Evolution is often thought of as a single thing. Yet’s it’s not even a thing at all — it’s a phenomenon, a figment of our imaginations, one way that we interpret the world we live in.
It is perhaps one of our most abstract scientific concepts. At the same time, no one even just somewhat versed in evolutionary theory would be surprised in the slightest were to mention how important generations are to in evolutionary development. Some organisms live less than a day, others can live thousands of years, … I myself view all of nature as alive, so perhaps universes regenerate themselves on the scale of billions of years (or more?).
I would be lucky to make it to 100 years (sometimes I joke that I would only be upset if someone misses my “galactic” birthday, by which I do not mean some astrological phenomenon but rather when I become 1 “galactic year” old 😉 ).
Let me now address why I chose this topic today.
Today, many, most, perhaps even all linguists recognize that natural languages are also living phenomena, and that languages also evolve over time. When I studied linguistics in grad school, I had a disagreement with one of my professors (in “diachronic linguistics”) regarding whether it is possible to practice diachronic linguistics on anything other than a written language. I believe it’s impossible to practice diachronic linguistics without recording data in some kind of codified writing system. He did not understand my argument, and insisted stubbornly that the work of a diachronic linguist is indeed focused on spoken language. Maybe my argument is indeed invalid, but I did not abandon it, I still refuse to abandon it, and it is for this reason that I cannot maintain to have achieved a master’s degree in Linguistics. At the time of the disagreement, I questioned how such a piece of paper might impact my life … and I came to the conclusion that it was not worth losing a lot of sleep over.
Nonetheless, to this day humans have a reverence towards this abstract notion of a language as being something permanent. There are certainly traces of language that seem to evolve at different rates from other traces. At any rate, only a fool would believe to understand Socrates or Plato — we merely interpret what we believe they meant according to our own current language and our own corresponding understanding. Let alone all of the thoughts that were never even written down.
No less foolish are the astronomical sums spent sending space ships into the vacuous ether with audio recordings or similar hare-brained notions of intelligence.
One of my friends joked to me yesterday how he wishes back the bygone days of natural intelligence!
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