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TOWER OF BABEL: The Evidence against the New Creationism,
by Robert T. Pennock
"A Bradford Book", published by The MIT Press, 1999.

THE POWER OF BABEL: A Natural History of Language,
by John McWhorter
Copyright 2001 by John McWhorter, published in hardcover in 2001 by
Times Books,reprinted in paperback in 2003 by "Perennial",
HarperCollins, all of which are subsidiaries of Henry Holt and
Company, LLC.

The Tower and Power of Babel

Robert T. Pennock got his Bachelor's degree as a "joint degree in
biology and philosophy", and his Ph.D in the history and philosophy
of science. I don't have details of his career since; he mentions at
one point teaching seminars in the philosophy of biology. His book
TOWER OF BABEL is written to answer and refute the criticisms of
evolutionary biology that have been made by the "Intelligent Design
Theorists": Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski, Stephen
Meyer, and others who seek to challenge "naturalistic science" in
favor of developing "theistic science". His book is primarily about
how science is done and why it is done that way, why evolutionary
biology is a science and "Intelligent Design Theory" is not, what is
the logic and evidence supporting contemporary Darwinism and why the
criticisms of the Creationists fail.

As part of his argument, and as a theme that recurs throughout the
book, Pennock makes an analogy between biological evolution and
linguistic evolution. Languages change over time, in their
pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and these changes can be
observed as they happen and documented over centuries in the writings
that have been preserved. (For European languages, one of the best
"document trails" is the different translations of the Bible that
have been made over the centuries.) It is well established, for
example, that the "Romance languages", Portuguese, Spanish, French,
Italian, Romanian, and a few smaller ones that are less well-known,
are all descended from Latin, as it was spoken in the Roman Empire.
While the Roman Empire prevailed, Europe was linked by trade and by
government, and Latin was the common language everywhere. After the
Empire fell and the roads were no longer maintained, Europe broke up
into lots of smaller fiefdoms that were largely self-sufficient, and
the local ways of speaking gradually drifted apart. Over the
centuries they drifted far enough that they were no longer mutually
intelligible; local dialects had become separate languages.
This is a problem for Creationists, because the Bible gives a
different account of the origins of languages. Languages were all
created by God; the first language was given to Adam, and after the
Fall, after the Flood and Noah's Ark, the descendants of Noah settled
in the plain of Shinar and began to build a tower. (Genesis 10 and
11.) Yahveh decides to disrupt this project by changing everybody's
language; since the people could no longer understand each other,
they scattered and settled all over the world, each family/clan/tribe
with their own language. Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation
Research explicitly support this account, and other prominent
Creationists have sometimes let it slip out that they do also.

John McWhorter is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the
University of California at Berkeley. His book THE POWER OF BABEL is
written to tell a story to the general public that has not been told
in other books, about how all of the 6000-odd languages that we speak
today evolved from the original one, developed by the first human
beings to speak language as we know it, which apparently was roughly
150,000 years ago in East Africa. He is not concerned with
Creationism and says nothing about it; he is fascinated by the
variety and vast differences to be found in human languages, and by
how languages change over time. He goes into much greater depth and
detail than Pennock about how languages change, illustrating his
points with languages from all over the world. Though he is not
trying to teach evolutionary biology, the reader can gain a better
understanding of evolutionary processes by seeing how they manifest
in language. The analogy between linguistic evolution and biological
evolution is not perfect- languages crossbreed and hybridize a lot
more easily, and a lot more often, than organisms do- but every
process of change that McWhorter illustrates has its counterpart in
biology.

One aspect of evolutionary theory that I think is made very clear in
McWhorter's book is that "species" are not "ideal types", not
platonic "forms" that exist unchanging in some abstract realm.
McWhorter says that, really, there are no such things as "languages",
what we call "languages" are groups of dialects. What really exists
are communities of speakers. These speakers work out ways of speaking
that let them understand each other; if they have no language in
common they will invent one. (McWhorter tells of historical cases
where slaves, or migrant workers, who had a number of different
languages, were gathered from different places to one place where the
work was, and had to invent ways to communicate; first a pidgin, then
a "creole" that had all the features necessary for the many kinds of
human communication.) These communities of speakers do not have sharp
edges. Local ways of speaking shade into one another; in some places
you can travel from village to village, noting how the local dialect
changes, and document a full set of "intermediate forms" between two
"separate languages". In biology, what really exists are groups of
organisms that interbreed. These groups, also, do not have sharp
edges. In other books I have read of "ring species", for example the
seagulls around the Arctic Ocean, where each local group of gulls can
and do interbreed with their immediate neighbors, but the gulls in
Greenland are visibly different from, and cannot interbreed with, the
gulls from Norway. The formation of new species is not a sudden
event, not a large or even particularly noticeable event. What
happens is that one population of interbreeding organisms becomes
separated, by distance or by habits, into two populations that mostly
do not interbreed; they then gradually drift apart genetically,
adapting to their different circumstances, until they cannot
interbreed.

The analogy can be made tighter by thinking of DNA as a writing
system of four letters; each organisms' DNA is a text. When two
organisms attempt to breed, they see if their respective texts are
mutually intelligible, if they "speak the same language". For an
article that explains speciation from this angle, see "The Digital
River" by Richard Dawkins, which is chapter one of his book RIVER OUT
OF EDEN.

Summing up- those interested in understanding evolution can gain
illumination by reading about evolutionary linguistics, as well as
evolutionary biology.