Linguistic laws in biology
This work addresses the need for a unified framework to study linguistic laws in biology, which could provide insights into fundamental organizational rules in natural systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing cross-disciplinary explorations.
The paper tackles the problem of applying linguistic laws, which are statistical patterns from human language, to various levels of biological organization, proposing a new conceptual framework to integrate description, prediction, and theory building for unifying these laws with core biological theory.
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.