Phylogenetic signal in characters from Aristotle’s History of Animals

The influential Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) is almost unanimously acclaimed as the founder of zoology. There is a consensus that he was interested in attributes of animals, but whether or not he tried to develop a zoological taxonomy remains controversial. Fürst von Lieven and Humar compiled a data matrix from Aristotle’s Historia animalium and showed, through a parsimony analysis published in 2008, that these data produced a hierarchy that matched several taxa recognized by Aristotle. However, their analysis leaves some questions unanswered because random data can sometimes yield fairly resolved trees. In this study, we update the scores of many cells and add four new characters to the data matrix (147 taxa scored for 161 characters) and quote passages from Aristotle’s Historia animalium to justify these changes. We confirm the presence of a phylogenetic signal in these data through a test using skewness in length distribution of a million random trees, which shows that many of the characters discussed by Aristotle were systematically relevant. Our parsimony analyses on the updated matrix recover far more trees than reported by Fürst von Lieven and Humar, but their consensus includes many taxa that Aristotle recognized and apparently named for the first time, such as selachē (selachians) and dithyra (Bivalvia Linnaeus, 1758). This study suggests that even though taxonomy was obviously not Aristotle’s chief interest in Historia animalium, it was probably among his secondary interests. These results may pave the way for further taxonomic studies in Aristotle’s zoological writings in general. Despite being almost peripheral to Aristotle’s writings, his taxonomic contributions are clearly major achievements.

Phylogenetic Signal in Characters from Aristotle’s History of Animals

The great Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) is almost unanimously acclaimed as the founder of zoology. There is a consensus that he was interested in attributes of animals, but whether or not he tried to develop a zoological taxonomy remains controversial. Fürst von Lieven and Humar compiled a data matrix and showed, through a parsimony analysis published in 2008, that these data produced a hierarchy that matched several taxa recognized by Aristotle. However, their analysis leaves some questions unanswered because random data can sometimes yield fairly resolved trees. In this study, we update the scores of many cells and add four new characters to the data matrix (147 taxa scored for 161 characters) and quote passages from Aristotle’s Historia animalium to justify these changes. We confirm the presence of a phylogenetic signal in these data through a test using skewness in length distribution of a million random trees, which shows that many of the characters discussed by Aristotle were systematically relevant. Our parsimony analyses on the updated matrix recover far more trees than reported by Fürst von Lieven and Humar, but their consensus includes many taxa that Aristotle recognized and apparently named for the first time, such as selachē (selachians) and dithyra (Bivalvia). This study suggests that even though taxonomy was clearly not Aristotle’s chief interest in Historia animalium, it was probably among his secondary interests. These results may pave the way for further taxonomic studies in Aristotle’s zoological writings in general. Despite being almost peripheral to Aristotle’s writings, his taxonomic contributions are clearly major achievements.

My Chief Interest Is Germination: an Interview with Elisa Kay Sparks

Elisa Kay Sparks, Professor Emerita of English at Clemson University, has established a career that is a source of inspiration to any scholar in the Humanities. Having taught Literature and Women’s Studies for 35 years at Clemson, she is part of the history of entire generations of students. Furthermore, Professor Sparks's research interests and practices put her at an ideal standpoint to discuss the “connections and innovations” element of this number's theme. She is an international reference in Virginia Woolf and Modernist Studies and one of the Virginia Woolf International Society’s main collaborators. Throughout the years, she has established an impressive body of critical work investigating parks, gardens, and flowers in Woolf’s life and writing. She has also drawn innovative connections between the works of the modernist writer and those of the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Taking in the stature of Professor Sparks’s contributions to Woolf Studies specifically and to the Humanities in a broader sense allows us to fully appreciate the reach of her views on the importance of sharing knowledge. For, beyond the fact that Professor Sparks is a prolific researcher, she is a truly generous one. Throughout the years, she has authored numerous blogs sharing her findings with readers and researchers entirely for free. In this interview, it becomes clear that, allied with the rigour of her academic production and her extraordinary career as a teacher, this impulse towards making knowledge and critical thinking as widely available as possible makes Professor Sparks a model of academic practice we should all aspire to.

Can Imperialists Produce Knowledge?

