Linguistic Laws in Nature and Fatherless Condor Chicks from Parthenogenesis
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2022
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about linguistic “laws” that also show up in nature; and how two California condors were born without fathers.
Linguistic "laws" like Zipf’s law of abbreviation and Menzerath’s law also show up in biology, geography, and more by Grant Currin
- Jonny Thomson. (2021, October 22). The unknown linguistic laws that apply to all life. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/life/linguistic-laws-biology/
- Semple, S., Ferrer-i-Cancho, R., & Gustison, M. L. (2021). Linguistic laws in biology. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.08.012
Two condor chicks were born from parthenogenesis, something we've never seen before by Cameron Duke
- Harrison, S. (2021, October 28). California Condors Are Capable of Asexual Reproduction. Wired; WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/california-condors-are-capable-of-asexual-reproduction/
- Ryder, O. A., Thomas, S., Judson, J. M., Romanov, M. N., Dandekar, S., Papp, J. C., Sidak-Loftis, L. C., Walker, K., Stalis, I. H., Mace, M., Steiner, C. C., & Chemnick, L. G. (2021). Facultative Parthenogenesis in California Condors. Journal of Heredity. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esab052
- San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance Conservation Scientists Report First Confirmed Hatchings of Two California Condor Chicks from Unfertilized Eggs. (2021). San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/pr/CondorParthenogenesis
- The Economist. (2021, October 30). No sex please, we’re condors. The Economist; The Economist. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/10/30/no-sex-please-were-condors
- Zhang, S. (2021, October 28). The Atlantic. The Atlantic; theatlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/california-condors-are-capable-virgin-birth/620517/
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. |
| 0:05.7 | I'm Cody Gough. |
| 0:06.7 | And I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:07.7 | Today you learn about linguistic laws that show up in nature, and why it's a big deal that two California condors were born |
| 0:14.5 | without fathers. Let's satisfy some curiosity. Linguists have noticed that some |
| 0:20.6 | patterns show up a lot in language. These patterns are so reliable that |
| 0:25.7 | researchers call them linguistic laws. But here's the weird part. In a recent |
| 0:30.9 | review paper, biologists have pointed out that some of these patterns show up beyond human language. |
| 0:37.0 | So here are three you should know about. |
| 0:40.0 | The first law concerns a, is most common words. |
| 0:44.0 | So take the most commonly used word in English, |
| 0:47.0 | that's the word the. |
| 0:49.0 | This word accounts for about 7% of all the words that English speakers say and write. |
| 0:55.0 | Coming in second is the word of. |
| 0:58.0 | And that accounts for about 3.5% of words. |
| 1:01.0 | That means that the most common word is used about twice as often as the second most common |
| 1:06.8 | word. While linguists named George Kingsley's zip noticed nearly a hundred years ago that this pattern just keeps going. |
| 1:15.4 | The word the is used about three times as often as the third most used word, which is and, |
| 1:21.6 | and so on. This pattern shows up in nature too. The vocal noises |
| 1:26.4 | and gestures that non-human animals use to communicate follow a similar |
| 1:30.7 | distribution. The size of proteins in some systems follow the pattern, and so |
| 1:36.3 | do the distribution of plants and animals in a particular space. Weird, right? |
... |
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