
A massive data dive proves that languages and genes evolve together - mmastrac
http://qz.com/336504/a-massive-data-dive-proves-that-languages-and-genes-evolve-together/
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daemonk
Doesn't this perhaps show selection based on language? People who speaks
similar languages are more likely to interact and reproduce, eventually
narrowing the gene pool.

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astazangasta
No, this is purely correlative. That's why I, with South Asian genetics, am
able to speak a language with no voiceless retroflex stop natively without
accent.

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kaoD
You might have misunderstood GP (or I might have misunderstood you).

What GP is saying is that people with the same language interact more with
each other and therefore reproduce, thus narrowing (averaging?) the gene pool
to the speakers of that language.

Not that you'd be unable speak a language because of your genes! The cause-
effect GP proposed would be language -> genes, not genes -> language (which is
what I guessed you meant to refute).

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astazangasta
I'd also dispute the likelihood of that. Genes change slowly, language changes
quickly. It seems unlikely that language could then drive genes on a global
scale.

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Jongseong
Linguists must be rolling their eyes at this study. If you want to study
language evolution, phonemes are the last thing you should look at. Languages
change, fast, and the sounds of a language change drastically over
generations. Compare modern Icelandic and Old Norse (by which we usually mean
Old Icelandic)—Icelandic is supposed to be one of the most conservative
languages and is still quite close to Old Icelandic in spite of centuries of
separation in areas like syntax and vocabulary. But if you compare the
pronunciations, they are quite different. The sounds of a language are among
its least stable aspects.

Similarities in pronunciation between languages spoken over the same region
are part of a phenomenon well known to linguists and do not imply that the
languages are related. For example in terms of a pronunciation feature called
coda devoicing, Slovene dialects near the Austrian border will pattern with
German, those near the Croatian border will pattern with Croatian, while
Standard Slovene will have something in the middle. Slovene and German are
only very distantly related.

There may be something there about closely related population groups ending up
using similar sounds even if their languages are not closely related, but I
doubt the researchers even thought about that and used phonemic distance as a
shorthand for actual linguistic distance.

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kylebgorman
I am always very leery of big-ticket science published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as this paper is. Many papers
(including this one) are not subject to peer review because they use what has
been called the "inside track" ([http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-
publishing-the-inside-...](http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-publishing-
the-inside-track-1.15424;) though note that Nature is not a disinterested
observer). This paper was "contributed" to PNAS, which means that the authors
reached out a member of the National Academy of Sciences (usually a famous
late-career scientist) who they believed would be sympathetic to the line of
work, and asked this person to serve as contributor (essentially a type of
action editor) on the piece. Importantly, this person (Marcus Feldman)
happened to be a colleague of the first author (she appears to be a postdoc at
Stanford, he is a professor at Stanford, and they have written papers
together), but the conflict of interest is ignored. Unlike a normal action
editor, however, the contributor is not expected to identify potential
adversarial reviewers, or even to take negative reviews into account! As a
result, a significant minority of PNAS "contributed" papers clearly wouldn't
have made it past peer review elsewhere. Famously, the 'contributed' track has
been widely abused (e.g., by Linus Pauling, who hoped to beat Crick & Watson
to discover the structure of DNA--unfortunately, his structure is clearly
wrong.)

I am not saying that this is the case for this paper. However, I note that
there are no linguist authors, no linguist reviewers, and no linguist editors,
involved in the process. And, as a linguist, I don't understand the motivation
for this work. The presence of a phoneme in language X and language Y tells me
next to nothing about the relationship between X and Y; there is no theory of
"phoneme evolution" because the evolutionary metaphor is irrelevant at best
(there is no analogue to selection). And we've known for centuries that
unrelated languages in close contact may borrow phonemes from each other
(retroflex t in South Asia being the parade example), and obviously close
contact will lead to genetic transfer too.

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skywhopper
This is interesting research, but it's also completely unsurprising. As human
populations migrate, expand, collapse, invade, mix, and die out, both their
culture and their genes will do all those same things.

