Dawkins, Darwin and the Evolution of Language

Back in the 1960s when I was just a lad I would sometimes amuse myself by trying to imagine what life in the far-off 21st century would be like. My imagination didn’t stretch very far but one thing I felt sure of was that no one in that still-remote future age would believe in God. Religion would be dead and buried, ousted by the hard facts of science.

How wrong can you be! Here we are in 2025 and, as I write these words, the cardinals are gathering in the Vatican to choose a new Pope. Meanwhile, wherever you look, religious conflicts disfigure the globe. Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, all are at each other’s throats.

I mention this signal failure of mine to read the runes because finally, twenty years after its original publication, I’ve read Richard Dawkins’ angry, sometimes ranting and repetitious but always well-argued and thought-provoking The God Delusion, in which he argues that the surprising persistence of religion in the modern age is explained by its being a cultural ‘meme’ (a term he himself coined).

Dawkins is one of my scientific heroes, just a few rungs below my (and his) pre-eminent scientific hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has always seemed to me the most sublimely beautiful of all scientific theories – though I suppose Einstein’s famous equation would also have to be up there somewhere – relying as it does on just two simple propositions to explain the extraordinary diversity of organic life: 1) living organisms create copies of themselves, and 2) the copying process is imperfect. All the rest follows – the miracle of biodiversity, the cornucopia that is Nature – as inevitably as day follows night.

Most of Dawkins’ book is naturally concerned with religion. But in the course of his argument he also touches on the subject of human language and its evolution. Somewhat surprisingly, however, he resists the temptation to explain this evolution by way of analogy with natural selection. Instead he suggests that, although ‘language evolves in a quasi-biological way’, the direction of its evolution is not determined by natural selection but rather by ‘the cultural equivalent of random genetic drift’. In other words, ‘it is handed down by a cultural analogue of genetics, changing slowly over the centuries, until eventually various strands have diverged to the point of mutual unintelligibility… It is, to say the least, not obvious that these evolutionary shifts reflect local advantages or “selection pressures”.’

This is where I find myself disagreeing with Dawkins because it seems to me there is a very strong case to be made for the idea that such selection pressures are at the very core of language’s evolution, at least in relation to the emergence of new words, so-called neologisms, within a language. Having spent many years as a lexicographer at Collins Dictionaries, where my duties included chairing the weekly New Words meeting, this is a subject that is especially close to my heart.

In broad outline, my argument goes as follows:

  • Individual words may be imagined as analogous to living organisms
  • Like living organisms, words compete for resources in their struggle for survival; in this case the resource is a human host who will voice or write the word in question and thereby keep it alive. The relationship is symbiotic rather than parasitic because people obviously derive a benefit from their use of words
  • Words sometimes mutate into new forms
  • Some mutated forms of words will be better suited to their local environment than others (easier to pronounce/simpler to spell/free from negative connotations/etc)
  • As a result some mutant forms of words will flourish and become widespread while others will decline in use and eventually become extinct
  • Extinct forms survive only in the fossil record of outdated or obsolete language while the successful mutant form will be passed down to future generations of speakers and become the dominant form

An example may help to make this process clearer. Back in the 1990s the term ‘genetically-modified foods’ entered the news cycle. But ‘genetically-modified foods’ was, appropriately perhaps, a bit of a mouthful, so there was pressure to find a shorter, simpler term. Among the likely candidates two in particular came to prominence: the neutral-sounding ‘GM-foods’ and the more journalistic and pejorative ‘frankenfoods’. For a year or two the outcome of this struggle hung in the balance until ‘frankenfoods’ eventually faded from view and ‘GM-foods’ became the standard term.

Another example, this time at the semantic level, might be the rapid rise of the word ‘closure’ in recent decades – formerly used mostly to refer to the shutting down of a shop or factory etc – as a ‘fitter’ alternative to a phrase such as ‘sense of resolution’. An alternative was required perhaps because we talk about our feelings so much more these days than we ever used to.

