ReviewTrends in ecology & evolution2022
Linguistic laws in biology.
Review in Trends in ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Peptide language pragmatic analysis and two-stage hierarchical learning framework for therapeutic peptide prediction.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Challenges and new opportunities in deciphering the meaning of corvid call sequences.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Deciphering the linguistic blueprint of DNA: context-sensitive structures, statistical patterns, and regulatory implications.Genomics & informatics · 2025Review
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Zipf's law in China's local government work reports: A 21-year study using natural language processing and regression analysis.PloS one · 2025Article
- Investigating DNA words and their distributions across the tree of life.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2025Article
- Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath's Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Protein Fold Usages in Ribosomes: Another Glance to the Past.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Zipf's law revisited: Spoken dialog, linguistic units, parameters, and the principle of least effort.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Zipfian Distributions in Child-Directed Speech.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
- Variable expression of linguistic laws in ape gesture: a case study from chimpanzee sexual solicitation.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication.Biology letters · 2022Article
- A mechanism for punctuating equilibria during mammalian vocal development.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Approximate Entropy in Canonical and Non-Canonical Fiction.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Linguistic laws, the common statistical patterns of human language, have been investigated by quantitative linguists for nearly a century. Recently, biologists from a range of disciplines have started to explore the prevalence of these laws beyond language, finding patterns consistent with linguistic laws across multiple levels of biological organisation, from molecular (genomes, genes, and proteins) to organismal (animal behaviour) to ecological (populations and ecosystems). We propose a new conceptual framework for the study of linguistic laws in biology, comprising and integrating distinct levels of analysis, from description to prediction to theory building. Adopting this framework will provide critical new insights into the fundamental rules of organisation underpinning natural systems, unifying linguistic laws and core theory in biology.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.