89 Editing and Evolution
Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 89120, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00391.x
Editing and Evolution
5 William Robins*
University of Toronto
Abstract
10 Both textual editors and evolutionary biologists investigate the process of
descent with modification, whether of how a text has been copied from
one manuscript to another or of how a species of organisms has evolved
into new species. In the last two decades there has been an interesting
convergence of these fields, especially as some editors have harnessed
15 biological methods of cladistics to aid their work in textual stemmatics.
This article provides a historical sketch of the main similarities and
differences between the genealogical methods in philology and biology
from their emergence in the nineteenth century up to the present day.
20 Over the course of the last fifteen years there has been a
fascinating yet tentative convergence of two scholarly
disciplines that are usually far removed from each other, the
editing of ancient and medieval texts and the analysis of
biological species. The current engagement is based on their
25 shared concern with what Darwin called descent with
modification (Origin 459). Scientists in the field of biological
systematics attempt to sort out how different species are
related to each other according to genealogies of descent,
and since the late 1970s they have done so primarily with
30 methods of cladistics. In this approach, researchers identify
the observable differences among a number of species,
encode these differences in a data-matrix, and then,
harnessing the power of computers, compare hundreds of
thousands of possible family trees that could account for
35 these differences according to the process of descent with
modification: the tree that requires the fewest steps of
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Editing and Evolution 90
modification is offered as a plausible model of the actual
history of speciation.
Humanists in the field of textual criticism frequently try to
40 sort out the relationships among the different manuscripts
of ancient texts in a similarly genealogical way, establishing
which copies were made from common ancestors according
to procedures that go under the name of stemmatics.
Stemmatic methods have tended to employ qualitative
45 criteria that rely upon the editors prior knowledge of an
authors language or style, rather than adopting strictly
quantitative considerations. Nevertheless, some text-editors
have turned with interest to cladistics for the task of arriving
at usable family trees. Much of the current discussion
50 involves how to take account not only of the similarities
linking the descent of species and the descent of
manuscripts, but also of their differences (for example,
scribes might correct mistakes in their exemplar or they
might blend together two exemplars when making their own
55 copy, processes that are unusual in biological speciation).
There have been a number of articles that point out how the
methods of stemmatics and cladistics overlap in some
points but not in others (Platnick and Cameron; OHara,
Trees; Robinson and OHara; Salemans, Building Stemmas
60 11 60; Howe et al.) This article for the most part steers
clear of the particulars of these debates, but instead offers
a historical perspective on the current convergence,
beginning with a look at the way textual criticism and
evolutionary biology were similarly transformed by
65 genealogical methods in the nineteenth century, and then
tracing some of the similarities and differences between the
two disciplines from that time to our own.
I. Genealogical Methods in the Nineteenth Century
70 The study of history underwent a deep shift in early
nineteenth-century Germany;
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 5 89 Editing and Evolution
for computer-based editorial projects is now devoted to
75 In the last decade or so, cladistic methods have taken
hold within several disciplines concerned with tracing the
history of human cultures. Linguistics has led the way, first by
mapping cladistic analyses of population genetics onto the
evidence of language variation (Cavalli-Sforza et al.), and
80 more recently by applying cladistics directly to lexical data for
Indo-European and other language groups (see the studies
listed in Atkinson and Gray). Anthropologists, especially those
looking at the archaeological remains of prehistoric societies,
are also forging ahead with cladistics (OBrien and Lyman). For
85 both of these fields, borrowings between different cultures,
whether of verbal expressions or of technologies, means that
researchers will have to address the problems posed by
reticulation. Some of the research focuses on dating the
points at which languages or cultures diverged, employing
90 hypotheses about rates of language change or about the
sequencing of artifacts in ways that are somewhat akin to
molecular biological studies but foreign to textual cladistics.
Justification for cladistic approaches to cultural phenomena
often appeals to Richard Dawkins concept of memes: a
95 meme is a non-genetic unit of information in the human brain,
which can be passed from one person to another and which
has identifiable effects in human behavior (10812). The
application of phylogentic methods to artifacts of human
culture is controversial, but it is now garnering considerable
100 interest.
In contrast to this recent activity, the flirtation of
textual scholars with cladistics seems to have come to a
pause. There are current projects afoot in medieval Italian and
German philology (Motta and Robins; Stolz), as well as in
105 biblical studies, but they hardly constitute a commitment to
be found in the field as a whole. Most of the (rare)
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Editing and Evolution 91
technological expertise and (even rarer) financial support
mounting electronic hypertexts. The rhizome-like structure
110 of hypertext is, as well, felt to be more in tune with
postmodern theories of textuality than the tree-like
premises of stemmatics. Most literary scholars are trained in
skills other than algorithmic computation, and the learning
curve for conducting or appraising cladistically derived
115 stemma is steep, and the gain in insight unproven. More of
an obstacle than all of these factors is the fact that different
forms of argumentation are at work in science and the
humanities. Scientific explanations strive to incorporate
notions of predictability, probability, or falsifiability, but it is
120 by no means clear that humanists seeking to understand
complex products of human agency will find that a
statistical inference about probability, or a deductive
inference about parsimony, makes one account more
compelling than another.
125 If cladistic approaches are used only to replicate
traditional stemmatics to distinguish between authorial
originality and scribal error then they are almost certain to
be dismissed by many literary scholars. Few accept the
premise that the significance of a text is controlled by
130 authorial intentions, even more so in cases where no
authorial documents survive. The discipline is much more
concerned with how texts engage with a whole array of
cultural codes and social institutions, that is, with how
writing and reading are shaped by social institutions and, in
135 turn, with how texts perform their cultural work.
Furthermore, there is a strong appreciation for the
uniqueness of every manifestation of a text, and for seeing
each version as irreducible to some standard form. David
Greetham, one of the leading theorists of textual criticism,
140 advises genealogically minded scholars to attend to all
three factors of linearity, environment, and idiosyncrasy:
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10 Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 89120,

10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00391.x