THE MEANING OF ‘EVOLUTION’: ITS EVOLUTION

THE MEANING OF ‘EVOLUTION’: ITS EVOLUTION

  Before Darwin (and also after) the word ‘evolution’ had a different meaning from the modern one, in biology as well as in its close imitator-science, linguistics. It referred to the unfolding of form in the development of the embryo or plant, and in particular to the

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  notion of the pre-formation of the adult organism in the egg or germ. The different meanings of evolution that lead to some confusion in linguistics were all carefully listed in the Century Dictionary, edited by Whitney:

  1. The act or process of unfolding, or the state of being unfolded; an opening out or unrolling…. Hence—2. The process of evolving or becoming developed; an unfolding or growth from, or as if from, a germ or latent state, or from a plan; development… Specifically—(a) In biol.: (1) …ordinary growth…; the evolution of the blossom from the bud…. (2) The…emergence… of a chick from the egg-shell which contained it as an embryo…. (3) Descent or derivation, as of offspring from parents; … (4) The fact or the doctrine of the derivation or descent, with modification, of all existing species, genera, orders, classes, etc., of animals and plants, from a few simple forms of life, if not from one; the doctrine of derivation; evolutionism…See natural selection…. (b) In general, the passage from unorganized simplicity to organized complexity…

  Similar distinctions can be found in the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siècle. Published two decades before the Century Dictionary, in 1866, it could not adopt such a detached and objective stance, but struggled hard to surrender traditional French thought to the Anglo-Saxon influence. Especially dear to French science was preformationism, ‘known as the “encapsulation (emboîtement) theory”,’ defended with powerful arguments by Charles Bonnet in his Considérations sur les corps organisés (1762). This was one of the first works to use the term “evolution” in a biological sense’ (Goudge 1973:178). This sense of ‘evolution’ as ‘ontogenesis’ was hard to forget, it seems. Under the entry ‘évolution’ (vol. 7, 1167, col. 4–1170, col. 3) is the following definition:

  You have seen in which sense naturalists have used up to now the word evolution; you have seen that they designated by the term evolutionist those who adhere to the formation of living beings from preexistent germs. The words evolution, evolutionist have taken on a new meaning since the publication of the book and doctrine of M.Darwin, and one might say that this meaning contradicts the old and classic [!] acceptation of these words. They have become synonymous with transformism, transformist; that is to say, that they express an idea which is totally opposed to the conclusion usually drawn from the pre-existence of germs.

  (1866: vol. 7, 1168, col. 4)

  ‘Darwinism’ (1866: vol. 6, 125, col. 1–131, col. 4) (in some way a synthesis of Lamarckism and uniformitarianism) is defined as follows:

  Darwinism can be explained simply and clearly in the following way: all animal and plant species, past and present, descend, by way of successive transformations from three or four original types, and most probably from one single primitive archetype. This constitutes the basic message of all of

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  Darwin’s work. One can rightly say that the originality of the Darwinian theory does not consist in this conclusion alone, but in the natural laws that M.Darwin has postulated, and which, according to him, explain the origin of species by progressive accumulation and hereditary fixation of at first very slight variations. It is not the transformationist thesis as such that is so new.

  (ibid.: 125, col. 1)

  Transformism had indeed been most strongly advocated in France by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck in his Philosophie zoologique (1809) (and before him by Maupertuis, Diderot, K.F.Wolff, and Darwin’s father Erasmus) (cf. Goudge 1973:178). His theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, for example, the famous neck of the giraffe, was linked to progressism. Lamarck believed that alterations are not random but ‘phases of the progressive advance of living things from lower to higher types’ (ibid.). But in the early nineteenth century biological progressism came under attack. The anatomist and palaeontologist Cuvier held that successive catastrophes shaped the earth’s surface as well as the life on earth. Only this catastrophe theory could account, in his view, for the fossil record, where no unilinear sequence of transformations can be found. He therefore rejected Lamarck’s notion of the mutability of species. He was anti-evolutionist and anti- progressionist. (In the end Cuvier effectively destroyed Lamarck, who died in poverty.)

  French scientists of the mid-nineteenth century found it difficult to abandon pre- formationism for Darwinism and uniformitarianism (Lyell) for catastrophe theory (Cuvier). Whitney and Bréal were neither pre-formationists nor catastrophists, they were both uniformitarianists, but it is difficult to claim that they were Darwinists. Let us say here that they were transformationists and specify their definition of this term later.