Mountstuart Elphinstone's administration as Governor of Bombay consolidated East India Company rule over large tracts of Central, Western, and Northwestern India. It represented a new and unmistakable projection of both British armed force and knowledge production. In this chapter, the work of a prominent soldier-administrator scholar whose work was strongly encouraged by Elphinstone, the father of Maratha history, James Grant Duff, is taken up. The line of argument is that, despite the imperial and military conditions that made Grant Duff's research possible, it is a mistake to see it simply as a project of colonial hegemony and not a major, even foundational intellectual production and act of public reason submitted to the cosmopolitan world of letters from which Indians were not, in principle, excluded. The chapter thus suggests grounds for breaking with the Saidian paradigm not simply on positivist grounds, but in favor of finer grained historical and more discerning ideological analysis. This means paying close attention to Grant Duff's (and his History's) struggle against the East India Company itself, whose chief interest was not knowledge so much as secrecy.

In Search of Catharsis. Theatre in Serbia in the 1990s

This paper discusses various points about the response of the Serbian theatre to the social crisis of the 1990s. The focus here is on publicly-funded theatres and their role in pacifying or mobilizing theatre audiences either to participate in or revolt against the political projects which accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The Serbian theatre system in the 1990s entered a clear process of transformation of its models of management, production, financing, public relations and, naturally, the language and forms of expression inherited from the socialist 1980s. The chief interest of this study is the transformation of the theatre system since the end of World War II, theatrical interpretations of the historical and literary past in Serbia, the role of theatre in the identity ‘makeovers’ that followed the demise of Yugoslavia, and stage interpretations of contemporary crises. Consideration is also given to the present state of the theatre in Serbia.

Contemporary Romanian Art in the United States

The article discusses the recent international interest in contemporary Romanian art and its growth in market share, with a focus on the United States. The theme is followed thorough in numerous museum exhibitions, increased collector following, art fair presence, gallery representation and auction activity initially in Europe and the United States. The phenomenon is discussed both in the context of the larger international movement conducive to the contemporary art price bubble, and in that of the local socio-economic changes. My chief interest lies in the factors leading up to the entry of post 1989 Romanian art in the global arena as a manifestation of market forces in the field. The analysis follows its grass roots local emergence through non-profit institutions, individual artists, small publications, low budget galleries, as well as the lack of contribution (with few notable exceptions) of state institutions, while pointing out the national context of increasing deregulation of social support systems resulting in lack of focus on cultural manifestations. The conclusion is that the recent ascent of contemporary Romanian art (and coincidentally, the award winning contemporary Romanian cinematography) is a fortuitous convergence of various factors, among which, increased international mobility and sharing. At the same time, it is also the result of the evolution of various individual artists that pursued a form of art rooted in Romanian artistic tradition but with a focus on the symbolic figurative. The result is a personal semiotics of raising the mundane to extraordinary levels that reconfigured the anxiety of entering a new system into an unmistakable and lasting visual language.

Tablets from the Sippar Library XIII Enūma Anu Ellil XX

The Sippar Library tablet IM 124485 is a new source for Tablet XX of Enūma Anu Ellil (EAE), the great compilation of Babylonian celestial and meteorological omens. The twentieth tablet of the series, which deals principally with lunar eclipses on the fourteenth day of each month of the year, was edited by Francesca Rochberg in 1988 along with all the other tablets of lunar-eclipse omens in EAE (Rochberg-Halton 1988: Chapter 10). Rochberg was unable to report the whole text of her MS M = ND 4357, a Neo-Assyrian tablet from the library of the temple of Nabû at Kalaḫ; it can now be consulted as CTN IV 5 (Wiseman and Black 1996: Pls. 5–6, 145), though the copy of the reverse is inadequate. In addition a Late Babylonian exemplar of a further commentary, written in the time of Philip Arrhidaeus for the scholar Iqīša of Uruk, has come to light in W23300 (now IM 75990), published as Uruk IV 162 (von Weiher 1993: 103–5, 186). Despite these additions to knowledge, some of the text of EAE XX remained poorly enough preserved to make the discovery of a new manuscript very welcome.The new tablet allows seven sections of the text of EAE XX to be reconstructed in full, and our understanding of the technical terminology refined as a consequence. The chief interest of this tablet of EAE emerges more clearly than before. The common denominator of the twelve lunar-eclipse omens of EAE XX is eclipses that, at least notionally, set in “above” and clear “below”, as observed in 1. 66 of the tablet published here. However, the observed phenomena that especially distinguish the protases of EAE XX from those of other calendrical lunar-eclipse tablets appear to be particular to partial eclipses. The progress of the eclipse to a point at which the disk is half eclipsed (imšul) or more (eli mašāli illik) is explicitly recorded on six occasions (§§1.2, IV, V, VII, VIII, IX). The portents relate either to the moon's “emblem” (šurinnu), a term that signifies the moon in eclipse (§§1.1, IV), to its “horns” (qarnu), i.e. the cusps of the partially eclipsed disk (§§VIII, IX, X, XI, XII), or to both (§§V, VII). It seems that what the compiler of EAE XX considered most portentous were the appearance, behaviour and other aspects of the lunar disk while the moon was half, or more than half, eclipsed.

