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Darwin's Plant Experiments

Curated data from Darwin's plant experiments and related text

Over an 11-year period starting in the 1860sw Charles Darwin performed a series of experiments to determine the extend of Hybrid Vigour in a variety of plants species

Examples

Basic Usage

Find the EntityStore relevant to Darwin’s plant experiment:

In[1]:=
ResourceObject["Darwin's Plant Experiments"]
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Register the EntityStore:

In[2]:=
EntityRegister@ResourceData["Darwin's Plant Experiments"]
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The reference containing relevant text and data:

In[3]:=
darwinBook = Entity["Reference", "The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom"]
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There are multiple sources for Charles Darwin’s publications:

In[4]:=
darwinBook["Sources"] // Dataset
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In[5]:=
darwinBook["PlainText"] // WordCloud
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By generalizing Wood’s application of grammatical structure to measure sentence complexity (Wood, 2018) ...

In[6]:=
sentenceComplexity[text_String, {graphType_, metric_}] := Mean@metric@# & /@ Flatten[TextStructure[#, graphType] & /@ TextSentences@text]; sentenceComplexity[{graphType_, metric_}] := Function[text, sentenceComplexity[text, {graphType, metric}]]; plotSentenceComplexity[text_, gc : {graphType_, metric_}, popts___] := ListPlot[ sentenceComplexity[gc] /@ Flatten[{text}], Filling -> Axis, Joined -> True, popts]

... we can get a glimpse of Darwin’s (un?)changing writing style between 1859 and 1876, the respective publication dates of The Origin of Species and ...

In[7]:=
Darwin1859 = StringTake[ExampleData[{"Text", "OriginOfSpecies"}], 130000 ;; 135000]; Darwin1876 = StringTake[darwinBook["PlainText"], 130000 ;; 135000]; pl = {"On the Origin of Species (1859)", "The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilization\n in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876)"};

... by comparing the average degree centrality of Darwin’s sentences broken down by dependency grammars ...

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plotSentenceComplexity[{Darwin1859, Darwin1876}, {"DependencyGraphs", DegreeCentrality}, PlotLegends -> pl]
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... as well as broken down by phrase structure grammars.

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plotSentenceComplexity[{Darwin1859, Darwin1876}, {"ConstituentGraphs", ClosenessCentrality}, PlotLegends -> pl]
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The text in Darwin’s original book ...

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darwinBook["Image"]
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contains various Quote entities

In[11]:=
Entity["Quote", "Darwin-hybridism"]["Dataset"]
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In[12]:=
Entity["Quote", "Darwin-hybridism"]["QuoteForm"]
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Darwin experimented on a range of plants from around the world but perhaps most famously on Zea Mays (corn)

In[13]:=
zea = Entity["DarwinPlantExperiment", "ZeaMays"]
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Darwin compared cross-fertilized and self-fertilized pairs that were each placed in one of four pots.

In[14]:=
zea["Data"] // Dataset
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pd = zea["PairedData"]
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From which statistical significance indicates some support for hybrid vigour in Zea Mays.

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TTest[Subtract @@@ pd, Quantity[0, "Inches"], "TestConclusion", AlternativeHypothesis -> "Greater", SignificanceLevel -> 0.05]
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Darwin’s experiments often also involved multiple generations.

In[17]:=
ipo = Entity["DarwinGenerationalPlantExperiment", "IpomoeaPurpurea"]
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In[18]:=
ipo["Data"] // Dataset
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onSoc, "Darwin's Plant Experiments" from the Wolfram Data Repository (2019)  

Data Resource History

  • Date Created:

Source Metadata

  • Creator: Ronald Monson
  • Date: 20 April 2019

Data Downloads

Publisher Information

  • Publisher of Record: onSoc