Cladistic trees

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Scientific American (February 2000 pp.90-95)
has a really excellent article

"Uprooting the Tree of Life"

describing the revolution from the biological classification
of Linnaeus to trees based only on shared innovations,
just like what we ideally practice in linguistics.

It shows also biological trees without roots,
and trees with multiple roots.

This should be a very good set of analogies
for thinking about where comparative-reconstructive
linguistics has been and where it may be going.
Also of non-analogies.

In the same article there is a review of a book
"In Search of Deep Time:
Beyond the Fossil record to a New History of Life"
which discusses the problem of what data is lost
and how we recover history.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics (couldn't resist)

(and the title of this message is odd, or redundant,
given the origin of the term "cladistic")