Quotes About Language Evolution

#1. We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.

Terence McKenna

#2. Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable.

Kenneth R. Miller

#3. Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

Charles Stross

#4. What may be less familiar is the idea that the evolution of the conventions of our language might involve what Charles Darwin called "artificial selection.

Daniel Cloud

#5. Language is not, as we are led to suppose by the dictionary, the invention of academicians or philologists. Rather, it has been evolved through time ... by peasants, by fishermen, by hunters, by riders.

Jorge Luis Borges

#6. This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#7. I always tried to work hard and stay focused, and just use one opportunity to contribute to the next.

T.I.

#8. Teilhard merely seems to set the problem of man, as the utopian sees it, on lofty heights; yet, hi terminology, which mixes archeology, sociology, biology, astronomy, and a vulgarized theology, can, in fact, be translated at every turn into the language of collectivism and of totalitarian polices.

Thomas Molnar

#9. Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Peter Thiel

#10. I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.

G. M. Trevelyan

#11. Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

Daniel Dennett

#12. Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Susan Blackmore

#13. As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

Jon Stewart

#14. At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.

Christine Kenneally

#15. Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.

Terence McKenna

#16. There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed.

Jonathan Haidt

#17. There are a lot of guys out there with skills who have not contributed to the evolution of the instrument. It's about more than that ... it's an emotive language, an aesthetic. Skill is an aspect, but it's what you do with that skill, or say with that skill, that matters.

Vinnie Colaiuta

#18. The blackouts were horrible. It was hideous to let those nights slide into a crack in the ground. But even scarier was to take responsibility for the mess I'd made. Even scarier was to remember your own life.

Sarah Hepola

#19. Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.

William Irwin Thompson

#20. Its ok to be afraid to fall in love, because without being afraid of it you won,t find the happiness of being loved

Premjit Lourembam

#21. If (early humans) weren't using and refining language I would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically increasing brains.

Dean Falk

#22. Moreover, the accomplishment of Russia's aims has been greatly simplified by the fact that we have heretofore offered the world no practical antidote for the Russian poison.

James Forrestal

#23. Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.

Carl Sagan

#24. In order for architecture to experience its ongoing evolution as a language, there has to be a lot of adjusted copies between how architects draw, think, engage bylaws and constraints.

Jimenez Lai

#25. Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.

Gene Wolfe

#26. Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution.

Jean Berko Gleason

#27. The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

Charles Darwin

#28. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.

Jo Walton

#29. It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

Richard Leakey

#30. The only stuff I don't like are Broadway musicals. I hate them. I don't even like to talk about it. I can't bear musicals.

Laurie Anderson

#31. The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

Julian Jaynes

#32. If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez

#33. But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.

Christine Kenneally

#34. I never saw anything funnier than Texas politics.

Molly Ivins

#35. Patriotism, currently, is nothing but the deadly evolution of narrow minded politics which has distorted language.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#36. The problem Creationists identify is with the word 'theory', not with the case for evolution

Lance Parkin