Harold Garnet Callan. 5 March 1917 — 3 November 1993 Elected FRS 1963

With the death of Harold Garnet (‘Mick’) Callan on 3 November 1993, the community of cell biologists lost one of the twentieth century's most profound and colourful students of chromosomes. During his 50-year scientific career the study of chromosomes and genes went from purely descriptive and morphological to deeply analytical and molecular. Steeped by training in the earlier tradition, Callan nevertheless contributed enormously to this revolution with his meticulous studies on the giant chromosomes of amphibians, all the while maintaining that he was a ‘mere cytologist’ on whom much of the molecular analysis was lost. Mick Callan and I were professional colleagues and close personal friends whose careers intersected at many points. We visited and worked in each other's laboratories, we published together, we generated a voluminous correspondence (much of it in the days when letters were handwritten), and our families enjoyed many good times together in Scotland and the USA. My most difficult task in writing this biography has been to extract from the vast amount of public and personal information in my possession those parts of Mick Callan's life and work that will be of chief interest to a broader audience. I have been helped in this by a 30 000-word autobiography written by him near the end of his life, covering the period from his birth in 1917 to the end of World War II in 1945. This account provides considerable insight into the factors that shaped his later professional career and is an engrossing account of the life of a boy in prewar England and a young man at Oxford and in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the worst days of the war. Callan's autobiography has been deposited in the University library, St Andrews, Scotland.

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Water

Among the truly outstanding books written in this century about the American frontier—and the shelf of such books is rather small—is Great Basin Kingdom by Leonard J. Arrington, published in 1958. When it appeared, it had only a few rivals either in scholarship or ideas. There was Henry Nash Smith’s work on the West as symbol and myth, Bernard DeVoto’s vigorous account of explorers and imperialists, Paul Morgan’s saga of the Rio Grande valley, Wallace Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell, and Walter Prescott Webb’s sweeping survey of Europeans on the global frontier. All of those books appeared in the 1950s within a few years of each other. All were well researched and brilliantly written, in many cases by accomplished novelists whose talents in creating plot and character recruited a wide audience for frontier and western history. Arrington’s study of the Mormon frontier was different from the others in that it was the work of an economic and social historian who was interested in how institutions took shape in one small part of the West and how they differed from those in other parts of the region and in the East. Like the other historians, he gave his story a compelling plot and filled it with arresting, complex characters; but for him the chief interest was how a vague, half-articulated set of ideas had migrated to Utah and taken shape there as a thriving, distinctive economic order. Better than any of his contemporaries, moreover, and better than most of his successors, he understood how powerful the drives of capitalism had been in developing the West, how thoroughly those drives had entered into the region’s overall sense of purpose, and how fiercely the battle had been waged, at least in Utah, to prevent that from happening. As romance, his story may not have been able to compete with DeVoto’s lusty adventurers or Morgan’s brown-robed padres preaching among the Indians, but in its implications it may have been the most important story of all. Arrington’s thesis was that nineteenth-century Mormon Utah was at once an intensely materialistic society, intent on achieving wealth, and a determinedly anti-capitalistic one.

On Tesnière on the dual

Duals come and go almost everywhere, or have done so some time or other, but it is rare for such events to be chronicled so circumstantially as Lucien Tesnière did for Slovenian in his well-known chef-d'oeuvre of 1925. Tesniere's chief interest was to collect enough information to be able to chart comprehensively the dual's demise and partial renaissance in the varietie of Slovenian, dialectal as well as literary, and to identify the changes concerned as phonological, morphological (in particular analogical), or syntactic. Although he would sometimes compare Slovenian patterns and developments to others, especially Slavonic and Indo-European ones, he was reluctant to draw general conclusions from the particulars so amply at his disposal other than implicitly, occasionally hinting at "tendences" or "causes profondes" supposedly giving direction to the vagaries of phonetics and morphology.