Blute Blog

James Watson of the Watson and Crick “double helix” fame died recently at 97. Read the obituaries – he was a human being with great strengths but also with some weaknesses as well. I met him once briefly in 1990 when I participated in the Centennial Symposium on Evolution at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while he was director there. What I loved about genetics as I continued to explore cultural evolution was the detailed analogy between genetics and linguistics. Some of that may have been forgotten more recently in the also important current emphasis on extending evolutionary theory, making it more inclusive beyond just population genetics.

Both genomes and languages are digital having basic units of structure (nucleotide bases and phonemes respectively) and basic units of function (codons and morphemes respectively). In both there are larger more inclusive units of both kinds as well and in both the units of function are symbolic rather than iconic. There is no physiochemical necessity in the biological case, nor psychological necessity in the cultural case, for the link between a string of symbols and what they represent. In both cases, those linkages are a product of an historical, evolutionary process and could well have been different under different circumstances. A language is a cultural species in which members are able to exchange communications linguistically within its boundaries but not beyond them analogous to a biological species with members able to exchange genetic information within but not beyond its boundaries.