There is more to be said about this but the point I wish to make here is simply that, despite any minor disagreements I might have with Dawkins, he is surely correct in his assessment that the explanatory power of Darwinian evolution extends far beyond the realm of biology. It might even be argued that whenever competing elements struggle for survival within a system that’s open to change – whether social, political, economic or any other sphere, as in the now discredited doctrine of Social Darwinism – the ‘fittest’ element will always survive because survival, broadly understood, is a measure of fitness. It’s a breathtakingly simple idea and one wonders, as Dawkins wonders, why it took so long for someone to come up with it.

L’Empire des Lumières

The news that the Magritte painting ‘L’Empire des Lumières’ sold at Sotheby’s this week for more than 120 million dollars – the highest sum ever paid for a Surrealist painting – took me back to 1990 when my novel about lucid dreaming, The Empire of Lights, was published.

In particular I found myself recollecting a lunch I had in a London restaurant with my agent Giles Gordon and my editor at Hamish Hamilton, Peter Straus (now the agent for such global literary superstars as Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan). At that time I had neither a title nor a cover design for the book and Peter asked me if I had any ideas on these matters. I replied that I’d like, if possible, to use a Magritte painting for the cover art and I described the image to him. He asked what the painting was called and I told him ‘The Empire of Lights’. ‘There’s your title,’ he said. Lux – lucid – light: it worked well, I thought, and the matter was settled.

I’ve been fascinated by this painting ever since first encountering an Americanized version of it (with a Chevy parked outside the house) on the cover of the Jackson Browne album Late for the Sky back in the 1970s. What intrigued me about Magritte’s painting was not just the impossible, dream-like concatenation of night and day – a cerulean sky with fluffy white clouds presiding over a gloomy house sunk in shadow, perhaps representing (or was this too literal an interpretation?) the conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind – but the single illuminated light in an upstairs window of the house. Someone, presumably, was inside that room. Who were they and what were they doing? Were they asleep and dreaming? Or perhaps insomniac, unable to sleep? It only belatedly struck me that the lumières of the painting’s title might refer not to the daytime sky but to this bedroom light together with the light from the street lamp outside the house.

Magritte made a whole series of such paintings and even experimented, less successfully, with the opposite effect – a night-time sky above a street bathed in sunshine – which makes it surprising perhaps that a single iteration of the image should fetch such a high price at auction. Speaking personally, I can’t afford 120 million dollars, so for the last 30 years or so a print of the painting – a gift from someone I hold very close – has hung on my bedroom wall instead. It’s the last thing I see before I fall asleep at night and the first thing I see when I wake in the morning.

Did I mention that the painting was created in 1954, the year of my birth?

The Anti-Immigration Riots

The government claims that the wave of violent unrest currently sweeping across the UK is the work of ‘thugs’ – of bigots, racists, fascists – who’ve been misled by disinformation on social media regarding the identity of the suspect responsible for the Southport stabbings. However, since it’s now widely understood that the suspect is not a Muslim and is not an asylum seeker, it’s hard to see how this claim makes any sense at all.

Equally nonsensical is the claim that the rioters are a small group of ‘mobile’ individuals who move from one town to another to create unrest. But if that’s the case, how is it that yesterday’s riots and protests took place in a dozen or more towns and cities spread across the length and breadth of the UK? Have these rioters cloned themselves or discovered the secret of teleportation?

What the government signally fails to recognise is that there is deep and widespread anger about the UK’s immigration policy and that this anger is not confined to racist thugs but extends to law-abiding citizens like myself. Having been politically left-of-centre all my life, in last month’s general election I found myself voting for Reform UK purely because of their stance on immigration. A policy of net zero immigration and an exit from the ECHR, allowing the small boats crossing the Channel to be returned to France, is perhaps the only way to put an end to the current tide of unrest. Or should I also now be regarded as a racist bigot?






Ukraine: the other side of the argument (reprise)

Nigel Farage’s recent comments about an expanded NATO/EU having provoked Putin’s attack on Ukraine have been met with predictable outrage and condemnation everywhere. None of the leaders of the main political parties have been brave enough to come out and say, ‘Actually, you know, he does have a point.’

