A second attempt

Sticking this up as a compilation (ever expanding) of all the material I've read and would recommend you read to get a handle on the criticisms of the linguistic ideas of Chomsky. This isn't just intended to be a criticism of Chomsky personally, but also the manner of linguistics that he engendered (basically anyone that uncritically cites Chomsky as a source on the nature of language). I have ordered these by date of publication in an effort to get across how long this has been around for.

I've tried to find publically accessible links where possible, but unfortunately not everything is so available even though it should be, so I've linked in some cases to JSTOR or similar (you might be able to get a copy if you e.g. request through researchgate but that might be it if you can't get Sci-Hub to work). Also, I've not directly linked to any PDF files, so for some of these you might have to do a little crawling through a long list of publications to find them, though that should be easier given these things are usually ordered by year, a piece of information I've given you.

I do expect to be adding to this post, so expect regular updates, as well as it being pinned on my blog.

An interesting paper (Vermeij, 2015) on the "empty phenotypic space", i.e. the forms and adaptations that we do not see in the living world, possibly relevant to the convergence vs. contingency debate.

Some examples:

Wheels: some curled-up arthropods can roll around, and bacterial flagella and some parts of weevil legs rotate on their axis, but macroscopic wheels with a free axle do not exist, probably because smooth surfaces on which they'd be useful are rare and it would be difficult to grow them through embryonal development.

Animal-provided pollination and dispersal do not exist in water, with the possible exception of one species of fish-pollinated seagrass (which is a descendant of terrestrial plants). Presumably water is already good enough at carrying gametes and propagules that buying the services of an animal is a useless expense.

Mineral reef-building does not occur on land nor, more surprisingly, in freshwater. The reason for the latter is not clear, since there are enough mineral ions in freshwater to build shells. Boring of rock, shells, and wood in freshwater is also extremely rare though common in the sea.

Gelatinous plankton like salps or jellyfish (with few exceptions of the latter) is also not found in freshwater, probably because they can't survive dispersal between separate water bodies.

Endothermy ("warm blood") is generally not found in small aquatic animal, probably because water leeches away heat much faster than water, so aquatic endotherms (tunas, sharks, seals, whales) need to be bulky. On land, however, endothermy is found among tiny vertebrates and even insects.

There is no passive air-floating plankton, since air is not dense enough to support living tissue or dissolved organic matter by buoyancy. For that reason filter-feeding is also rare outside of water, while carnivorous plants are not found in the ocean (the water already carries enough nutrient). Aquatic plants do not produce wood as buoyancy is enough to keep them upright.

Large terrestrial animals do not specialize as scavengers (all mammals famous for scavenging also hunt actively); large carcasses are too spread out. All specialist scavengers on land are either very small, or flying.

Herbivory is rare among active fliers, because plant matter has a low energy density and takes a long time to digest. Herbivorous birds and insects are poor fliers or flightless, and the best fliers, like geese, are the ones that can take shelter in water.

Many more examples are only excluded from specific groups (e.g. live-bearing, despite being very common in reptiles, never appeared in birds, probably because the bird egg-shell is too mineralized to be retained in the womb as transition toward full live-bearing).

Even though the author calls them "forbidden phenotypes", only some of them are actually impossible (because they cannot evolve in the first place, or because they cost more energy than they're worth), and others simply never happened to evolve. At the end of the paper there is a list of phenotypes that would have been "forbidden" in the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion and Ordovician diversification, but which appeared later, and they include

cutins, suberins, lignins, flavonoids, alkaloids, vascular systems, roots, leaves, rigid frameworks of stems and branches, nutrition complemented by animal matter, and basal growth in land plants; nitrogen-fixing symbiosis on land; animal-mediated dispersal/pollination; silk-producing, sound-emitting, flying, eusocial, terrestrial herbivorous, wood-boring, terrestrial shell-bearing and endothermic animals; embryos nourished within the body of an animal or plant parent; mineralized phytoplankton; and rock-excavating marine herbivores. [...] photosymbiotic and chemosymbiotic molluscs, the bivalved condition in gastropods, terrestrial life in gastropods and vertebrates, complex septa within the phragmocone of externally shelled cephalopods, internalization and loss of the shell in cephalopods, cementation to the substratum with a glue of calcium carbonate and organic matrix in several animal groups (gastropods, brachiopods, bivalves and barnacles), spines on shells of several groups (brachiopods, bivalves and brachiopods), mineralized tubes in polychaete annelids, mobility in bryozoans and pelmatozoan echinoderms, jaws and teeth in vertebrates, and vascular systems in brown and red algae. A vast diversity of potent venoms also lay in the future as part of the defensive and aggressive arsenal of many gastropods, cephalopods, aculeate Hymenoptera, vertebrates and land plants.

