Darwin Meets Chomsky

Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.

Darwin saw parallels between the evolution of species and of languages

Charles Darwin spotted it. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: "The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have developed through a gradual process are clearly the same." He'd been struck by ideas that William Jones had advanced 50 years earlier, that the similarities between languages as disparate as Sanskrit, Latin, and Old Persian, suggest a common historical ancestry.

These foundations for an entirely new field of research were largely ignored for almost a century. Language wasn't recognized as a heritable trait, subject to processes of natural selection. Instead, studies of biological and language evolution followed different trajectories, evidence of which is still reflected in the departmental structure of most universities. The divide is finally being bridged, even if a common terminology has taken a while ...