Evolution compared to language

Photo by neopicture

Recently as I’ve discussed evolution with my creationist family/friends, they’ve raised a few objections to evolution including the following:

“Why isn’t evolution still happening today?”

“If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”

“Gaps in the fossil record prove evolution isn’t true. Where are all the transitional fossils?”

While not a perfect analogy, I think that comparing biological evolution with the evolution of language can be helpful in explaining the process of evolution to those who don’t understand or accept it. I’m not a biologist, but thanks to those scientists who take the time to write books explaining evolution to the layperson, anyone can pick up a book and, within a few hours, understand the major lines of evidence supporting evolution.

My goal is to share my limited understanding in a non-technical way, and hopefully if you’re someone who doesn’t accept evolution, some of my writing will pique your interest enough that you will go pick up a book by someone who really knows their stuff. For an easy-to-read, enjoyable explanation of the evidence for evolution, I recommend Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth.

“Why isn’t evolution still happening today?”

It is. It’s happening all around us. Evolutionary change takes place over periods of time much greater than your lifespan, so you won’t personally see live animals giving birth to new species.

The English language is evolving. New words are being created, old words are being forgotten, and bit by bit, syllable by syllable, word by word, English is slowly changing over time. It won’t become a completely different language in any one person’s lifetime, but over the course of many generations it will change significantly.

Some creationists claim to accept microevolution, but not macroevolution, meaning that they believe there can be small changes within species, but that evolution cannot account for large changes, or cannot explain how one species becomes another. That is like saying that one believes that English is changing a little, with new words being added and old words being dropped, but that it could never have been a different language, and will never be a different language in the future.

Macroevolution is just microevolution happening continuously for long periods of time. English is changing slowly, and someday the English we speak today will be unrecognizable to an English speaker of the future, just as Old English is incomprehensible to the current day English speaker.To switch metaphors, macroevolution is a mile, and microevolution is an inch. Add enough inches together and you get a mile. Add enough small genetic changes together and you get a new species.

One objection that a creationist might raise is, “Well, language is controlled by intelligent people who empower it to evolve, whereas evolution doesn’t have an intelligent being supervising it, so it wouldn’t work.” It’s true that intelligent humans are the vehicle through which language is transmitted and evolves, but that doesn’t mean that intelligence is the key factor. The only necessary factors are replication with small variation. Each person who learns a language is “replicating” that language, and over time there will be small variations in a language (especially as people groups are separated from one another by mountains, distance, oceans, rivers, etc.).

Evolution provides a means of replication with variation: DNA. As long as something replicates itself imperfectly, there will be some replications who survive better and some who don’t, and the process of evolution by natural selection will be at work.

“If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”

This objection is based on a false premise, First, we didn’t evolve from monkeys, just like English didn’t evolve from Spanish or French. English, Spanish, and French all have a common ancestor, Latin, but they didn’t evolve from each other. In the same way, humans didn’t evolve from monkeys, ducks didn’t evolve from crocodiles, and cats didn’t evolve from rabbits. Each of these pairs has a common ancestor.

Imagine a small kingdom in a valley surrounded by mountains. The citizens of this kingdom all speak the same language. A small group of villagers on the outskirts of the kingdom decides to cross a nearby mountain to find better land to farm. They make the journey across the mountain and settle on the opposite side, building a small village and cultivating their new farmland. Over the next few generations, this new town’s language changes slowly, being completely independent of the old kingdom’s influence. In the mean time, the kingdom’s language also evolves slowly.

After several generations, a small group of travelers from the village decides to make the trek back to the old kingdom. Upon arriving, they are surprised to find that they now speak a different language from their cousins in the kingdom. The grammar structure is similar, much of the vocabulary is similar, but the two languages are unmistakably different.

The kingdom’s language has also changed slightly from its old form, but it has changed more slowly, since it is a larger population, so small variations make a weaker impact on the language as a whole. Now the kingdom’s current language and the village language have a common ancestor, but they are sufficiently different to be called separate languages.

A similar process is responsible for speciation, or the splitting of a single species into different species. Just as English, Spanish, and French have a common ancestor, humans and monkeys have a common ancestor.

“Gaps in the fossil record prove evolution isn’t true. Where are all the transitional fossils?”

For this analogy, let’s consider books to be fossils–fossils of the evolution of language. We have many ancient manuscripts and leather-bound volumes that we can study to see how languages were different in the past. However, many books and manuscripts have been destroyed over the centuries. Does the lack of “fossils” showing a smooth, gradual transition into every modern language mean that current languages don’t have a common ancestor? No, because there are other lines of evidence showing their common ancestry. Studies of syntax and geographical distribution are powerful evidence for the evolution of languages from a common ancestor, just as DNA evidence and geographical distribution are powerful evidence for biological evolution.

Most organisms are not fossilized when they die–only a tiny percentage have the fortune to begin the fossilization process before decomposition takes over. It is no surprise that there are gaps in the fossil record, and these gaps do not even begin to disprove evolution, since there are many other lines of evidence that support it.

Edit: For a more detailed examination of the parallels between language and species evolution, read this article.

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