  The quotes from the two dictionaries show that it was more or less common knowledge from the 1870s onwards that there were different kinds of evolutionism (pre- formationism, transformism, progressism, Darwinism, etc.) and that Darwinian evolutionism was only one among others. But in the heat of the moment scientists from all orientations and affiliations adopted some formula or other, regardless of the doctrine it belonged to, and tried to integrate it as best they could into their own view of biology, culture, religion, society, and language.

  In the case of linguistics, one can distinguish between different varieties of evolutionism, all more or less derived from biological theories, and mixed with specific views about history, anthropology, and philosophy. One can identify the following groups: (1) Schleicher

  Schleicher mixed Linnaean classificationism with a theory of growth and decay, that is the older ontogenetic form of evolutionism as unfolding, with a theory of descent of offspring from parents (cf. family tree), with a Hegelian philosophy of history, and later with Darwinism. He held that a language was a natural organism. Linguistics belongs to the natural sciences.

  (2) Max Müller

  Müller also affiliated linguistics with the natural sciences, because in his view linguistic evolution was natural growth, not an historical process directed by the will of men. However, he did not claim that language was a natural organism and rejected

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  Schleicher’s ontological metaphors. Although he fought Darwinism because it countermanded his belief in the uniqueness of the human race, unique especially for its faculty of language, he adopted some Darwinian metaphors, such as the struggle for survival, to account for changes in the lexicon.

  (3) Hovelacque, Chavée, Regnaud

  These three adopted the Schleicherian form of evolutionism (transformationism). Languages are compared to organisms; linguistics is a natural science; language change is regarded a natural growth, governed by natural laws, and independent from the human will or consciousness.

  (4) Arsène Darmesteter

  Darmesteter amalgamated Darwinism (in this case especially the theory of variation and natural selection) with psychology. Words are compared to organisms. They, as well as ideas, struggle for survival in the mind and in the language. Language- change is governed by ‘laws of the mind’ (cf. 1886:18).

  (5) Steinthal

  Steinthal stuck to pre-formationism (germ → plant) and catastrophe theory. (6) Whitney

  Whitney amalgamated uniformitarianism (Lyell) with transformationism; his theory of semantic change arguably hides some real Darwinism (i.e. the theory of natural selection). Languages are not comparable to organisms and linguistics is an historical science. Language change is governed by two different forces—conscious intentional action (individual variation) and ‘unconscious’ consequences (social selection). However, he still talked about the ‘life and growth’ of language, avoiding the term evolution, perhaps for the same reasons as Darwin.

  (7) Bréal

  Bréal mixed uniformitarianism (Lyell?) with Larmarckism (?) and progressism (cf. Jespersen 1894; reviewed by Bréal 1896b). Languages are not comparable to organisms, neither are words. Language change is the cumulative consequence of intentional, intelligent, and conscious actions. The language user is the motor of change. Although he rejects Darmesteter’s biological metaphors, his conception of semantics is built on Darmesteter’s work and Darwinian concepts, but directed towards a pronounced psychologism. He wants to discover the ‘intellectual laws’ of language change (cf. 1883; ES) that govern linguistic ‘evolution’ and progress. He rejects the terms ‘life’ and ‘growth’.

  Although divided into different groups through their adherence to some specific aspect of Darwin’s theory or its rejection, almost all the proponents of an evolutionary theory of language referred to Lyell as their guardian angel, in short, they were all (with the exception of Steinthal) ‘uniformitarianists’.

  It is one of the contradictions of Schleicher’s work that even he refers in positive terms to Lyell (cf. Schleicher 1863). In his book on uniformitarianism in linguistics Christy points out that:

  The faith Schleicher expresses here in the lawful development of language through gradual transformations, along with his rejection of unknown causes in favor of causes known through observation, bears no doubt that

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  Schleicher was a practitioner of the uniformitarian, or actualistic, methodology, though in point of theory he propounded first and foremost the organism model.

  What is uniformitarianism?

  The term ‘uniformitarianism’ was introduced by William Whewell in 1840 to label a certain scientific theory, contrasted with catastrophism. The issue as discussed by Whewell and his contemporaries primarily presented itself in geology. Charles (later Sir Charles) Lyell (1830) was the most prominent advocate of uniformitarianism.

  (Wells 1973:423)

  —and Whitney was one of its most prominent advocates in linguistics (cf. Christy 1983:78–88).

