Comparing the Evolution of Language and Biological Evolution

I think that you might be trying to make too much out of an analogy.The evolution of languages is similar to biological evolution in that we have descent through slight modifications and we have common descent. This allows some interesting analogies in terms of heirarchical classification and reconstruction of ancestors.However, the mechanisms are completely different. In biological evolution individuals live or die depending on whether they have "better" or "worse" heretable characteristics, and so may or may not pass these characteristics to the next generation. In language, we do not have natural selection, at least not anything like the way natural selection works in biology.So be careful of the analogy. There is a limit to how far its usefulness extends.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

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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.

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Actually, I wasn't saying anything about selection, just that if it exists it is nothing like what occurs in biology.But you have brought up an interesting point. Is there selection that guides the selection of languages? I know that there are certain rules that govern some language changes, like the attempts of speakers to eliminate irregularities (the past tense of help used to be [/i]holp[/i] long ago, but was eventually "regularized" to helped) and the attempts of speakers to create irregularities to make the sounds easier to say (which created mice as the plural or mouse). But these would seem to be more analagous (to stretch the analogy) to the rules of chemistry determining which mutations are more likely to occur in genetics.Interesting question. So, are there selection forces as work in the evolution of language? Or is language evolution governed mostly by neutral drift?

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

One other very significant difference between biological evolution and the evolution of language is the nature of the evolution.In biological evolution, the species evolves because individuals with "better" characteristics survive and pass these characteristics to their offspring, while individuals with poorer characteristics die sooner without leaving behind surviving offspring or fewer offspring.But in language evolution, we do not see that individuals with a "superior" way of speaking leave behind children that speak the same way, evetually replacing individuals with "inferior" ways of speaking. Instead, innovations spread among many different individuals who live concurrently, perhaps to the entire population. The evolution of language is much closer to Lamark's ideas of evolution, where the entire population of individuals undergoes evolution simultaneous, in response to present needs in the environment.Almost the only thing about language evolution that is Darwinian as opposed to Lamarkian is that we do see separate populations of a given language evolving their own separate dialects, resulting in common descent. (Added by edit: Also, Lamark's philosophy of an innate drive toward "progress" may be no more relevant to linguistics than to biology.)Perhaps if we were to really develop an analogy between language and biology, Lamarkian evolution would offer some insight.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 15-Oct-2005 07:17 PM

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt