The Meme Machine

THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE 25
never . . . reappears’ (Darwin 1859, p. 422). He also spoke of words competing
for survival. Darwin probably knew about the work of the British Judge Sir
William Jones who, in 1786, found remarkable similarities between Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin, and concluded that all three languages must have sprung from
a common source. But Darwin could not have seen many languages become
extinct in his own lifetime nor have known just how many are now threatened.
On a recent estimate, about 80 per cent of North American Indian languages are
spoken largely by adults only, and are therefore likely to become extinct when
those adults die. Similarly, about 90 per cent of Australian languages and
perhaps 50 per cent of languages worldwide are doomed (Pinker 1994).
Nowadays, comparative linguists analyse the minute details of similarities
and differences. They can often trace words back through many types of change
such as the dropping of syllables and shifts in pronunciation. Thus, the
evolutionary history of various languages can be accurately traced. Family trees
of languages have been constructed that are comparable with the genetic family
trees based on differences in DNA. Also, the migratory history of whole
peoples can be deduced from the languages that remain today. In Africa, for
example, the 1500 or more surviving languages fall into just give main language
groups, largely spoken by distinct racial group, and their distribution can reveal
which groups defeated others in the past. From a few remaining words it can be
deduced that the pygmies once had their own languages but were forced into
adopting those of neighbouring black farmers, and that Semitic languages, the
languages of the Bible and of Islam, came not from the Near East but from
Africa. The American physiologist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond
(1997) uses language analysis as just one part of his masterful history of
humanity over the past 13000 years. He explains how languages evolve along
with the people who speak them, but he does not consider the elements of
language as replicators in a new evolutionary process.
In his book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker (1994) explicitly applies
evolutionary thinking to the development of languages, looking at heredity,
variation and the effects of isolation in allowing sets of variations to accumulate.
However, he does not use the idea of a selfish replicator to understand language
revolution and not does he explain why language evolved in the first place.
Perhaps the answer seems too obvious – that it was biologically adaptive. But,
as we shall see, this is not necessarily the right answer, and memetics can
provide new twists to the argument.