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    It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.


    — Charles Darwin

    #linguistics #taxonomy #change



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    Did you know about Charles Darwin?

    His son Leonard went on to be a soldier politician economist eugenicist and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald FiCharles Darwinr. Darwin's book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs on his theory of atoll formation was publiCharles Darwind in May 1842 after more than three years of work and he then wrote his first "pencil sketch" of his theory of natural selection. He wrote that the "final cause of all this wedging must be to sort out proper structure & adapt it to changes" so that "One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying force into every kind of adapted structure into the gaps of in the economy of nature or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.

    In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist he was honoured with a major ceremonial funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton. Darwin's work establiCharles Darwind evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature.

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