Henry M. Hoenigswald (1915–2003)

The editors have compiled the essays of sixteen scholars across various science disciplines from botano-biology to linguistics,

"Biological metaphor has been utilized in many fields for both artistic and heuristic purposes. The dynamic aspects of biological systems, the birth, growth, decay, and death of individual organisms, the change of one form into another over time, and the appearance and extinction of species are all compelling images."

The editors have captured the opportunity created by the emergence of the "sciences" of biological taxonomy and linguistics in 19th century Europe as both have been evolving. And "For the past ten years" it has reached a kind of "revolution" among the systematists in the biological community. [xi].

Cladistic classification involves constructing a tree in which branch points are based on possession of derived or more recent characters as distinguished from primitive characters. Competing methods, for example taking phenetic foci, or shared ecological niches, or rate of change in a taxon since branching, differ from cladistic methodology. Since classification has been cladistic for well over a hundred years, the recent use by biologists is a surprise. At the same time, the use of trees based explicitly on measures of similarity, which preceded the use of cladistics in biology, is now being used by linguists under the name of lexicostatistics or glottochronology. [xi] Helpful to know. Now?

Cladistics in biological sciences has generally been accepted as the best methodology since the 1980s. Cladistics is an approach to classification that relies on the identification of unique features to determine monophyletic groups. (Groups with a common ancestor.) Of course, common sense must also accompany any reconstruction of a genealogy.

Linguists and biologists face many of the same issues in trying to classify the objects of their studies. The glimpse across the "specializations" is useful for finding solutions. Both bio-botanical and linguistic sciences have moved from the "family" metaphor to the "tree" for modeling genealogy or relationships. This brilliant compilation across specialized sciences will increase the accuracy of the cladistic method used by all of them.… (meer)