8 Evolutionary models in other disciplines

Abstract

“Stemmatology usually works with texts that change during their copying history.” If we conduct a small experiment of metaphorically zooming out and replacing the nouns in this sentence with nouns from a higher, more general category, we could say: “Genealogical science usually works with sequences that change during their transmission.” Some sciences for which this statement is applicable – though not all of them – will be the focus of this chapter. The formulation “sequences that change during transmission” hints at e v o l u t i o n a r y theory, although the concept of evolution more specifically entails mutation and selection as agents of change, and therefore carries strong biological connotations. Nonetheless, it has been used to convey different notions of processes of change which lead to hierarchical or temporally successive structures in various disciplines; thus, we can speak of biological evolution, text evolution, language evolution, the evolution of writing materials, and so on. The main visual metaphor for such structures, and the only figure in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), is the t r e e. The tree as a mathematical, analytical structure has been used, in turn, for a huge number of purposes, be it in one of its first attested usages, as a family tree for aristocratic families (see Lima 2014, 29); as a stemma codicum; or as a way of displaying folder and file structures on a computer. As Lima (2011, 43) points out, the tree has been appreciated on the one hand and attacked on the other (and not only in stemmatology). Yet it has survived criticism and continues to be widely used. So far, in this book we have looked at many kinds of stemmatic trees. In this chapter, we will focus on fellow trees from other disciplines, which together form the forest of “trees of history”, as O’Hara (1996) proposed to call some of them. The application of the tree model in science as an analytical tool is – as already stated – very broad and has had a special role as a “tool of thought” in Europe (KlapischZuber 2007, 293). The habitat of our forest is indeed vast. In fact, it is so large that we will not be able to cover all the applications of trees (for which Lima 2014, among others, could be consulted); instead, we limit ourselves to some of the disciplines most intimately related to stemmatology: linguistics, cultural evolution, musicology, and biology. What are the parallels, what are the differences, what can we learn from each other, what can we borrow or incorporate, and what are the interfaces stemmatology shares with these sciences? These are some of the leading questions to keep in mind when reading this chapter. Phylogenetics (8.1) has functioned as a donor of many computational tools (see 5.2, 5.4) to stemmatology. Linguistics (8.2) makes complex genealogical judgements just as stemmatology does, albeit with a focus on language as a whole, not on a single work. Anthropological phylomemetics (8.3; an umbrella term proposed by C. J. Howe and Windram 2011) is, on the one hand, concerned with trees of cultural artefacts (e.g. material relevant to codicology, book binding types) and, on the