Our results demonstrate for the first time that biotic interactions dramatically increase the probability of fertilization in a seaweed. The observation of mucilage-embedded spermatia attached to idotea body parts after visiting male gametophytes suggests that idotea may serve as “pollinators” in G. gracilis upon subsequent visits to female individuals (movie S1). If we draw a parallel with the Cox-Knox postulates that define criteria for determination of pollinators of flowering plants, our results are sufficient to prove that idoteas are efficient gamete vectors.

Although I. balthica grazes on other seaweed, it does not feed directly on Gracilaria but rather eliminates epiphytes at the surface of the thallus while protecting itself from predators. We suggest that the relationship could be mutually beneficial.

Animal pollination is generally thought to have originated during the Mesozoic for gymnosperms and angiosperms and was believed absent in mosses and ferns, in which fertilization is restricted to water. However, transport of male gametes by animals has been demonstrated recently in mosses, antedating animal-mediated pollination at the early phase of land colonization (~ 450 million years ago).

oh cOME ON

someone on reddit explained 😭

im seeing people fact-check this in the notes so i'll add that the full inscription is "marcosior maternia" and if you search that in google scholar you'll find lots of sources. it might not be true but it's definitely real, by which i mean that scholars don't know for sure what "marcosior maternia" means but this is a common interpretation. it's written on a spindle whorl (little weights that are used in spinning) and there's actually a lot of spindle whorls from roman gaul that have sort of amatory inscriptions on them, so they might have been gifts for lovers but it's not clear, but anyway a sexual meaning is perfectly expected for this type of object, and maternia looks like a woman's name in either the nominative or instrumental case, and marcosior looks like a passive verb related to the word for 'horse' in a desiderative or future form. so "i want to be ridden by maternia", "i will be ridden by maternia", and "maternia will be ridden" are some of the plausible interpretations.

Given how well-attested they are in Old Irish, it would also be a little surprising if they'd dropped out entirely in Gaulish given how much earlier our sources generally are.

That said, in Old Irish, deponents are almost all of the W2 class which forms an f-future not an s-future. Likewise, whilst there is limited evidence of deponent f-futures, there doesn't seem to be an Old Irish evidence of a deponent s-future (3rd person passive forms are known, but in Old Irish the formal identity of deponents and passives was not well maintained).

Obviously Old Irish is a complicated informant here, both because of it hardly being a close relative (within Celtic) and from the complications inherent in doing anything to do with its verbal system.

As deponent s-futures are attested elsewhere in Indo-European (e.g. Greek), and given the distribution of deponents in Old Irish, it wouldn't be too surprising if they existed there too at some stage, but later got displaced by the innovative f-future (and, provided the f-future is young, we would then expect deponent s-futures to survive in other early Celtic languages, like Gaulish).

However, the W2 verbs go back to primary thematic verbs in *ey- and athematic statives in *eh1- (or thematic in *eh1ye-), neither of which are good candidates for this verb.

We might expect instead a W1 verb (which includes thematic denominal in *-eh2ye-, parallel to the Latin 1st conjugation), or maybe a denominal in *ye- which ended up analogically drawn to the W2 class (or rather the Gaulish equivalent of it). W1 verbs also generally form f-futures, and can be deponent (although are less often so than W2 verbs), so this doesn't overly complicate the picture.

Sometimes I try composing all-new tunes, but a good chunk of the time I'm actually working off of existing hymn tunes I have access to. This one's a fun arrangement of a classic bit of English mediaeval music, the Agincourt Carol (without the Deo gratias refrain), to which I set Tate & Brady's psalm 29, which seemed to fit the mood of the arrangement I'd put together.

im seeing people fact-check this in the notes so i'll add that the full inscription is "marcosior maternia" and if you search that in google scholar you'll find lots of sources. it might not be true but it's definitely real, by which i mean that scholars don't know for sure what "marcosior maternia" means but this is a common interpretation. it's written on a spindle whorl (little weights that are used in spinning) and there's actually a lot of spindle whorls from roman gaul that have sort of amatory inscriptions on them, so they might have been gifts for lovers but it's not clear, but anyway a sexual meaning is perfectly expected for this type of object, and maternia looks like a woman's name in either the nominative or instrumental case, and marcosior looks like a passive verb related to the word for 'horse' in a desiderative or future form. so "i want to be ridden by maternia", "i will be ridden by maternia", and "maternia will be ridden" are some of the plausible interpretations.

"O my Lord," Rabi'a (717-801), Muslim saint & Sufi mystic

Once again, reality won't let The Onion remain as satire.

reblogging the golden potato

hoping it will work