A Review: The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Asya Pereltsvaig, Martin W. Lewis)
A
few years ago, a team of researchers lead by Russell Gray and Quentin
Atkinson presented a mathematical model for the spread of language
families. Applying this model in reverse to the Indo-European languages
supported the Anatolian hypothesis, a minority position on the location
of the Indo-European urheimat.
For some reason, this was widely published in media, and the paper Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family appeared at the same time in the journal Science. Gray and Atkinson have made very vocal and powerful claims about their findings: 'decisive support [for the Anatolian hypothesis]' is among the various things they have said about their own work.
Pereltsvaig
and Lewis go over the results in depth, and find them highly lacking:
they find numerous problems in the geographical spread that it presents,
including multiple instances where the sanity of the model is
excruciatingly questionable. They present the evidence we have against
the Anatolian hypothesis (and even more clearly, the evidence we have
against the Gray-Atkinson version of the Anatolian hypothesis) and all
the difficulties it brings with it, as well as the evidence we have for
the Steppe hypothesis.
They also present the evidence that has lead most linguists to accept Steppe Hypothesis instead.
The argumentation is persuasive and clear, well-nigh undeniable. This leads to an important question: how did Science
let a paper that is so rife with unsound historical linguistics pass
peer review? It turns out that linguists did peer review it, and Science
ignored their judgment, because their negative comments did not pertain
to the maths of the model - clearly, having a mathsy model is a guarantee that the mathsy model is correct in Science's view?
Publications
such as Business Insider either repost bad science from the
Gray-Atkinson team, or add their own even worse spin to it. Consider
their version of the Gray-Atkinson animated map.
This is, allegedly, how "Language" spread across Europe. In
linguistics, "Language" signifies the general phenomenon, the fact that
humans can communicate in a complicated system. So if we are to take
Business Insider's video title seriously, this is how the ability to
speak spread in Europe, and all the current language families were the
first languages spoken in their areas.
Pereltsvaig
and Lewis point out a very real problem: other scientists apparently do
not take linguistics seriously, and we are facing a rise of armchair
philosophers who disdain empiricism in favour of cute models (at least
when going outside of their own field - i.e. Gray and Atkinson probably
understand how to be scientific in their own field, but when working
with language, the computational model seemingly blinds them to
empirical facts).
This,
in turn, is coupled with the modern phenomenon of clickbaiting, where
the most attention-attracting claim is more likely than other claims to
pull in ad money, and thus scientific claims are propagated online not
by their likelihood of being accurate, but by how tittilating they are. This is a genuine problem, and needs to be curbed.
Pereltsvaig's
and Lewis's book is less combative than this review, although at times
it does take vigorous swings at the Gray-Atkinson teams publications. It
is a good read, and gives a lot of information about historical
linguistics and especially Indo-European historical linguistics. A
certain glimpse into issues in the philosophy of science can also be
gleaned. It is well written: both clear, enjoyable and relevant.
Thank you for a great review and for emphasizing the important contributions of our book! We tried to contain our combativeness and the general dismay at the sort of work we've criticized so it's great to hear that we've succeeded. What a great phrase about "the sanity of the model [being] excruciatingly questionable" :)
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