Where does lineage collide?

In social anthropology, a group of people who trace descent from a common ancestor through a single line, either the father's side or the mother's, and who act together as one body holding land, names, and obligations. Evans-Pritchard's 1940 The Nuer described how such groups nest inside one another and split and recombine in a regular way, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's 1940 African Political Systems made the concept central to the study of societies without a state, and Radcliffe-Brown's 1940 On Social Structure set it within the wider study of kinship. The referent here is a living body of related people bound by rules of descent, not a chain of evolving organisms or a record kept about a piece of data.[1][2][3]

Unit

One descent group defined by a rule of descent from a shared ancestor

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced through genealogies and kinship interviews, and read from who holds land, names, and ritual duties together

In evolutionary biology, a single line of descent: a connected series of ancestor and descendant populations, organisms, or species running through time, so that each member is derived from the one before it. Simpson's 1961 Principles of Animal Taxonomy treated the lineage as the basic historical entity that classification tries to recover, and de Queiroz's 2007 Species Concepts and Species Delimitation made a lineage of ancestor and descendant populations the shared core of the competing definitions of a species. The referent is a genealogical thread of biological life across generations, not a group of living kin acting together or a trail of how a stored value was computed.[4][5]

Unit

One connected line of ancestor and descendant populations or species

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Reconstructed from fossils, comparative anatomy, and molecular phylogenies that infer branching descent

In computer science, a record of where a piece of data came from: which source records it was drawn from and which operations produced it, so that any output can be traced back through the steps that made it. Cui, Widom, and Wiener's 2000 Tracing the lineage of view data in a warehousing environment defined this for data warehouses and gave methods to find the exact source rows behind a result, and Cui and Widom's 2003 Lineage tracing for general data warehouse transformations extended it to arbitrary transformations. The referent is bookkeeping about the origin and derivation of stored data, not a kin group tracing common ancestry or a line of evolving organisms.[6][7]

Unit

One data item paired with the sources and operations that produced it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Captured by tracking source rows and transformation steps, or by querying provenance recorded during processing