Cladistic language concepts

[Ghiselin, Michael]

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               Strong endorsements of cladistic language concepts keep
          coming in and I only wonder if somebody somewhere disagrees
          with them.
               Your comments raise some further questions about the
          putative analogies and disanalogues between linguistic and
          organic evolution.  There have been in fact some heroic but
          not very effectual efforts on the part of biologists to
          measure complexity, and that makes me think that there is
          not much difference.  One team of scientists attempted to
          decide whether bivalves or gastropods are the more complex
          by counting the number of words in glossaries!  That
          probably means only that clams are a bit harder to talk
          about.
               Surely there are adaptive changes in language through
          time, at least in the sense of coinages and borrowings when
          there are new conditions of existence.  The advent of new
          modes of transportation obviously evokes a needed
          vocabulary.  That of course is a change within a language
          rather than competitive displacement.  When there are just
          two species in perfect competition one will drive the other
          out, and the same would probably happen with languages.  But
          that results from an unstable equilibrium, and which wins
          out can be due to a very minor difference.
               I would argue that the same kind of entropy exists with
          respect to languages, and that if they do maintain their
          organization it is due to something counteracting the
          tendency to decay.  Consider the vocabulary as it gets
          passed from parent to child.  The probability that every
          single word will get transmitted has to be somewhat less
          than one.  But as everybody knows, children and adults alike
          coin words when they need them.
               Continuity does seem to me the basic criterion as you
          say, and discontinuity blocks it.  That seems to be
          fundamental to the outlook of populational and cladistic
          thinking.  What you say about the role of bilingual persons
          is very interesting when one tries to find biological
          analogies.  A cell is often part of more than one organ
          system, but I cannot think of any that are part of more than
          one organism, although they can move from one organism to
          another.  Organisms are never part of more than one species,
          but they can be part of more than one club or other
          organization.  A bilingual person may be said to participate
          in more than one language, though I suppose nobody considers
          such a person a part of either.  The person's idiolect is
          supposedly a part of a language, so the person would have
          more than one idiolect.  But transfer from one idiolect to
          another within the same person and hence across languages,
          would not imply that there was just one idiolect or just one
          language.
               The situation is rather like what we encounter when a
          certain amount of gene flow occurs between populations
          through hybridization.  But only partly.  To get something
          like a bilingual person we would need organisms with two
          independent genetic systems that can coexist and get
          transmitted separately.  I can imagine that, but to my
          knowledge there is no such thing in nature.
          MG