Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

The inference of evolutionary history, whether in biology or in linguistics, is aided by a carefully considered model of the evolutionary process and a reconstruction method which is expected to produce a reasonably accurate estimation of the true evolutionary history when the real data match the model assumptions and are of sufficient quantity. In molecular systematics (i.e., the inference of evolutionary histories from molecular data), much of the research effort has focused in two areas: first, the development of increasingly parameter rich models of molecular sequence evolution, and second, the development of increasingly sophisticated software tools and algorithms for reconstructing phylogenies under these models. The plethora of software for reconstructing phylogenies from molecular data is staggering. By comparison, much less has been done in historical linguistics in terms of developing statistical models of character evolution or reconstruction methods, suggesting that there is perhaps much to be gained by doing so. ...

A familiar complaint about statisticians and applied mathematicians is that they are the possessors of a relatively small number of rather elegant hammers with which they roam the world seeking convenient nails to pound, or at least screws they can pretend are nails. One all too often hears tales of scholars who have begun to describe the details of their particular research problem to a statistician, only to have the statistician latch on to a few phrases early in the conversation and then glibly announce that the problem is an exemplar of a standard one in statistics that has a convenient, pre-packaged solution - preferably one that uses some voguish, recently developed technique (bootstrap, wavelets, Markov chain Monte Carlo, hidden Markov models,...)

propose here to give detailed or specific critiques of these, which are available elsewhere, but look at the broader problem behind the failure to achieve an interdisciplinary consensus on how phylogenetic methods, initially developed for applications outside linguistics, can ...