Inspiration

Language: Design Without a Designer

To assume there was one person [who] gave a name

To everything, and that all learned their first words from the same,

Is stuff and nonsense. Why should one human being from among

The rest be able to designate and name things with his tongue

And others not possess the power to do likewise? …

-           Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5, lines 1041-5

The development of an embryo into a body is perhaps the most beautiful of all demonstrations of spontaneous order. Our understanding of our own biological development is growing ever less instructional. Richard Dawkins writes in his book The Greatest Show on Earth, “The key point is that there is no choreographer and no leader. Order, organization, structure – these all emerge as byproducts of rules which are obeyed locally and many times over.” There is no plan, just cells reacting to local effects. Consider a termite mound in the Australian outback. Tall, fortified, ventilated and oriented with respect to the sun, it is a perfect system for housing a colony of tiny insects in comfort and gentle warmth. It is as carefully engineered as the Notre Dame de Paris. Except there is no engineer, no architect, no designer. Despite being composed of individual termites, rather than individual cells, the mound is no more centralized than a tree or a developing embryo. Every single grain of sand, each small stone, each piece of dirt is carried to and placed in its resting place by a termite acting under no instruction, and with no plan in mind. The thousands of individuals simply react to the environment around them – to their local signals. The mound is like a human language, with all of its rules of syntax and grammar, which emerges spontaneously from the sounds of individual “speakers,” with nobody laying down the rules. 

That is exactly how language evolved. Evolution is not confined to, or bound by, systems that run on DNA. Evolutionary theorists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, in their book Not by Genes Alone, have developed one of the most intriguing evolutionary theories of the late twentieth century: the mechanisms of natural selection, as described by Charles Darwin, resulting in cumulative complexity and spontaneous order apply to human culture in all of its aspects too. Everything about us, from our biological beginnings to our habits, cities, and languages can be described accurately from the viewpoint of evolutionary change. The changes that our cultures undergo are gradual, undirected (despite our best efforts), mutational, completely inescapable, combinatorial, profoundly selective, and – in no small part – progressive. 

Language evolves like a message in a game of Telephone - where one person whispers a message into the ear of his neighbor, who whispers, as accurately as possible, that same message into the ear of his subsequent neighbor, and so on – the initial message is gradually and completely changed in both form and meaning while remaining cogent and coherent. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission – like DNA and language – so long as there is some degree of randomness in the passing along of that information. There is an almost perfect parallel between genetic evolution and the evolution of written and spoken language. Both consist of linear codes. Both evolve by a selective survival (or dismissal) of sequences generated by (at least) partly random variation. Both are combinatorial systems – capable of generating effectively infinite diversity from small numbers of discrete elements. Languages, like lifeforms, mutate, diversify, and evolve by descent with modification and merge into a ballet of unplanned beauty.