Two years ago, in the immediate aftermath of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, I posted the following piece on this blog, which is in complete agreement with Farage’s remarks. Today I would add one further point to my argument: back in the 1960s the US thought itself justified in declaring war on Vietnam, on the other side of the world, because of its fear of the spread of Communism through the putative ‘domino effect’. How much more reasonable and justified, at least from Putin’s point of view, is Russia’s fear that an expanded NATO/EU reaching right up to its own land borders is a threat to his country’s integrity?

Here is my post from 2022:

Like everyone in the West, I of course abhor Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine and the senseless loss of life unfolding there, for which Putin should ultimately be held accountable and tried for war crimes. However, I do believe there’s another side to the West’s absolute insistence on Ukraine’s right to self-determination and, while readily admitting that I’m no expert on geopolitics, I feel it’s a point of view that deserves to be raised.

Consider the following hypothetical. Imagine that in the next few years Scotland or Wales achieves independence from the UK and a few years further down the line the Scottish or Welsh people vote to enter into an alliance with Russia. Ridiculous, of course, but then who would have predicted back in the mid-1980s that just a few years later most of Eastern Europe and the Baltic republics would become democracies with an aspiration to join NATO and the EU?

Now imagine further that one of the consequences of this alliance with Russia was that Russian missiles, including nuclear missiles, might be sited on Scottish or Welsh soil. Do you think the English government would simply shrug its shoulders and say ‘Well, they have the right to self-determination, so if that’s what they choose to do…’? Of course not.

By the same token — and this time it’s not even hypothetical, it’s historical — why was it OK for the US to object to the possibility of Russian missiles in Cuba but it’s not OK for Russia to object to the possibility of NATO missiles in Ukraine? It’s hard not to detect a whiff of double standards, mixed with a lax complacency engendered by Western triumphalism after the fall of Communism.

Even before the invasion of Ukraine was launched, I saw no reason why a diplomatic solution could not be reached, according to which Ukraine would commit to becoming a neutral country – not the only neutral country in Europe after all and a solution which Putin actively favoured. Perhaps this neutral status could even be guaranteed for an initial, negotiable number of years, after which the situation would be reassessed. Surely this would be preferable to the terrible tragedy being played out in Ukraine today.

Any sympathy I once had for Putin’s security concerns has now vanished of course. But still I can’t help feeling that, if the West had shown at least a measure of understanding of those concerns rather than simply repeating the mantra of self-determination ad nauseam, the awful events currently being enacted on our TV screens might have been avoided.

Memories of Cassino

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino, one of the major battles of the Second World War. My dad, a private in the Medical Corps, saw action at Cassino and described the experience in the unpublished war memoir, Memoirs of a Non-Combatant, he wrote in the 1980s. Below is an extract from this section of the manuscript, a tale of bleak horror and endurance with little room for my dad’s characteristic dark humour.

“Back to Venafro for a few days’ rest, then to Cassino. It had been bombed and shelled continuously for two months and the Germans still held it, or at least what was left of it. The town itself was razed to the ground, the front line positions being in tunnels and basements, and nobody at all ventured above ground in daylight. The hill behind the town, on which the monastery was situated, stood out a mile and you could see the bombs and shells falling but the Jerries didn’t suffer many casualties from them as they just drew back into their caves and tunnels. The hill behind the monastery was one of the main factors: ‘Mount Cairo’, where the Jerry observation posts could see for miles.

There were two positions halfway up to the monastery, which everybody nearly passed out with fear when their turn came to go there, at least I did: ‘Hangman’s Hill’ and ‘Castle Hill’. You only stayed there for twenty-four hours as you were under constant attack and just getting there and back was a feat in itself. But with a casualty tied to a stretcher in the pitch black it was horrific. Actually we didn’t mind so much once we were in Cassino because you hardly ventured out and there were plenty of hiding places, but it was getting in and out that was worrying.

As soon as it got dark four of us would creep up to what remained of the bridge. The regular bridge over the Savio had been blown months ago and the only way into town was the remains of a Bailey bridge. If you went over normally you’d just climb over the girders into the water and climb out again, but with the wounded that was again very difficult.

