The Genetics of Language

[Avatar]

'Evolutionary law of language'

Paris - Scientists have uncovered what might be called the law of language evolution: the more a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time.

Like genes, words undergo ruthless survival-of-the-fittest pressure and those which are less central to daily life are subject to mutation, according to their study.

Their research applies mathematical precision to four very different Indo-European languages - but if it holds for other languages as well, it would be a milestone in understanding one of humanity's defining attributes.

Much like the evolutionary theory of Darwin, who was himself intrigued by the concept of a linguistic family tree, the new findings show how individuals can unwittingly influence changes in the "species" of their shared mother tongue.

The paper, published in the British journal Nature, reveals an ironclad link between the word's frequency of use, its stability of form and meaning over time - and this applies across a spectrum of languages.

Researchers led by Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, southern England, looked at how 200 basic words diverged over thousands of years among English Russian, Greek and Spanish.

Much as in evolutionary biology, the entire family of 87 Indo-European languages spoken today are thought to share a common origin reaching back 10 000 years.

Very commonly used words - the number "two" or "water", for example - remain recognisably related across this vast linguistic spectrum, they found.

Word 'mutation'

But others words that occur less frequently in daily speech, even if they are hardly obscure, have changed profoundly over centuries and millennia.

An English speaker bereft of foreign-language skills would have a hard time guessing that "oupa" in Greek, "Schwanz" in German, or "queue" in French all mean the same thing as "tail" in English.

The statistical correlation between the frequency of word use and its "mutation" is extremely high, the authors say.

"The relationship explains 50% of the variation in replacement rates between different words - a level of statistical power rarely observed in the social sciences," comments Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland.

In a parallel study also published in Nature, Erez Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist and mathematician at Harvard, probed changes over time in English verbs, especially the transition from irregular to regular verbs.

In Old English, changes in tense rarely adhered to specific rules, but gradually these "irregular" verbs have become standardised.

Lieberman and his colleagues, looking at 177 verb forms, show a mathematically exact link between frequency of use and change: a verb used 100 times more often than another will regularise 10 times more slowly.

Resistant to change

Though they use very different methods, both papers arrive at the same conclusion: frequently used words are resistant to change.

Exactly why this relationship holds, however, is unclear.

One possibility, according to the researchers, is that new variations - or "mutations," in the language of evolutionary biology - are rarer with commonly-used words because people using them are less apt to make mistakes. Put simply, we best remember those words which we use every day.

Another explanation would be that all words breed new variants, uttered in error or on purpose.

But the chances that this pretender will survive and flourish are diminished if, like an introduced species, it has to fight against an established rival which dominates its habitat.

--A

[Loredoctor]

Interesting. I wonder if this means that memes are genetic?

[Avatar]

Hmmm, don't see that. Just that words are subject to the same environmental stresses/reinforcement as other things.

--A

[Loredoctor]

Hmmm, don't see that. Just that words are subject to the same environmental stresses/reinforcement as other things.

--A

Possibly ideas/concepts could be subject to the same thing.

[I'm Murrin]

Though it is more generally related to culture, language is one of the easiest places to see memetic theory at work, and yet for some reason you rarely see people refer to evolutionary linguistics in discussion of memetics. Is there some reason why language seems to be ignored, when quite clearly its transmission mechanisms are identical - and more fundamental, since language itself is part of the transmission mechanism for culture?


Lore--I'm not sure what you meant by your comment. Memetic theory itself comes from the idea that cultural evolution follows the same patterns as genetic evolution, with the meme as the 'unit of culture' that acts as analogue to the gene; so the question "are memes genetic" seems unusual.

[Avatar]

Ah, I misunderstood your comment at first Lore. Yes, I absolutely agree that idea/concepts/memes would be subjected to the same sort of pressures.

Thought you suggested they were genetically encoded into us for some reason.

--A

[Loredoctor]

Lore--I'm not sure what you meant by your comment. Memetic theory itself comes from the idea that cultural evolution follows the same patterns as genetic evolution, with the meme as the 'unit of culture' that acts as analogue to the gene; so the question "are memes genetic" seems unusual.

I'm not arguing that they are. I was just wondering aloud if higher concepts can be passed on genetically. Or, the makeup of our brains makes us predisposed to realise ideas. The latter is probably the case.

