Comparing the Evolution of Language and Biological Evolution

Is the evolution of human language truly analogous to biological evolution?I have begun a very tentative comparison of evolution in language and biology, and - bearing in mind I am not a biologist or a historical linguist - there seems to be a large degree of agreement between the two fields. So these are my musings on the issue so far:I think that the syntax and vocabulary that each individual speaker uses are comparable with an individual organism's genes. Sure, a person's accent and vocabulary are subject to much greater pressures to change than an organisms genes, but I don't think that breaks the analogy.If a language is the equivalent of a species (say French), and the genus/group of languages which it belongs to (Romance languages) has a common ancestor (Latin), everything seems to fit quite nicely. Going back into prehistory (the fossil record ends 35 centuries ago with the creation of the first alphabets), ancestors are postulated (Indo-European language), and their ancestors are postulated (Eurasian language).Are dialects sub-species? (that is, a Geordie can probably understand what an Aussie is saying and vice-versa)?
Where biological entities genetic compatibility might be put to the test by seeing if they can produce viable offspring, language compatibility is all about making yourself understood. If we have to make up an equivelent arbitrary boundary for language, why not say you have to be able to satisfactorily communicate an abstract idea to have two languages sufficiently compatible?Are languages - or more accurately, individual speakers - ever in competition with one another in the same way that individuals are in the biological world? It seems quite difficult to stop thinking about speakers as biological entities whose existence is based on their DNA and instead start to think of them as vehicles for language. I'm not sure if individual speakers ARE directly analogous to individual organisms. I was wondering if anyone could help me out here?
My hunch is that the speaker actually isn't directly comparable to the organism. Perhaps the language they use is the direct counterpart. Or perhaps an individual speaker is directly comparable, but their DNA must be regarded as a separate environmental factor. God, my brain's hurting just at the thought of all this.Moved here by AdminBenThis message has been edited by AdminBen, Thursday, 2005/10/13 03:31 PM

That makes perfect sense. An individual's idiolect is unique, as an individual's genetic makeup is unique. (Idiolect is also a great word! Thanks!)I guess the idea of the meme is relevant here. Whereas DNA resides primarily in cells' nucleii, language resides in... well, brains, I suppose. It is written in the relevant portion of a brain. That way, it makes more sense if we consider someone who speaks many languages - the different languages reside in different parts of the brain. In this way, a speaker's brain is more of an environment in which a language can live.I don't think it can be described as something that sexually reproduces, instead, it appears to reproduce asexually, in way that bacteria do.Every heard speech act is promiscuous, in that it has the potential to take root in the listener's brain, for them to utter it, and for a ripple effect to take place through a population of speakers. I suppose if you want to keep running and running with the analogy, each utterance is equivalent to the moment when a single-celled organism undergoes binary fission.This may all seem a bit random, but I think that it would be quite interesting if we could assertain whether language is directly comparable with DNA.

Okay - that's really helpful. I hadn't been able to properly put my finger on what was making me uneasy about this idea until your last post. Now you've given me a much clearer idea, but I think there's a way through it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.I'm going to try to provide a direct answer to your two "top down" questions:Mutation - That definitely applies, as far as I can see. You just have to look at some written English from four hundred years ago, and some written English from eight hundred years ago to see that it has been undergoing what appears to be an ongoing process of change. The linguistic commonality between, say German and English, or French and English points to a "common ancestor". I don't buy that Tower of Babel business, unless God was really trying to cover his tracks (as usual!).Selection - This is the bit that I thought at first might be problematic. What selective pressures are there? What if language change is just arbitrary and without selection?It doesn't seem as clear cut as organic natural selection. In the simplest terms - if an organism lives long enough to reproduce, and if it reproduces more than the average member of its reproductive community, then its going to be a success.Our task here is to try to understand if there are selective pressures against words and syntax, not DNA. After some reflection, I think there are some.An obvious one (if we assume that the human brain is wired to produce certain kinds of language, especially grammar, more readily than others) is that if something is overly complex or not easy, for whatever reason, for most human brains to process, is going to be selected against. Clearly there is loads of scope for variety of vocabulary and grammar that isn't difficult for the brain to remember, but that parallels organism evolution well.Additionally (and this is off the top of my head), there might be other reasons as well that would result not from neurological reasons but from cultural circumstances. I can't quite think what they would be though.Like a reproductive community of organisms, a community of speakers and listeners is where evolution takes place. No-one can readily decide to change how language works in a community in the same way that I can't decide to give birth to an otter.Right, I'm just rambling now, but just this last point: its quite fun. It just occured to me that linguists have already made Chimeras! Klingon and Esperanto are good examples. Ah! And Klingon in fact gives us a really interesting example of a language where a cultural force (Trekkiness) makes a language that was deliberately made difficult to learn, very popular.

Okay - here's a really wacky idea. It may be totally irrelivant, but it might be interesting. If we were going to slavishly continue the analogy between the evolution of life and the evolution of language, how might language SEXUALLY reproduce? I can't quite figure it out.It might be useful because if it can be imagined, it might make the relationships clearer.In case you are wondering, I'm not going to keep slavishly tying language evolution back to organic evolution. If evolution can be observed in different things like language, life (I'm certain it applies to stories too), then maybe we can start to see a broader picture, and even get a better understanding of the forces involved in evolution generally.This message has been edited by Tusko, 10-14-2005 09:42 AM

Ah okay - maybe that was a joke, so forgive me! But if it wasn't, then perhaps you have slightly misunderstood.Each new generation of humans does have its own "lingo"... but language can be learned from young people by old people, so it works in a different way from the transmission of genetic material from parents to children.As far as I can see, language reproduces asexually. For a laugh, I wondered if it was possible to push the analogy of language evolution even further an envisage how the DNA of language (words and syntax I guess) might recombine to make a linguistic "offspring". Perhaps two people would have to come together and combine their idiolects and teach it to a third party? But perhaps thats being too human-centred. Perhaps it wouldn't be like that at all. Just a silly little though experiment really.This message has been edited by Tusko, 10-14-2005 10:00 AM

I'm very aware of this problem. This enquiry could all could be very silly, I know. But it would be really cool if it did, in some weird way, correspond.I was just thinking how it could be that (as I think you may be suggesting) the change in the language of different speaking communities is due entirely to random shift with no selection to speak of. This would make it fundamentally different from biological evolution. I certainly think there is a much greater degree of random shift in language (and at a much faster rate) than in biological evolution.But it is just possible that there is some selective element operating on language, which would make it analogious to biological evolution. I postulated one (though its not that convincing) a couple of posts ago.

Brilliant thinking! I hadn't made the connection.Perhaps creoles are, in a fashion, the result of a kind of linguistic sexual reproduction.Perhaps its a tangential point, but the first thing of interest that springs to mind is the two step process needed for the creole to be "born". First a pidgin must be arrived at between adults, but because they haven't got the necessary brain structure to push it to a fully fledged language, the pidgin has to be learned by a human sufficiently young to turn it into a "proper" language.Perhaps that compares with haploids and diploids a bit?I am terribly aware that I'm pushing the analogy to breaking point, but for the purposes of this thread I want to keep going with it until it crashes into the mountain, burns, oxides and gets into the ground water.

Perhaps I'm getting the wrong end of the stick - but can you explain again why that breaks the analogy?

I agree that languages are meme-complexes (or whatever).Hapoloidy/Diploidy stuff was just a moment of craziness on my part. I'm not concerned with mapping every little thing into language. I just want to see if the places where it appears NOT to fit can be beaten into shape.Why do I want to do that? Just for laugh really.What I'm finding exciting at the moment is that there seem to be interdependent but totally seperate realms where evolution is taking place. There's organisms, there's languages, and there's stories as well. I'm wondering if there are any more. Actually this is OT.

That's great!So you are suggesting specific kinds of environmental selection: - the human desire (neurological imperative?) to regularise constructions, or the practical necessity to irregularise them when they become too difficult to say regularly.Cultural factors also have a strong selective influence. A word like Supercallifragilisticexplialidocious hasn't got much of a chance if its just let loose in the wild, so to speak, but if it has a tasty sugar-coating (Mary Poppins) then it can become quite popular. It won't stand the test of time for many centuries - but in very specific cultural circumstances it can flourish.I'm guessing that it is to a large degree neutral drift. But I don't think these selective pressures can be entirely discounted.I'm a bit unsure about your point about pushing the analogy too far. Sure the selection method is radically different - but that isn't a problem as long as its analogious, is it?This message has been edited by Tusko, 10-14-2005 11:18 AM

Oh - I thought you specifically pointed out an example of horizontal transfer in organisms WAS possible.I'm just pulling this out of the air here, but perhaps because an individual's idiolect is so much simpler than the DNA of an octopus, language can only ever function in evolutionary terms like the very simplest of genetic organisms. Perhaps horizontal transfer results from having a comparitavely simple code.I totally agree that the limits of the analogy have to be recognised. I'm just wanting to keep running and running until I've totally run out of road!

We do - unforunately cute little elephants are only capable of making cute little roads.

(Just in case you have the wrong end of the stick, I'm not talking about language conferring a selective advangtage on human beings, or any group of human beings. I am talking about the seperate but parallel evolution of language.)There are many ways in which biological and linguistic evolution are different. DNA seems considerably less prone to mutation than lanaguage, so the rate of change in language is much greater than the rate of change in life.If we adopt Crash's useful idea of the idiolect (that is, the unique rules, idiosyncracies and vocabulary that an individual uses to make themself understood), then we can see that this mutation takes place constantly through a lifetime. The equivalent in the natural world would probably be a critter that hangs out in a nuclear waste dump, constantly picking up little mutations!Related to this, new words can spring up (no-one quite knows where from) and suddenly they spread into many people's idiolects. Or an old word suddenly takes on a new or contradictory meaning. RAZD described this as the equivalent of horizontal transfer of genetic material in very simple organisms. If such a novel word fulfills a cultural need, it will stick - at least while the cultural conditions are condusive.I suspect that an individual's idiolect is much more simple than the simplest of viruses, but that it might be sufficiently similar biological evolution to make the comparison worthwhile. There is even the vaguest of possibilities, if language is like a very primitive form of life, that it might give some insight into the very early stages of the evolution of life. However, that's probably codswallop.I suspect that as a result of the much higher rate of mutation in language than in life, quite a lot of the difference between, say, Spanish and Hindi can be put down to random "genetic" drift. However, for the sake of this thread, I am contending that any language is subject to a certain degree of selective pressure also. What's my evidence? Well, I don't really have a hell of a lot.The selective pressures on language might face is clearly very different from those that any life-form face. Whereas creatures inhabit the world, languages "inhabit" humans and human society. I believe however that in facing a selective pressure, then the evolution of language can be seen as a parallel kind of evolution, and not as one that is fundamentally different.It is perhaps reasonable to expect that utterances that are physically difficult to voice, concepts that become archaic culturally, and complex irregular grammatic rules will often be selected against. (Thanks to Chiroptera for this.)Clearly, creatures with different vocal tracts or different brains would comprise an alien environment and consequently the languages they spoke would be subject to different selective pressures.And that's all I've reallly got so far.

You seem to have highlighted the same problem as RAZD, but coming at it from a different angle. He compared this property of language to horizonal genetic transfer in very simple organisms. I hadn't thought of it being a possible example of Lamarkian evolution in action; that's really cool.My question is - are these two interpretations two sides of the same coin?I'm not terribly hot on biological evolution, so I was wondering if you could clarify something for me. I was just thinking about Lamarkian evolution, and it occured to me that actually seems seems to work - but only when it is the DNA itself that is being modified, if you see what I mean. Let me explain: if I work out a lot and get big muscles, then I'm not going to pass those on to my kids. But if my DNA was to be changed by something that happened during my life, then this would be hereditable. Except in the case of multicellular life, this isn't going to work, because I have my DNA stored in loads of different places, and its not ALL going to get the same mutation all at the same time. However, with single-celled life if something changes it, it stays changed. The same thing would happen with languages too, I venture. Does that make sense?

Wow! This is great stuff - unfortunately its making my brain ache. Perhaps if I come back at it fresh tomorrow, I'll be able to understand it properly. I hope so!