I tried to simply reply to the post itself, but I encountered the same “you must be logged in” glitch as previously complained about. What’s mysterious is that for some posts I am logged in, and for others I am not.
In any case, I think that a human population’s capacity to create a new grammar when one is lacking or unavailable does not exclude language from an evolutionary model. Specifically, I am thinking of the way that linguistic information is inherited from previous generations with astounding fidelity. And then mistakes are made in the copying process or populations migrate or whatever and the next thing you know, you have a dialect, then a new language altogether. This looks an awful lot like speciation to me.
It’s also important to remember that although an analogy may not fit to the letter, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still useful. While it would be brilliant if language evolved in literally the same way as genetic material, that would also be way too simple and make our lives far too easy. If you accept such a model as analogous and account for discrepancies therein, you can discover more about both subjects through their differences, and perhaps modify your understanding of them (hopefully in a useful way).
Switching gears completely, the Maddison reading for tomorrow made me wonder what speciation looks like. Is there a concrete example of this that has been observed? At what point do species split–that is, when can we start naming them in Latin? Can they only split in two directions, or can they branch off in three directions at once?
One reply on “Re: Scott’s post about linguistic phylogeny”
“made me wonder what speciation looks like”
A good question for Wayne Maddison tomorrow. Unfortunately there’s no single answer. Speciation can look like lots of things depending on the kind of organism (bacteria? flowers? bees? wombats?) and on the main cause or conditions of the speciation event.
In most cases it is thought to be a single split into two lineages, but you can have lots of new species forming in a very short time, leading to a three-prong branch or more. These are called star-phylogenies (for obvious reasons) and are thought to be mainly due to not having a fine enough resolution of the events. It’s possible to imagine three or more species branching apart at the same time, but it is much more likely that they branch off one at a time in quick succession.