[I'm Murrin]

Ah. I get what you mean now. I would lean toward the latter also.

[Avatar]

Ah, I was still wrong...you were wondering if they could be coded.

Interesting idea. I'd also say we were simply more predisposed, but then, we don't know what ideas are actually made of. Still, I'd agree that we could be genetically more receptive to ideas, rather than inherit them, which wouldn't work well. Afterall, once an idea has been had...

(Unless you mean abstract concepts...)

--A

[I'm Murrin]

Our capability for abstraction, ideation, etc. is apparently genetic; the concepts which arise from this ability are more likely transmitted through memes, so that they still appear to survive from generation to generation in a similar way, but via a mechanism working in parallel with, and enabled by, the genetic element.

[Avatar]

Good post. I agree. Taking Lore's musing further though, I wonder if something like an "honour" gene, or an "honesty" gene (wait, wasn't there something about that recently?) or "fairness" or whatever will ever be isolated.

--A

[Loredoctor]

Our capability for abstraction, ideation, etc. is apparently genetic; the concepts which arise from this ability are more likely transmitted through memes, so that they still appear to survive from generation to generation in a similar way, but via a mechanism working in parallel with, and enabled by, the genetic element.

Great post.

And interesting post, Avatar.

[emotional leper]

Drat. For some reason I was hoping this would be the other way around. I've been reading Dune too much.

Loremaster: Why Jonathan Crane?

[Loredoctor]

Loremaster: Why Jonathan Crane?

1. The Scarecrow has always been my favourite villain.
2. We share the same careers - Prison Psychologists.
3. I look ALOT like Cillian Murphy.

[DukkhaWaynhim]

I like entertaining the thought that some memes, vowel sounds, thought patterns, etc. are more easily uptaken and held onto by our neurally-circuited human brains than others.
Think about the latest CD of any artist. What makes one song better/more memorable than the others? Would this explain why some rhythm/music/lyrics combinations are more attractive to us, and thus more easily memorized and repeated, but others do not spark our interest? Why are some people better able to visualize math than others? Is it that some have more capacity than others, or is their memory structure just better suited to hold and manipulate numbers than others?
What I'm getting at is this - are some thoughts more easily uptaken by people's brains because they are somehow neurally suited to better absorb that specific type of information?
Let's TC this topic - why do Stonedownors tend toward rhadhamaerl arts rather than wood lore? Is it environment? Are they just naturally tuned to the pitch of stone over wood? Could a Stonedownor pick up wood lore to the same level of proficiency that he could stone lore?

dw

[emotional leper]

Loremaster: Why Jonathan Crane?

1. The Scarecrow has always been my favourite villain.
2. We share the same careers - Prison Psychologists.
3. I look ALOT like Cillian Murphy.

I'm afraid to think about what's in your briefcase.

[Zarathustra]

What about mathematics? Isn't it a sort of universal language? The question of language being "coded" in our genes--even from a predisposition standpoint--is a question about whether or not language is a contingent yet extremely likely consequence arising from the interplay between random mutation and natural selection. In other words, some memes are so useful, our genetic evolution "inevitably" follows a course favorable to the utilization of certain memes.

That is freaky enough; the idea that certain ideas "call matter" towards them. It gives them a measure of independence and substance.

But what if we go further and suppose that there is a level of meaning which is in no way contingent, which exists before and after any creature is there to ponder them? Not only *very likely* memes, but *necessary* memes? Memes that don't need to be pre-programmed in order to appreciate, but which are instead so fundamental to the way reality is put together, that no conscious being can fail to recognize them even if they weren't predisposed by evolution to recognize them?

When it comes to mathematics, I'm definitely a Platonist. But I might be a Platonist when it comes to ideas in general.

[Avatar]

Hmmm...I'm not sure I'd go that far. Depends where you draw the line between memes and observable phenomenon. Is gravity a meme? I wouldn't say so.

So if we're talking about the abstract, then I'd disagree to an extent. Certainly there will always be people to whom certain memes are self-evident. Such as, not killing other people. But there will be those to whom they are not self-evident, therefore making an independant existance unlikely IMO.

--A

[Lord Mhoram]

Viva Chomskyism.

He was right.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar--famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky's "universal grammar" theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages--and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky's assertions.

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child's first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all--such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique human ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky's theory for guidance. ...