I was recently shown a picture of a bird on someone’s phone and and asked if I could identify it. From a distance, obviously a crow. Perhaps it was melanistic, I suggested. What I meant was leucistic. Which is, kind of, the opposite (I mentioned a rare melanistic female House Sparrow seen in Northumberland in Animal Wild). I was still completely wrong. Looking more closely, bells started to ring. This was a particular crow species. “American?”, I wondered, dredging the recesses of my brain. The bird looked to be wearing a greyish white cape. He or she was of course a Hooded Crow, common in the north of the UK and elsewhere, although I have never seen one. It would probably have helped if I had. It is a separate species (with four sub-species) closely related to the Carrion Crow, indeed they hybridise, which contradicts some definitions of the word “species”.
What got to me about this was that this was something I am sure I used to know. It made me wonder what else I had forgotten, going back even to my schooldays. Taxonomy sprang to mind – a word I see and hear often enough, but recently have let wash over me with only the vaguest understanding of what it meant. So I decided to relearn it and I very glad I did – it has sent me down all sorts of new paths.
Like the Theory of Evolution it is simple enough on the surface, incredibly complex in the detail. The system of classification has been improved and refined since Linnaeus developed it in the eighteenth century, but the essence has not changed.
At the top of the “tree of life” is life itself, or “all life”. Hence viruses are excluded, although whether some or all viruses are alive or not is still very much a matter of debate. After that, I delighted in learning again, are the Domains, of which there are currently three: Prokarya (which includes bacteria), Archaea and Eukarya. The last comprises organisms which have nucleic cells and includes all those life-forms with which we are most familiar and can see with the naked eye. All of this is of course a massive over-simplification and there are many (debatable) sub-divisions. The next level of classification is the Kingdom: Animals, Plants Fungi, unicellular Monera, and Protists (everything else). Some sources include Eubacteria and Archaebacteria amongst the Kingdoms. Over time, however, categorisations have changed and so all of this is far from set in stone. The next level is the Phylum, of which there are many. We belong to the Chordata and within that the Vertebrates, having, basically, a backbone. Both have a central nervous system. Other Phyla include the Arthropods and Molluscs.
Classes, such as Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, follow, then Orders: Cetacea, Carnivores, Artiodactyla (even-toed hoofed animals like Moose, Camels and Giraffes), Chiropptera (Bats), Rodents and Primates. Moving on down, or up, we reach the Family: loosely, Cats, Dogs, Bears, Mustelids, Seals (two different families), Hyenas (in a family of their own, interestingly), and so on. Then it’s down to the nitty- gritty, Genus and Species. Species within a Genus are closely related and each Species is unique. These are always given in Latin and italicised, with only the Genus in capital case (I am capitalising a lot here to try to keep things clear, if only in my own mind). Thus the Red Fox is Vulpes vulpes.
The full classification of the modern human being is: Eukaryota (Domain, we have cells with nuclei), Animalia (Kingdom), Chordata (Phylum), Mammalia (Class), Primates (Order – although we belong to sub-orders of this), Hominidae (Family), Homo sapiens (Genus and Species).
All of this led me to what is perhaps the most wonderful and fascinating website I have ever come across:
It is a fully interactive tree of life and one could easily spend hours exploring it. It is searchable and you can zoom in and out as you like. Since I work with them every week at HART Wildlife Rescue, I decided to start with the Hedgehog, specifically the Northern Hedgehog, Erinaceous europaeus. Unsurprisingly, they are on a rather lonely branch of the tree. They are Placental Mammals, Carnivores of course and beyond that Insectivores. Moles and Shrews occupy other branches, Hedgehogs share theirs only with the Gymnures like the Moonrat. There are fifteen Species of Hedgehog in total, ours being one of only two “Woodland Hedgehogs”.
My next stop, Elephants are not so very far away on the tree. Which animals is it they are closely related to again? Just zoom in: Manatees, Dugongs and, bizarrely, Hyraxes (four Species), which look like Rodents to me. The African and African Forest Elephants are, respectively, Loxodonta africana and Loxodonta cyclosis but the Asian Elephant is Elephas maximus. It is mind-blowing stuff. The Echidna (a very useful word for crossword* compilers), which looks like a Hedgehog, is somewhere else altogether, closer to the Platypuses, being Monotremes, the only living Mammals which lay eggs. Our own close relationship to Chimpanzees and Bonobos can be seen at a glance.
*Two wonderful words new to me this week from this source: “wapentake”, deriving from the Old Norse, a county division, and “farouche”, which, amazingly, can mean either wild or shy, and a reminder of “Polari”, a lexicon of slang used especially although not exclusively by the gay community.
The Tree of Life is a fractal, and fractals have fascinated me for years. Or is it? Fractals are not easy to define, but they are essentially complex repeating patterns regardless of the scale at which one looks at them. Again, simple enough as a concept on the surface … They follow the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, which also generates the Golden Ratio. Fractals appear in all sorts of places in nature: ferns and snowflakes are two of the most often cited examples.
Because of them, it is impossible to accurately measure a coastline (aka the Coastline Paradox) – it all depends on your unit of measurement. Coastlines are in a way infinitely long or approach the infinite. Actual trees are fractal too. There are many websites where you can have fun adjusting parameters to generate fractals, for example:
https://fractal-tree-generator.netlify.app/
The Tree of Languages can be seen here:
The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic | Open Culture
It is usually described as beautiful but I can’t say it floats my boat aesthetically, however it is fascinating and reminds me that Frisian is the language closest to English on the Germanic branch of the tree. Watching the tv quiz Only Connect recently I was reminded too of the Great Vowel Shift (linguistics, which included Old, Middle and Modern English was my favourite part of my university degree) which over time meant that vowel articulation in Middle and Early Modern English became very different, and Grimm’s Law (I am really reaching back here), a much earlier sound shift between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. I used to be able to write fluently in the phonetic alphabet (the real one, not Alpha, Bravo, Charlie etc.) and runes for that matter. I can probably still read it without too much difficulty. There is another alphabet, known as the Cockney Alphabet which my father loved and used to entertain us. It began “A for ‘orses, B for lamb, C for ‘th Highlanders, D for mation … Favourites were F for vescence, G for police, L for leather, M for sis, and R for mo.
Which, in a very circuitous way, brings me to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, named after its originators and also known as the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. I had never heard of it until I watched the 2016 film Arrival the other day, which was not at all the mindless sci-fi romp I had expected. It centres around a linguist who is tasked with interpreting the symbols presented by extra-terrestrial life forms twelve of whose spaceships have arrived to hover in various places just above our planet’s surface. Their language is a gift to humankind. Our heroine eventually realises, through studying the symbols, that the aliens perceive time differently from us, as does she. Human-driven catastrophe is averted and nations co-operate peacefully. I love the movie Contact as well, with Jodie Foster, based on the great Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggest that our thought processes are guided by the language we use – another major simplification on my part. Does language influence culture or is it the other way around? I will go with the consensus – like the supposed nature and nurture, it is a bit of both. We spent many happy hours as students attempting to devise rules and structures for the English language based on the thinking of the uber-linguist Noam Chomsky*, also as a philosopher and political commentator a hero of mine. He suggested that humans are born with an intuitive set of grammatical rules, a Universal Grammar. This went against previous thinking that language was acquired purely by means of imitation, reinforcement and conditioning. Our understanding of Universal Grammar (and not everyone acknowledges its existence) is still in its early stages.
I seem to have understood “affix hopping” and “particle movement” and created diagrams like these ( one with tutor’s comment):
What I do remember very clearly is that our student diagrams invariably took the form of … trees. Which brings this post full circle.
Chomsky:
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