Spencer Matthew, Davidson Elizabeth A, Barbrook Adrian C, Howe Christopher J
Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QW, UK.
J Theor Biol. 2004 Apr 21;227(4):503-11. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2003.11.022.
Biological evolution has parallels with the development of natural languages, man-made artifacts, and manuscript texts. As a result, phylogenetic methods developed for evolutionary biology are increasingly being used in linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, and textual criticism. Despite this popularity, there have been few critical tests of their suitability. Here, we apply phylogenetic methods to artificial manuscripts with a known true phylogeny, produced by modern 'scribes'. Although the survival of ancestral forms and multiple descendants from a single ancestor are probably much more common in manuscript evolution than biological evolution, we were able to reconstruct most of the true phylogeny. This is important because phylogenetic methods are influencing the production of critical editions of major written works. We also show that the variation in rates of change at different locations in the text follows a gamma distribution, as is often the case in DNA sequences.
生物进化与自然语言、人造器物和手稿文本的发展存在相似之处。因此，为进化生物学开发的系统发育方法越来越多地被用于语言学、人类学、考古学和文本批评。尽管这种方法很受欢迎，但对其适用性的严格测试却很少。在这里，我们将系统发育方法应用于由现代“抄写员”制作的、具有已知真实系统发育关系的人工手稿。尽管在手稿进化中祖先形式和单一祖先的多个后代的留存可能比生物进化中更为常见，但我们仍能够重建大部分真实的系统发育关系。这很重要，因为系统发育方法正在影响主要书面作品的校勘版制作。我们还表明，文本中不同位置变化率的差异遵循伽马分布，这在DNA序列中经常出现。
