Information about a quote

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Aubrey,

    Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that  
does not arise from old parts?  Without concrete examples of this,
I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude  
cannibalism.   Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing  
Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind.   
Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that  
arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then  
spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides.
Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like  
glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right?

--Brian MacWhinney

On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote:

> Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in  
> the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in  
> Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language  
> improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range,  
> etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary  
> Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the  
> eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo- 
> centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human  
> divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what  
> order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude  
> cannibalism? And: Why?
>
> Aubrey Nunes
> PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT
> Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd.,
> 52, Bonham Road,
> London SW2 5HG
> 0207 652 1347
>
>
>