# Dominant group/Learning resource

This subpage of dominant group is exploratory. The ongoing original research project focused on dominant group is uncovering knowledge and producing understanding about this two-word phrase. Each aspect of this process produces potential learning resources.
As the exploration continues, this subpage includes these potential learning resources, organizes them, and determines, if necessary, through experimentation, what is needed to produce the learning resource.
Dominant group occurs in primary sources that are or have been state-of-the-art contributions in almost every field or subject in which original research takes place. Seeing the two-word phrase is almost synonymous with original research, including in psychology, because the phrase is an identifier of something important.

## Dominant groups

Examples from primary sources are to be used to prove or disprove each hypothesis. These can be collected per subject or in general.
* Accident hypothesis: dominant group is an accident of whatever processes are operating.
* Artifact hypothesis: dominant group may be an artifact of human endeavor or may have preceded humanity.
* Association hypothesis: dominant group is associated in some way with the original research.
* Bad group hypothesis: dominant group is the group that engages in discrimination, abuse, punishment, and additional criminal activity against other groups. It often has an unfair advantage and uses it to express monopolistic practices.
* Control group hypothesis: there is a control group that can be used to study dominant group.
* Entity hypothesis: dominant group is an entity within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
* Evolution hypothesis: dominant group is a product of evolutionary processes, such groups are the evolutionary process, produce evolutionary processes, or are independent of evolutionary processes.
* Identifier hypothesis: dominant group is an identifier used by primary source authors of original research to identify an observation in the process of analysis.
* Importance hypothesis: dominant group signifies original research results that usually need to be explained by theory and interpretation of experiments.
* Indicator hypothesis: dominant group may be an indicator of something as yet not understood by the primary author of original research.
* Influence hypothesis: dominant group is included in a primary source article containing original research to indicate influence or an influential phenomenon.
* Interest hypothesis: dominant group is a theoretical entity used by scholarly authors of primary sources for phenomena of interest.
* Metadefinition hypothesis: all uses of dominant group by all primary source authors of original research are included in the metadefinition for dominant group.
* Null hypothesis: there is no significant or special meaning of dominant group in any sentence or figure caption in any refereed journal article.
* Object hypothesis: dominant group is an object within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
* Obvious hypothesis: the only meaning of dominant group is the one found in Mosby's Medical Dictionary.
* Original research hypothesis: dominant group is included in a primary source article by the author to indicate that the article contains original research.
* Primordial hypothesis: dominant group is a primordial concept inherent to humans such that every language or other form of communication no matter how old or whether extinct, on the verge of extinction, or not, has at least a synonym for dominant group.
* Purpose hypothesis: dominant group is written into articles by authors for a purpose.
* Regional hypothesis: dominant group, when it occurs, is only a manifestation of the limitations within a region. Variation of those limitations may result in the loss of a dominant group with the eventual appearance of a new one or none at all.
* Source hypothesis: dominant group is a source within each field where a primary author of original research uses the term.
* Term hypothesis: dominant group is a significant term that may require a 'rigorous definition' or application and verification of an empirical definition.

## Assessing importances

“How important is the proposed [or ongoing original research] activity to advancing knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields?”

## Bad groups

In practice, depending upon the scientist's intent, dominant group may be the bad group that engages in monopolistic practices, or socially negative behavior such as discrimination, abuse, punishment, and additional possible criminal activity against other demographic groups.
In a society a dominant group often has an unfair advantage such as numbers, military power, or assets and money.

## Causative force for change

This exploratory investigation into dominant group and its usage has the potential to demonstrate that dominant group, when identified is a causative force for change, requires further investigation.

## Cessation of use

This exploratory investigation into dominant group and its usage has the potential to demonstrate that dominant group should be no longer used as a scientific/technical term because its meanings are unclear and vague, should this actually be the case.

## Control groups

Studies and experiments concerning dominant group are likely to require the need for a control group.
For the conclusions drawn from the results of an experiment to have validity, it is essential that the items or patients assigned to treatment and control groups be representative of the same population. In some experiments, such as many in agriculture or psychology, this can be achieved by randomly assigning items from a common population to one of the treatment and control groups.

## Data mining test standard

"[T]wo-word glossary items are the most common technical terms". Dominant group is a likely two-word glossary item captured by data mining algorithms. A first-principle's demonstration that dominant group is a two-word scientific/technical term yields one test standard for data mining algorithms to find.

## Dominant group of two-word scientific terms

As a two-word scientific/technical term, is dominant group a member of the dominant group of two-word scientific/technical terms?