As I said, we’d got to the beginning of the bridge at sunset. As soon as word came that there had been casualties, we’d get to the other side, pick up the casualties on a stretcher and make our way to the bridge. Now came the very nasty and tricky bit. Jerry knew that someone would have to use the bridge and they had fixed up a Spandau machine gun with fixed sights, which triggered a burst of gunfire about every eighteen seconds. As the bridge consisted of one girder about six to eight inches wide, we’d carry the stretcher to the edge of the girder and wait for the m/g to fire. As soon as it finished, we knew we had eighteen seconds to get to the other side. Just putting one foot in front of the other and feeling for the edge was one thing, but the weight of a man on a stretcher, and not knowing if the other bearer was keeping step with you, was the most worrying.

I suppose we were at Cassino for about three weeks before we were pulled out for a rest. The usual delousing, showering and change of clothes until we went into Cassino again, this time for the big one.

It was the beginning of May. The two companies went forward to cross the Savio with the infantry, but some of us stayed with HQ about a mile behind and formed a main dressing station. The biggest artillery barrage of the war started at midnight. We began to get the first casualties about two hours afterwards and they came non-stop until someone relieved us about seven hours later.

One incident I remember well. A German officer, wounded in both legs, had to be carried piggyback about a hundred yards. I felt a very hard object pressing into my back, but as they had all been searched for arms I had no reason to think anything of it. Suddenly I stepped into a mortar hole, dropped the German and fell on top of him. At which he screamed ‘Gott in Himmel!’ and shouted a mouthful of German swear words before I managed to get him up and carried him to the ambulance, at which point I realised that the hard object was missing. I searched the mortar hole afterwards and found a Luger pistol with ammo which he had stuffed in his shirt but, after the incident in the mortar hole, decided to get rid of. I eventually sold the Luger to some Canadians for thirty pounds.

After we’d had a couple of hours’ sleep we made our way towards Cassino to relieve A Company, who’d had a direct hit and lost a lot of men killed and wounded. The next five or six days were bloody hell. In every battlefront that I was in before and after Cassino, although it was grim and frightening, there would always be something funny that someone would say or do, either by accident or design, but not at Cassino. In fact there were things happening there that I’d prefer not to recall.

One that made me feel ill was after we had relieved A Company when we went forward to take over a small house right on the river bank. Inside was a dead German soldier who had obviously died of his wounds. Having experienced this sort of thing before, we quite rightly guessed that he had been booby-trapped. One brave soul lay down and lifted his ankle about an inch off the ground while we passed a rope around it. A Bren carrier backed in and tied the rope to a chain. We then retreated into a shell hole and waited.

The Bren carrier moved him about two feet before the booby trap went off. We immediately hit the deck and were covered with debris and earth. When I opened my eyes, the poor guy’s leg, with part of the rope still attached, was lying across my back. As I pushed it off I discovered that I had been lying right on top of another German, who was lying face upwards but had been squashed into the ground by a tank. I was promptly sick, the first and only time.

Lt. Manchello was killed soon after and a sergeant was killed by a shell burst. Three of the lads were badly wounded and crying for help. Yes, the badly wounded really did cry and scream, not as the war films would have you believe, and we tried time and again to get to them but, because of the heavy fighting, could get nowhere near them.

Suddenly our CO appeared and wanted to know why the bloody hell we weren’t going in after the men. We told him it was suicide to go in there, at which he said ‘Rubbish. Follow me,’ and off he marched, stick under his arm as though he was on parade. We followed, though not feeling so confident as him, until he was stopped by a German officer who, pointing his revolver at his head, told him that we were all prisoners.

‘Get out of my bloody way, I have three wounded men in there and I’m taking them back.’

He actually pushed the German out of the way. Suddenly I noticed that all firing in the immediate area had stopped and the only sounds I could hear were my knees knocking and my heart pounding. I think all attention was on the duel between the CO and the Jerry officer.

‘Pick those men up and get them back,’ roared the CO, which we promptly did.

I believe he received the MC for that. Eventually we were relieved by the 8th Indian Division and so ended for us the worst five days of the war.

We went back to Piedmont for a few days, a clean-up, kitted out, fed after a fashion and then on the search for wine, women and song. Geordie didn’t care much for women or singing, just vino. I preferred women first, then wine – the singing could take care of itself.”

