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.

翻译：语言学定律（人类语言的常见统计模式）已被定量语言学家研究近一个世纪。近年来，来自不同学科的生物学家开始探索这些定律在语言之外的普遍性，在从分子层面（基因组、基因和蛋白质）到生物体层面（动物行为）再到生态层面（种群和生态系统）的多个生物组织层级上，发现了符合语言学定律的模式。我们提出了一个研究生物学语言学定律的新概念框架，该框架涵盖并整合了从描述、预测到理论构建的不同分析层面。采用这一框架将为理解自然系统的基本组织规则提供关键新见解，使语言学定律与生物学的核心理论实现统一。