## Empirical identifiers

Dominant group can serve as an empirical identifier in observations. At one extreme, it is 100 % of the effect or phenomenon under study. At the other, it is a minority group effect that perhaps has some natural or artificial advantage.

## Experiments

Empirical or predictive uses of dominant group per its likely meaning may be informative regarding fields where its occurrence is minimal.

## Evolutionary process

Hypothesis: As an evolutionary process, a dominant group may be a force for extinction by driving a number of other groups to extinction. As a force for extinction a particular dominant group may also through its actions on other groups ultimately produce its own extinction event. This departure from a zone then allows other groups to fill the niche.
Hypothesis: As an evolutionary process, a dominant group may be a force for speciation when spatial or temporal dispersion creates diversity and isolation which may eventually produce new groups
Hypothesis: In every field for which it has been used, dominant group is a force for extinction of other groups while being a force for speciation of new effects within that field?
Changes in the characteristics or properties of a region may force the dominant group into extinction; thereby, making room for the next dominant group. However, some changes may not allow a dominant group to emerge. Additionally, properties of dominance may be appearance only. No competition for resources may have occurred.

## Inhibiting or moderating force

This exploratory investigation into dominant group and its usage has the potential to demonstrate that dominant group identifies an inhibiting or moderating force that works against 'high-risk, high-reward' "research with an inherent high degree of uncertainty and the capability to produce a major impact on important problems in biomedical/behavioral research", or in other scientific/technical fields.

## Lectures

Subpages of dominant group are not allowed to be lectures, but a category for lectures has been created. A lecture about dominant group the two-word scientific/technical term may help focus any possible or pending NSF proposal and delineate methods to evaluate hypotheses. The lecture would be a part of the course elements of terminology.
Dominant species occurs about 2 1/2 times more often than dominant group suggesting it as another possible lecture/article topic.
Regions is another likely lecture/article topic applicable to dominant group.
The field of dominant group appears to be regions, or the science of regions. Within a region in any science, including the social sciences, there may be a dominant group. Each region is defined by its limits. These limits in turn may allow for a dominant group. Change the limits (characteristics) for any region and the dominant group may go extinct. If a regional genome in biology lacks the potency to take advantage of any change in regional characteristics, there will be no dominant biological group.
Bad groups appears to be one of the characteristics attached to dominant groups. The members of the bad group engage in socially negative behavior such as discrimination, abuse, punishment, and additional possible criminal activity against other demographic groups, including monopolistic practices. These bad groups always have an unfair advantage such as numbers, military power, or assets and money, financial and political power. Even worse these groups seem to have lost their sense of humanity and definitely do not believe that we are all in this together.

## Letter of interest

Although a letter of intent may not be required before an unsolicited proposal is submitted to NSF, a letter of interest to the respective program manager usually is. Such a letter is similar to a letter of intent, but is designed to assess directly by request whether or not the program manager has sufficient interest in the proposal topic to proceed with either the letter of intent or the formal proposal submission.
One such letter of interest (Dominant group/Letter of interest/NSF - Linguistics Program) has been sent.
NEH does not require a letter of interest because it uses grants.gov.

## Lexical pragmatics

The term lends itself to lexical pragmatics.
From a metadefinitional point of view each use of "dominant group" has a relationship between members of the dominant group, a population from which the dominant group is a subset, a criterion for dominance, and a region, range, distribution or "in their own country". But, each of these four structures may have their meaning in the context within which the author or speaker places the two-word technical term "dominant group".

## Two-word terms

"The compound two-word term is employed to give more precision than either word alone would have, not being exact synonyms. And each word indicates the sense in which the other is used." Bold added.
The image at right is part of human history. And, human history is a two-word term.

## Oldest two-word terms

It (or one of its relative synonyms) may be one of the oldest two-word terms. Some of its synonyms predate 1826: for example, the phrase “die Dominanten Religionen von ganz Europa” occurs in 1726.
One of the synonyms, patrician class, or classicus, comes from the early Roman Republic, some 2600 b2k.