Utopian Avenue: Anachronisms and Anatopisms

One of the rarely-mentioned pleasures of reading period fiction lies in spotting those little anachronisms – a striking clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar most famously – that have crept undetected into the text, leaving you with a self-congratulatory smugness that makes you feel briefly superior to the writer of the book in question.

David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, I felt, would offer rich anachronistic pickings. It’s a novel about a 1960s rock group based in London, with walk-on parts for the likes of Brian Jones, Syd Barrett, Steve Marriott, Keith Moon, Hendrix, Bowie, Lennon and a host of others. This was my era after all and my town: I was born and raised in East London – the Tremeloes’ manager lived in our street and you would sometimes see their van with the name emblazoned on the side parked outside his house – with older siblings who bought all the latest releases (singles, EPs, LPs) and filled the house with the music of the day. With satisfying neatness, I became a teenager in the Summer of Love.

What could Mitchell offer in return? Born in Lancashire in 1969, he could hardly have experienced the shock and awe of listening to Sergeant Pepper’s for the first time in the year of its release or the furtive thrill of sneaking into his sister’s tiny boxroom when she was out so he could play the Zombies’ ‘She’s Not There’ on her Dansette record player. My brother and I even recorded ourselves pretending to be radio DJs and introducing our own Top Ten singles to an imaginary audience on our dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder.

But, somewhat disappointingly, I found that Mitchell had done his homework. In fact it turned out he knew far more about the 1960s music scene than I ever knew or was likely to know, despite his being a babe-in-arms in Stockport at a time when I was attending my first ever weekend rock festival (The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music) on the weekend of my 16th birthday in 1970.

In fact I found only two anachronisms in all 561 pages of Utopia Avenue, neither of which was music-related. At one point in 1967 a trucker in a transport cafe is described as reading the Racing Post, which was only launched in the 1980s. A horse-racing aficionado of the day would have been reading the Sporting Life. And elsewhere the word ‘clone’ is used in its modern figurative sense at a time when even the literal sense of the term was rare and confined to a technical context.

On a related subject, an article by Ben Yagoda lists ‘lexical anatopisms’ in the book – anatopism being ‘the equivalent of anachronism, except referring to words out of place rather than words out of time’ – where American characters use Anglicisms such as ‘chalk and cheese’, ‘spot on’ and ‘chop chop’. A corresponding form of anatopism – British characters using Americanisms – occurs with the members of Utopia Avenue routinely referring to marijuana as ‘weed’ when in Britain at the time it was usually called ‘grass’.

Occasionally, too, there’s a sense of boxes being ticked, a checklist of personalities and locations and legendary rock trivia, as when keyboardist Elf meets Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin and Jackson Browne at New York’s Chelsea Hotel and we hear about Dylan writing ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ while staying there. And sometimes the detailed technical analysis of the band’s musical compositions, which will mean little to the musically-untrained reader, looks a bit like showing off.

But these are minor quibbles. And, though it pains me to say it, I thoroughly enjoyed Utopia Avenue. Mitchell’s breadth of knowledge about all sorts of obscure and esoteric subjects is truly impressive and the precision of his prose and freshness of his imagery are almost Nabokovian in quality. Utopia Avenue stands alongside the best of his books and is certainly among the most straightforward, even allowing for the weirdness of the psychotic episodes afflicting lead guitarist Jasper de Zoet and Mitchell’s habit of having his own characters or their descendants migrate from one book to another. In short, it’s hard to imagine a better novel about the British music scene of the 1960s and its social and cultural impact ever being written. Damn! And I so wanted to be disappointed!

‘Fat’ as a four-letter word

Following the recent furore surrounding the so-called sensitivity editing of books by Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and others, I dug out this short Orwellian pastiche, which I wrote back in 2016 and failed to find a home for.

Sensitivity editing now goes on in all the major publishing houses, with authors both past and present. In addition to all the other reasons why such a practice is abominable and barbaric and shameful, there is one other: writers choose words not only for their meaning but also for their sound, for their rhythm, for their music. In the story below, for example, try replacing the word ‘fat’ with a synonym in the phrase ‘filthy fat fuckin’ pharmacist’ and see what happens.

2084

Waiting in line for the inhibitor pills designed to curb offensive language – originally developed for use with Tourette’s sufferers – Winnie speaks into his phone.

