HY4120 SPECIAL TOPICS IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE II

Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships. While most famously studied in the context of biological relationships (which species share common ancestry, or whether all species descend from a common ancestor), it can also be applied in the field of linguistics to establish relationships between languages or language families. There are many well-documented parallels between biological and linguistic evolution, and the driving question of this course will be to determine whether these similarities justify the use of a shared set of phylogenetic methods and assumptions for both systems. In this course, we will study the main methods of phylogenetic reconstruction, the assumptions that these methods depend on, and some applications of these methods in other historical fields.