## Origin

The proposed activity consists of finding the origin of dominant group or one of its relative synonyms. The fundamental concepts encompassed by the totality of relative synonyms may have very early origins in primitive languages.
1826 (Kirby): "Groups, according to their range, may be denominated either predominant, dominant, sub-dominant, or quiescent."
1840 (Shuckard): "The Ants and the Staphylini have been supposed to represent each other in the tropical and temperate zones. In the temperate zone, and especially in our own country, the Staphylini are a dominant group, and the ants a secondary one."
1857 (Tocqueville): “The fact that a group is egoistic and dominant proves that it is well formed and that it approaches the make-up of a man.”
1859 (Darwin): The earliest use is on page 343, “The dominant species of the larger dominant groups tend to leave many modified descendants, and thus new sub-groups and groups are formed.”
1860 (Darwin): “Under the many conditions of life which this world affords, any group which is numerous in individuals and species and is widely distributed, may properly be called dominant" [a dominant group]. [Letter 110. To W.H. Harvey, August, 1860]
1944 (Simpson): "In the history of life it is a striking fact that major changes in the taxonomic groups occupying various ecological positions do not, as a rule, result from direct competition of the groups concerned in each case and the survival of the fittest, as most students would assume a priori. On the contrary, the usual sequence is for one dominant group to die out, leaving the zone empty, before the other group becomes abundant.". "GG Simpson's so-called evolutionary species concept contains undefinable criteria and is useless in praxis.
1960 (Huxley): "Improved organization gives biological advantage. Accordingly, the new type becomes a successful or dominant group. It spreads and multiplies and differentiates into a multiplicity of branches. This new biological success is usually achieved at the biological expense of the older dominant group from which it sprang or whose place it had usurped."
1971 (Travis): The earlier theory of evolutionary progressivism (Social Darwinism) puts forth several concepts including "dominant group".
2001 (Mayr): "Other previously dominant groups of organisms that also became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous are many marine taxa, such as most nautiloids and the ammonities, both of whom had been previously highly successful organisms." Page 320: "Ernst Mayr is the biologist largely responsible for shaping the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionary theory."

## Original research identifier

Dominant group serves as an indicator that original research has been conducted, especially when it appears in a primary source.

## Own field

The first question to answer is "What is dominant group's own field?"
It is a scientific or technical term, specifically a two-word scientific or technical term. Its overall field is linguistics, or technical language, terminology. It is and refers to an entity. An overall field allowing application to other fields is regions or the science of regions, usually spatial, but not necessarily always spatial. Spatial science or the science of space may be the appropriate field for dominant group.
The identification of its own field may result; thereby, in allowing differentiation of other fields so as to determine how knowledge is advanced across those different fields. It's like "differential equations". Although differential equations is a subject within mathematics, its spread to other subjects such as physics with ensuing use advanced knowledge within physics.

## Proof of concept

Within the development of a science or technology is the need to prove that something works. "Dominant group" has successfully demonstrated itself to be a concept, two-word phrase, and ultimately a two-word technical term that is beyond jargon.

## Questionnaires

Several learning resources are available in a mostly completed form to benefit an original research effort. These include survey design, questionnaire, hints for designing effective questionnaires, survey research and design in psychology, questionnaire (Wikipedia), statistical survey (Wikipedia), and Questionnaire (Wiki Commons).
An external link is Survey design images (tagged on delicious).
Why do scientists outside biology (especially evolution or entomology) use the term?

## Quizzes

It may be an enjoyable learning activity to compose several quizzes focused on important aspects of dominant group and its usages.

## Radiance

Fields have been found for which as yet the term is not known to occur. Are there any demographic factors limiting its radiance?

## Regions

Region is most commonly found as a term used in terrestrial and astrophysics sciences also an area, notably among the different sub-disciplines of geography, studied by regional geographers. Regions consist of subregions that contain clusters of like areas that are distinctive by their uniformity of description based on a range of statistical data, for example demographic, and locales. In astrophysics some regions have science-specific terms such as galactic clusters.

## Term tests

"Dominant group" occurs in a number of articles on several of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, including Wikibooks, Wikimedia meta wiki, Wikipedia, Wikiquote, and Wikisource. The inclusion of the two-word technical term within articles on these resources allows students to explore attribution, copyright, and the legal implications of quotation use.

## Theory of definition

This two-word technical term may be unique in its versatility across fields of science and technology. Yet, it may have a relatively simple definition, specifically a metadefinition, within which are subconcepts into which plugin definitions are made so that a specific observational fact may be reported in the primary literature of science and technology.

## Two-word scientific terms

Usually scientific and technical are thought of as synonyms, but they are not exact synonyms. Scientific relates to application of the scientific method, whereas, technical refers to technology, especially using facts from applied science.
Dominant group, when used in scientific/technical primary sources appears to be more of a scientific two-word term than a technical one.

## Two-word technical terms

"Two-word terms [are] determined not to be of interest in the context of the whole document collection either because they do not occur frequently enough or because they occur in a constant distribution among different documents [deviation-based approach]."
Two-word technical terms meeting these two criteria may not be significant enough.

## Usages

Determining why scientists outside biology use the term, may contribute to understanding how science makes conceptual advances.

## Hypotheses

* Learning how not to become a member of a patrician class or other dominant group is for the better good of humanity.