The Virtually Universal Applicability of Lamarckian Evolution

Thomas of Endless Rocking recommended this review of this book. As the reviewer explains, one of the themes of the book is the parallel between the evolution of financial instruments and biological evolution:

But how does all of this fit in with the credit crunch, the first phases of which are covered by Ferguson? As ever, there are plenty of lessons from the past. In one of the strongest passages in his book, the author explains how financial history is essentially the result of institutional mutation and natural selection. And just like the mass extinctions that eliminated 85 per cent of the earth's species at the end of the Cretaceous period when asteroids hit the earth, the credit crunch stands out as a period of major discontinuity in the world of finance. Numerous banks and entire sub-species of financial institutions are dying off. This happens regularly in financial history, with the bank panics of the 1930s and the savings and loans failures of 1980s America cases in point.

Ferguson enumerates the common features shared by the financial world and an evolutionary system; in doing so, he paints a remarkable portrait of the past two decades of financial innovation. Finance has its very own 'genes', in the sense of certain business practices, and it boasts a potential for spontaneous mutation thanks to technological innovation. There is competition between firms for resources; a mechanism for natural selection, with weaker practices, firms and individuals wiped out; scope for speciation, with the creation of wholly new species of financial institutions a key feature of the past few years; and scope for extinction, with species dying out altogether.

This is a very interesting analogy. Indeed it's amazing how many interesting analogies with biological evolution and classification there are. One of the most provocative for my work is the three-fold analogy explored by Norman I. Platnick and H. David Cameron in "Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic, and Phylogenetic Analysis," published in Systematic Zoology 26.4 (1977), 380-85. They show that the methods of dealing with textual corruption (i.e. the kind of thing explored here), the evolution of language (i.e. the kind of thing explored here and here), and biological evolution have deep analogies, such that one can fruitfully critique the methodology of textual criticism on the basis of the methodology of biological classification and vice versa. (Perhaps another thing they have in common is that all three are or have been at different times highly problematic for Christian belief.) The analogy has even been drawn with quilts.

Of course what is generally left unsaid is the fact that all of these analogies are drawn between biological evolution and systems that are either Lamarckian or else generated by "moderately intelligent design." That is, the evolution is driven by the efforts of the things evolving to improve their own adaptions (languages, financial systems) or else are material things created by moderately intelligent designers who, working with limited resources on the basis of what they have already, are trying to improve their adaption to the environment. Except for biology, no other evolutionary system seems to be thought to run on random mutation as its basic motor. (And no such system seems fruitfully explored as the result of omniscient intelligent design. The presence of constraint seems fundamental to effective explanation.)

Actually, one could argue that Lamarckianism and "moderately intelligent design" are the same thing, in that the thing seen to evolve -- whether text, language, financial systems, body types, and so on -- is always separate from the constrained will and limited intelligence seeking to maximize its adaption. Either way, it seems to be, all unacknowledged, one of the most powerful tools in the intellectual arsenal today.

Food for thought.

The Grammaticalization Cycle

This is pretty technical, but it's so interesting I couldn't help post it. A graduate student of mine in linguistics (thanks, Mikael!) forwarded the quotation to me, and I figured it might as well sit around on my blog as on my hard drive on my office computer. Plus, I've noticed that there is actually a significant number of amateur historical linguists out there, and this is one of the more interesting descriptions of a basic concept that I've seen. It's from R.W. Dixon's The Rise and Fall of Languages, pp. 41-2. Follow the link to the amazon.com entry and the book seems pretty interesting. Certainly his idea of most languages approximating each other as areal families works a lot better with Altaic languages (Mongolian, Turkish, Uzbek, Manchu, etc.) than the classic divergent/genetic family approach.

Languages can be roughly classed into three types: isolating, where each meaning element makes up a distinct word (e.g. Vietnamese and Chinese); agglutinative, where a word is likely to contain several meaning elements but these are clearly separable (e.g. Turkish and Swahili); and fusional,where a word will contain several meaning elements some of them being fusedtogether, so that a single vowel may simultaneously mark, say, tense,voice, and person and number of subject (e.g. Latin and Sanskrit).

Proof of genetic relationship rests heavily on grammatical elements, including affixes. The ideal situation is to have a proto-language that is agglutinative [Proto-Indo-European had a fairly fusional structure (with ablaut and stress shift). This structure can be reconstructed because these fusional features have been retained in many of the descendants (and we are fortunate in having old records)] and modern languages that vary from agglutinative to fusional. If a group of modern languages are all basically isolating, with few grammatical affixes, if may never be possible to prove genetic connection with the same degree of confidence as for an agglutinative group.

As languages change over time, they tend -- very roughly -- to move around a typological circle: isolating to agglutinating, to fusional, back to isolating, and so on. If we place the isolating type at the four o'clock position, agglutinative at eight o'clock and fusional at twelve o'clock,around a clock-face, it is possible to describe recent movements in various language families. Proto-Indo-European was at about twelve o'clock but modern branches of the family have moved, at different rates, towards amore isolating position (some to one or two o'clock, others toward three o'clock). Early Chinese is thought to have been at about three o'clock, Classical Chinese was a fairly pure isolating type at four o'clock, while Modern Chinese languages are acquiring a mildly agglutinative structure, towards five o'clock. Proto-Dravidian was on the isolating side of agglutinative, at about seven o'clock, and modern Dravidian languages have moved around the cycle towards nine o'clock. Proto Finno-Ugric may have been at around nine o'clock, with modern languages moving to ten or eleven o'clock...For Egyptian, which has a long recorded history, Hodge (1970)* describes how it moved right around the cycle from fusional back again to fusional over a period of about 3,000 years.

My graduate student noted that stress and syncopation seem to be the motor driving the grammaticalization cycle. Inflectional/fusional languages that have lots of grammatical meanings coded into single phonemes are vulnerable to losing them through syncopation or dropping of unstressed syllables. So they add on prepositions or postpositions to make the meanings clearer. Once all the inflections have been syncopated out, your grammatical meanings are expressed only by these separate pre/post-positional words. That's the isolating position. But over time, unstressed pre/post-positions tend to get attached to the neighboring words. (A good example can be seen with the infinitive marker "to" in English which is now in spoken speech attached to preceding auxilliary verbs: "D'you wanna go?" "No, I hafta clean my room" -- or more briefly "D'you wanna?" "I hafta," etc. The additional -a is now marking a particular type of auxilliary verb function.) So agglutinative endings are mostly former pre/post-positions. But as more and more such separate unstressed particles are "glued" onto words, they tend to combine and form complex endings coding for more than one grammatical meaning and voila! you have a fusional/inflecting language and the cycle starts all over again.

*Refers to Carleton Hodge, 1970. " The Linguistic Cycle," Language Sciences 13: 1-7