‘Yeah, still at the pharmacy, running a bit late. Thought I’d be back by six but fat chance of that now.’

A shaft of incandescent pain arrows up his left leg and stabs him in the groin. ‘Fuck!’ he cries through clenched teeth, only to be rewarded with another piercing bolt of pain.

‘For goodness sake,’ his wife says, ‘you know not to use that word.’

‘What word?’

‘The f-word of course.’

‘Too many f-words, that’s the trouble. I just got zapped twice. First one must have been the other f-word. You know, the… adipose word.’

‘The what?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Winnie sighs heavily. ‘Can’t say a flippin’ thing these days.’ He waits to see if ‘flippin” will be punished too, but nothing happens. ‘Sooner they sort out these contextual glitches the better. Can’t take much more of this.’

‘Well that’s why you’re getting the inhibitors, isn’t it? Won’t have to worry about that any more.’

Initially, when the Verbal Offences Act first came into force, he refused to wear the ankle-bracelet gizmo that was now mandatory for all. But after twice being singled out for random spot checks during those early weeks and hit with absurdly heavy fines as a result, he understood that one more infringement would mean an automatic custodial sentence. So, reluctantly, he complied.

Finally he reaches the head of the queue, where the screenwall behind the counter displays a rolling list of the most recent terms to be proscribed. ‘Ugly,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘mad,’ ‘lazy’ and ‘victim’ are, it appears, the latest casualties of the verbal cull. The language is shrinking by the day. As if by eliminating unpleasantness from the dictionary they can eradicate it from the world.

‘Mr Smith?’ the girl – sorry, woman – behind the counter says, handing him his prescription. ‘Take one in the morning and one at night. Any problems, call your doctor.’

He’s about to ask when the ban on the blacklisted words on the screenwall comes into force but catches himself just in time. Not making that mistake again: it’s entirely possible that the word ‘blacklist’ has itself been blacklisted. He contents himself with a gruff mumbled thank you instead.

Filthy fat fuckin’ pharmacist, he says silently to himself as he leaves the store. You might control my speech but you’ll never control my thoughts!

Back home Winnie’s wife sucks on her electronic pacifier in front of the screenwall. The news channel carries a story about the latest verbal-offences measures, something to do with a mass screening programme designed to detect ‘inappropriate cerebral activity,’ whatever that means. She takes another hit on the pacifier and switches to her favourite cookery show.

A Cynic’s Response to Recent Political Events

The paradox at the heart of our liberal democracy is that we expect, or at least hope, that our politicians will be people of principle who say what they believe and believe what they say. Yet the sad truth is that politics by its very nature attracts people driven not by principle but by personal ambition. A recent example of this, if example were needed, is Liz Truss’s desperate and embarrassing attempt to cling on to her job by whatever means necessary, backtracking and reversing and U-turning on a daily basis. Ditto Boris Johnson’s refusal to quit as the previous PM until he literally had no choice (the same Boris Johnson who once wrote two drafts of an article for the Spectator, one in favour of Brexit and another arguing against it, while he waited for the results of the referendum).

Another example is provided by Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s resignation letter to Truss on October 19, which the mainstream media analysed exclusively in terms of two possible motivations: did she resign because of a relatively minor breach of the ministerial code or did she resign because of ideological differences with Truss? Am I the only one who strongly suspects that Braverman’s resignation had nothing to do with either of these alternatives but was a transparent (at least to me) attempt to reposition herself outside the Truss inner circle and thereby present herself as a critic and opponent of Truss rather than a supporter? Clearly she saw that Truss was about to be toppled and didn’t want to be taken down with her as collateral damage, especially as she had her eyes on the top job herself. Yet none of the media outlets I saw or read even mentioned this as a possibility.

Could there be a world in which politics attracted people of principle rather than those driven primarily by vanity and ambition? It’s hard to imagine, because who would want to do such a dirty and thankless job unless fuelled by such self-serving motives? And yes of course there are exceptions to the rule, a minority of politicians who are true to their beliefs, maybe even models of probity and integrity. The trouble is, with politics being the cutthroat business it is, such paragons of virtue rarely make it to the top.