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This introductory chapter explains the rationale of the book and its intended audience. It indicates briefly the author’s positions on the uniformitarian principle, linguistic descent, the regularity of sound change, linguistic reconstruction, and the comparative method.

This chapter elucidates various mathematical formulas. Based on expressions for Gaussian integrals in one and many dimensions, the methods of stationary phase and steepest descent are deduced, representations of the delta-function are given and applied to Fourier and Laplace transformations. For quantal operators, the Mori product is introduced and an important formula for the derivative of exponentials is shown. Elementary properties of spin and isospin are discussed; for fermions, the formalism of second quantization is produced.

This chapter considers a possible intuitive explanation of quantum breaking of symmetries as well as the subjects which are not discussed in the main chapters, such as the descent formula for gauge anomalies and the global SU(2) anomaly. The book has concentrated on the rather classical and basic aspects of quantum anomalies, which can be explicitly calculated by an elementary method in the path integral. Advanced subjects such as the anomaly cancellation in superstring theory and supersymmetric theory in general are not discussed in detail, but several references to these subjects are given.

This chapter argues that Eusebius conveys a narrative of Greek descent (in Books 1-6) that begins with the Phoenicians and Egyptians in order to highlight the lateness and dependency of the Greeks upon these ‘barbarian’ nations, and to portray them as embodying negative national character traits. Thus, the Praeparatio can be seen as part of the anti-Greek tradition of historiography that arose among subject peoples (such as Egyptians and Jews) following the conquests of Alexander the Great, but which continued well into the Roman Empire, especially with Philo of Byblos. His narrative is bolstered by a euhemerist interpretation of ancient myths and a critique of allegorical interpretations.

This chapter traces how Eusebius creates a picture of the ancient Hebrews as chronologically earlier, and culturally and religiously superior to the other nations. However, due to ‘Egyptianization’, the Hebrews later fell into the corrupt national form of the ‘Jews’. Moses was seen as the key transitional figure, writing a law that offered an intermediate way of life for the morally-weak Jews. Only some scattered Hebrews remained after this transition to Judaism: Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, and others. For Eusebius, the coming of Christ marked the restoration of the ancient Hebrew nation.

This chapter proposes a context for interpreting the phrase “in Christ” that would have resonated with Paul's audience: the ideology of patrilineal descent. The same logic which underlies the notion of “coming out of” (ek) your ancestors also shapes the concept of being “in” your ancestors. Indeed, these are two ways of expressing the same relationship: ancestors contain descendants. To understand how “in Christ” fits in with this descent logic, it is instructive to consider the other contexts in which Paul applies a similar concept of being “in” someone: the gentiles are blessed “in” Abraham (Gal 3:8), and true descendants of Abraham are said to be “in” Isaac (Rom 9:7). This chapter discusses a range of texts — Greek, Roman, and Jewish — that maintain similar notions about ancestors and descendants, and then focuses on the Septuagint (Paul's source for this “in” language) and Paul's letters to show how Paul turns this phrase into his own discourse of kinship for gentiles.

The divine identity of Jesus is essential for the efficacy of salvation and its entire story. That story comprises all the stages in the human history of the incarnate Son of God—right from his conception through to his glorious coming at the end of time.

This chapter describes the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution by natural selection. In particular, it explains the notion of fitness, which underlies the concepts of descent with modification and the appearance of species categorized into clades. It shows that descent with modification is a much better evolutionary theory than the “Great chain of being” model, which implies that evolution is driven toward the production of more perfect and complex life-forms. Finally, it explains how the science of genetics strongly supports evolution through the notions of mutation, gene frequencies in populations, and drift.

The three constitutional crises examined are that caused by the rejection by the House of Lords of Lloyd George's `People's Budget’ of 1909; that caused by the Home Rule Act of 1914; and the abdication in 1936. Each of these crises posed difficult problems for the sovereigns involved—George V and Edward VIII—and for their Prime Ministers—Asquith and Baldwin. In 1914, George V seriously contemplated refusing royal assent to legislation passed by Parliament. In 1936, abdication, a voluntary renunciation, seemed a threat to the very institution of monarchy, which depends upon automatic hereditary descent. But, paradoxically, the abdication heralded a vote of confidence for monarchy and the new style of limited, constitutional monarchy, as represented by George VI.

Philosophers continue to debate the meaning and rationale behind ‘Ockham's razor’. Two formally distinct justifications for parsimony can be distinguished: one that recommends positing as few theoretical components as possible, and a second recommending against positing the superfluous. Furthermore, parsimony as applied to phylogenetic inference can be separated into conceptual versus operational aspects. It is argued that phylogenetic inference is ideographic, springing from the idea that the relative recency of common ancestry can be represented directly as a concrete, spatio-temporally restricted, explainable thing — the cladogram — just as it can be accompanying transformations of inherited traits. Any phylogenetic method that assumes an evolutionary model can be criticized since it may assume counter-factual conditionals. Since models are usually statistical, relating them to the necessarily unique hypotheses of phylogeny is illogical. A further argument is that employing a model assumes more than background knowledge: that which is minimally sufficient to provide a causal explanation of historical individuality. Given the ideographic argument presented, in quantitative terms, parsimony should choose the hypothesis of cladistic relationships that minimizes the overall patristic difference, because that hypothesis has the greatest power to explain the independently heritable transformation events as propositions of homology.

Problems can arise in parsimony analyses when data sets contain characters that are not applicable across all terminals. Examples of such characters are tail colour when some terminals lack tails, or positions in DNA sequences in which gaps are present. Focusing on regular single-column characters as classically used in phylogenetic analysis, Farris characterized parsimony as a method that maximizes explanatory power in the sense that most-parsimonious trees are best able to explain observed similarities among organisms by inheritance and common ancestry. This led De Laet to formulate parsimony analysis as two-item analysis, whereby parsimony maximizes the number of observed pairwise similarities that can be explained as identical by virtue of common descent, subject to two methodological constraints: the same evidence should not be taken into account multiple times, and the overall explanation must be free of internal contradictions. In this chapter, the way this formulation can be used to deal with the problem of inapplicables is discussed vis-à-vis the optimization of entire nucleotide sequences as complex characters in a tree alignment.

Assimilation and the construction and maintenance of ethnic identities are social processes, and one must not lose sight of the fact that individual humans are the driving force behind them. Individual people, by developing new relationships across ethnic lines over the course of generations, cumulatively create assimilation. By exchanging beliefs, practices, and ideas between different groups, they bring about cultural assimilation. The collective impact of their personal decisions causes the loss, maintenance, or triumph of a particular ethnic identity. This chapter explores important issues and problems of methodology, terminology, evidence, and definition concerning the personal interaction between English and Normans. Because the interaction occurred over several generations, the focus is on the precise role of descent in ethnicity in this society.

This chapter illustrates how Kikuchi had decided to rejoin his family during the initial phase of the internment. Kikuchi infused the connection to his family with the greatest significance: as an index of his Americanism, a sign of his loyalty to the nation. Kikuchi's intertwining of his two aspirational families is striking-filiopietism translated into patriotism or, to use his term, Americanism. When the Kikuchis left the Tanforan horse stalls behind at the beginning of September 1942, they were also leaving behind a more cosmopolitan group of evacuees, all of whom had lived in the Bay Area. The Gila River Relocation Center, on the other hand, housed a cross-section of diverse groups of Japanese descent from the West Coast: rural and urban, older Issei bachelors and Nisei families, Kibei, Hawai'ian Nisei, worldly Angelenos, Berkeley academics, and San Joaquin Valley farmers, among many others.