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.
Robert Grossmith 