We establish a limit formula for the median of the distance between two leaves in a fully resolved unrooted phylogenetic tree with n leaves. More precisely, we prove that this median is equal, in the limit, to √ 4 ln(2)n.

In the half-century since the C-value paradox (the apparent lack of correlation between organismal genome size and morphological complexity) was described, there have been no explicit statistical comparisons between measures of genome size and organism complexity. It is reported here that there are significant positive correlations between measures of genome size and complexity with measures of...

This study investigates jaw-finger coordination in a task consisting in pointing to a target while naming it with a /pata/ or a /tapa/ utterance stressed either on the first ('CVCV) or on the second (CV'CV) syllable. Optotrack measurements of jaw and finger displacements show that for 'CVCV names, the moment at with the finger reaches the target alignment is synchronized with the maximum of the...

The amalgamation of leaf-labelled (phylogenetic) trees on overlapping leaf sets into one (super)tree is a central problem in several areas of classification, particularly evolutionary biology. In this paper, we describe a new technique for amalgamating rooted phylogenetic trees. This appears to be the first such method to provably exhibit particular desirable properties which we list and establ...

We describe a statistical model over linguistic areas and phylogeny. Our model recovers known areas and identifies a plausible hierarchy of areal features. The use of areas improves genetic reconstruction of languages both qualitatively and quantitatively according to a variety of metrics. We model linguistic areas by a Pitman-Yor process and linguistic phylogeny by Kingman’s coalescent.