This article highlights some shortcomings of Salikoko Mufwene's comparison between biological evolution and linguistic evolution as he sees it. It is argued that, contrary to Mufwene's par-allelizations like gene (pool) ≈ feature (pool),...
moreThis article highlights some shortcomings of Salikoko Mufwene's comparison between biological evolution and linguistic evolution as he sees it. It is argued that, contrary to Mufwene's par-allelizations like gene (pool) ≈ feature (pool), organism ≈ idiolect, species ≈ communal language, 1. biologists consider the mixing of species as rare, whereas Mufwene considers the mixing of languages as pervasive, 2. biologists see genes as (dis)favouring organisms, whereas Mufwene does not explicitly see linguistic features as (dis)favouring idiolects, 3. biologists think 'nature' and specific environments select organisms, whereas Mufwene thinks individuals select features for their idiolect(s), and, 4. in biological evolution, the genes of a new organism come from one ore two parents, whereas according to Mufwene the features of a new idiolect come from virtually all other idiolects present in the environment. The article comes to the conclusion that comparing comparable aspects of biological and linguistic evolution may be helpful, whereas the parallelization of a whole biological scenario and a linguistic one is liable to create a false image of natural selection among linguists and of linguistic evolution among biologists.
