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This approach is wild and problematic to put it lightly. It is a good idea to look at reviews. Here is a review from Emma Parfitt pointing out issues: https://w

This approach is wild and problematic to put it lightly. It is a good idea to look at reviews. Here is a review from Emma Parfitt pointing out issues: https://web.archive.org/web/20180212045651/http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/18525 https://web.archive.org/web/20180212045651/http://sociologic... Quote: The method could be compared to a cake recipe as follows: 1. Take 275 tales. These can be found in any specialist ‘Tales of Magic’ delicatessen or curiosity shop. 2. Separate the yolks from the whites. In other words the presence or absence of these tales in 50 Indo-European speaking populations. 3. Mix with a smattering of jargon and statistics. I found the paper to be written in a statistical analysis style, therefore not very accessible. 4. While the cake is in the oven draw some language trees. These indicate how populations have historically come into contact over time (population dispersal and the diversification of linguistic lineages). 5. Remove from the oven and cool. Ice the cake by skimming over debates of written versus oral narrative, and the distinctions or overlaps between them. The written-oral debate acknowledges that there is a difficulty in tracing oral stories because tales are so easily transportable by travellers. There has been interaction of oral and written texts overtime, with one informing the other (Bottingheimer 2009, 2014). This basically means that what is an oral folktale, and each tales origins is unclear. For example, different renditions of Arabian Nights indicated that translators created new stories inspired from oral and literary traditions (Warner 2012: 18). While this demonstrates some of the issues with the paper’s source materials it also illustrates how fearless Graça da Silva and Tehrani (2016) were trying to tackle the complex subject of oral folklore utilising new methodologies. 6. To finish the cake, sprinkle the results with statistics to see whether the 275 tales were more likely to spread generation to generation or across geographical areas due to migration, trade, and encounters between groups of people. 7. Eat the cake.

verisimi 2y ago
Yes, this is always the case. The approach might be the best we've got, but it doesn't inspire confidence that we are uncovering some underlying truth.
bsza 2y ago
Whether or not this is the case, an ad hominem attack against the race of the authors and a strawman that presents their method as a cake recipe only convinces me about the reviewer being an asshole. One could turn the proof of the Pythagorean theorem into a cake recipe in a way that makes it sound ridiculous and unscientific.
- xandrius 2y ago
  What does that have anything to do with race? I don't really get it.
  - bsza 2y ago
    The linked writing takes an inventory of the sex and skin color of the authors and voices concerns about the lack of diversity thereof.
    - buovjaga 2y ago
      Not the authors of the phylogenetic analysis paper, but the creators and editors of Aarne–Thompson–Uther index of folktales.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> 4. While the cake is in the oven draw some language trees. These indicate how populations have historically come into contact over time (population dispersal and the diversification of linguistic lineages). Seems superfluous; there are cases where we know good and well that a story was transmitted without much in the way of cultural contact. For example, Cinderella comes from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian We don't know anything about the path of transmission or the intermediate stories that must have existed in locations between China and Italy, but it is plain that the stories are the same.
- bazoom42 2y ago
  How do we know this story comes from China? Couldnt there be shared origin?
kaonwarb 2y ago
I can't take seriously a review that includes the criticism "I found the paper to be written in a statistical analysis style, therefore not very accessible."
oersted 2y ago
That "recipe" is completely unhelpful in explaining the method. It boils down to the author saying "it's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo I don't understand, therefore it's wrong". But I largely agree that it's a stretch. As far as I understand it, they discovered a correlation between phylogenetic markers in historical populations and the presence of these folktales in their cultures. Which is completely unsurprising, populations that mix genetics will share stories. From this, they link "The Smith and the Devil" to the genetic marker ATU 330 (going back to the Bronze Age), which is the only story they could trace back. > The Bayesian ancestral state reconstructions failed to support the presence of three out of the four tales that were tentatively inferred in Proto-Indo-European (table 2). However, the analyses reconstructed one tale, ATU 330 ‘The Smith and the Devil’, in this corpus, with a posterior probability of 87%. A fossil test returned positive support for the presence of ATU 330 (Bayes Factor 3.59). It's not nothing, it's plausible, but I wouldn't call it "evidence". > [we] find evidence that one tale (‘The Smith and the Devil’) can be traced back to the Bronze Age Even if a story is correlated to a genetic marker, it doesn't mean they originated at the same time. Although it might be possible to infer that the story originated in a certain population before it got mixed with others, maybe. Is that what the paper is saying? I'd need more time with it.

verisimi 2y ago

Yes, this is always the case. The approach might be the best we've got, but it doesn't inspire confidence that we are uncovering some underlying truth.

bsza 2y ago

Whether or not this is the case, an ad hominem attack against the race of the authors and a strawman that presents their method as a cake recipe only convinces me about the reviewer being an asshole. One could turn the proof of the Pythagorean theorem into a cake recipe in a way that makes it sound ridiculous and unscientific.

xandrius 2y ago
What does that have anything to do with race? I don't really get it.
- bsza 2y ago
  The linked writing takes an inventory of the sex and skin color of the authors and voices concerns about the lack of diversity thereof.
  - buovjaga 2y ago
    Not the authors of the phylogenetic analysis paper, but the creators and editors of Aarne–Thompson–Uther index of folktales.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> 4. While the cake is in the oven draw some language trees. These indicate how populations have historically come into contact over time (population dispersal and the diversification of linguistic lineages). Seems superfluous; there are cases where we know good and well that a story was transmitted without much in the way of cultural contact. For example, Cinderella comes from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian We don't know anything about the path of transmission or the intermediate stories that must have existed in locations between China and Italy, but it is plain that the stories are the same.

bazoom42 2y ago
How do we know this story comes from China? Couldnt there be shared origin?

kaonwarb 2y ago

I can't take seriously a review that includes the criticism "I found the paper to be written in a statistical analysis style, therefore not very accessible."

oersted 2y ago

That "recipe" is completely unhelpful in explaining the method. It boils down to the author saying "it's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo I don't understand, therefore it's wrong". But I largely agree that it's a stretch. As far as I understand it, they discovered a correlation between phylogenetic markers in historical populations and the presence of these folktales in their cultures. Which is completely unsurprising, populations that mix genetics will share stories. From this, they link "The Smith and the Devil" to the genetic marker ATU 330 (going back to the Bronze Age), which is the only story they could trace back. > The Bayesian ancestral state reconstructions failed to support the presence of three out of the four tales that were tentatively inferred in Proto-Indo-European (table 2). However, the analyses reconstructed one tale, ATU 330 ‘The Smith and the Devil’, in this corpus, with a posterior probability of 87%. A fossil test returned positive support for the presence of ATU 330 (Bayes Factor 3.59). It's not nothing, it's plausible, but I wouldn't call it "evidence". > [we] find evidence that one tale (‘The Smith and the Devil’) can be traced back to the Bronze Age Even if a story is correlated to a genetic marker, it doesn't mean they originated at the same time. Although it might be possible to infer that the story originated in a certain population before it got mixed with others, maybe. Is that what the paper is saying? I'd need more time with it.