barton remarks on the fact that not only are the dominant newspapers of British Columbia part of a commercial monopoly, they’re all going up behind paywalls, too.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster notes that galaxies like our Milky Way, which has two relatively large satellite galaxies (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds), are actually quite rare in the universe.
• In his ongoing False Steps blog, describes a proposed American spacecraft designed in 1946 that could have sent an astronaut into space a decade ahead of time.
• Geocurrents describes the peculiar situation of the booming Somalian city of Galkayo, divided between two state-like entities.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan is very critical of the recently-voiced argument that Indo-European languages evolved in Anatolia, not the Pontic steppes.
• Marginal Revolution takes note of Mexico’s heavy investment in the United States, one data point illustrating that Mexico is actually something of a global economic power.
• New APPS Blog’s Mohan Matthen revisits the question of Gandhi criticism.
• Savage Minds links to an anthropologist’s posting describing how, given the terrible economic prospects for students in the field, the only future for anthropology truly is outside of academia. More later.
• Torontoist takes note of the commemoration of the one-year anniversary of Jack Layton’s death at Toronto City Hall.
• Towleroad’s Andrew Belonsky points out that the ongoing trend in the United States towards acceptance of same-sex marriage is likely to influence eventual Supreme Court decisions.
• At The Way the Future Blogs, Frederik Pohl is right to note that one major element behind the decline of Mexican emigration to the United States is the sharp fall in the Mexican fertility rate. This is not the only factor at play, however, as he implies.

[LINK] “Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say”

Nicholas Wade’s New York Times article on the latest theory about the place of origin of the Indo-European languages–the family of languages spoken native in Europe, Iran, and South Asia, and, via Eurasian colonialism in the previous half-millennium, nearly all of the Western Hemisphere and Australasia–surprises me. I had thought the question of Indo-European origins to have been decisively settled, the steppes north of the Black Sea being the urheimat of the proto-Indo-Europeans. That clearly doesn’t seem to be the case.

Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.

The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.

The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,” they report.

But despite its advanced statistical methods, their study may not convince everyone.

The researchers started with a menu of vocabulary items that are known to be resistant to linguistic change, like pronouns, parts of the body and family relations, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. Words that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral word are known as cognates. Thus “mother,” “mutter” (German), “mat’ ” (Russian), “madar” (Persian), “matka” (Polish) and “mater” (Latin) are all cognates derived from the proto-Indo-European word “mehter.”

Dr. Atkinson and his colleagues then scored each set of words on the vocabulary menu for the 103 languages. In languages where the word was a cognate, the researchers assigned it a score of 1; in those where the cognate had been replaced with an unrelated word, it was scored 0. Each language could thus be represented by a string of 1’s and 0’s, and the researchers could compute the most likely family tree showing the relationships among the 103 languages.

A computer was then supplied with known dates of language splits. Romanian and other Romance languages, for instance, started to diverge from Latin after A.D. 270, when Roman troops pulled back from the Roman province of Dacia. Applying those dates to a few branches in its tree, the computer was able to estimate dates for all the rest.

The computer was also given geographical information about the present range of each language and told to work out the likeliest pathways of distribution from an origin, given the probable family tree of descent. The calculation pointed to Anatolia, particularly a lozenge-shaped area in what is now southern Turkey, as the most plausible origin — a region that had also been proposed as the origin of Indo-European by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in 1987, because it was the source from which agriculture spread to Europe.