  The basic axiom of uniformitarianism is well expressed in the title of Lyell’s first book on the topic: Principles of Geology; being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation (1830–3). A ‘uniformitarian’ is therefore ‘One who upholds a system or doctrine of uniformity; specifically, in geol., one who advocates the theory that causes now active in bringing about geological changes have always been similar in character and intensity’ (Cent. Dict. 1897:6616). The uniformitarian doctrine was opposed to ‘catastrophism’, a ‘theoretical view of geological events which has as its essential basis the idea of a succession of catastrophes’ (ibid.: 857). Catastrophism, advocated most strongly by Cuvier, also claimed that one can only account for the phenomena of geology if one supposes the operation of forces different in their nature, or different in power, from those we at present see in action in the universe.

  Darwin’s contribution to the debate was important in so far as he brought together Lamarck and Lyell, transformationism and uniformitarianism, a synthesis that Bréal and Whitney tried to achieve in linguistics:

  As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation and by catastrophes; and as the most important of all causes of organic change and one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly altered physical conditions, namely the mutual relation of organism to organism,—the improvement of one being entailing the improvement or the extermination of others; it follows….

  (Darwin 1859:457f.)

  As in Bréal and to a certain extent Whitney, but contrary to Schleicher, uniformitarianism here is combined with progressism.

  Another point of convergence, or agreement, between the linguists of that period was the theory of the transformation of species applied to the evolution of languages. Following Lyell, who in 1863 had incorporated a chapter on language in his Antiquity of Man, and Schleicher, who in 1863 had integrated Darwinism into his theory of language

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  evolution for the sake of a better typology of languages, most linguists of that period would have subscribed to this statement: ‘Transmutation of species in the kingdom of speech is no hypothesis, but a patent fact, one of the fundamental and determining principles of linguistic study’ (LSL, 175; quoted by Hovelacque 1876:438).

  Schleicher, the most important proponent of the theory of the linguistic transmutation of species, integrated this theory into the doctrine of a continuous branching tree of languages, a theory at first conceived in a strictly Linnaean framework with the purpose of finding a good classification and typology of languages (cf. Leroy 1950:14; and Maher 1983:xvii–xxx), and to give a graphic illustration of the descent of the Indo-European languages from an ‘Ursprache’ (cf. Schleicher 1860). The twigs, branches, boughs, etc. of the tree of life of languages represented, respectively, species, genera, families, etc. Through Darwin (cf. 1859:160f.) this figure of the tree of life had become a new paradigm in evolutionary theory (cf. Goudge 1973:179), and it was all the more easily adopted by Schleicher as it agreed so well with Boppian organicism and Linnaean classificationism. What he ignored was that Darwin’s primary goal was not the classification of species, but the explanation of the process of speciation itself. The most important reason why Schleicher’s transformationist version of linguistics was later abandoned was, however, his attempt to accommodate it with Hegelian ideas—and here the agreement among the linguists of the nineteenth century stopped.

  Whitney and Bréal (followed later in the century by the neogrammarians) would not follow Schleicher down the two branches of his theoretical route: the Stammbaumtheorie and the doctrine of the life-cycle of languages. As Bréal and Whitney had stressed repeatedly, languages are not organisms, but only live through those who speak them. This belief stood in sharp contrast to Schleicher’s ontological conception of languages that propagate themselves through parents and offspring, who live and die. This theory remained attached to the older conception of biological ‘evolution’, and contradicted the Darwinism Schleicherian linguists proclaimed so eagerly.

  What must have infuriated Whitney was the Hegelianism mixed with Schleicher’s theory of language evolution as growth and decay, which led him to distinguish between ‘evolution’ and ‘history’. According to this view:

  A similar table of languages had earlier been presented in Klaproth’s Asia polyglotta (1823,

  near p. 217) (cf. Morpurgo Davies 1975:636, note 53).

  ‘evolution’ is the development of more complex beings from simpler, and ‘history’ is the account of the subsequent transformations of such complex beings. Thus, ‘evolution’ and ‘history’ are mutually exclusive by definition. Accordingly, there are two periods, teaches Schleicher in all his works, in the ‘life of language’: language evolution (Sprachbildung), i.e., phylogeny, and language history (Sprachgeschichte). ‘History’ he defines in the Hegelian sense, the necessary condition for which is ‘man’s spiritual consciousness of his freedom’.

  (Maher 1983:xxviii)

  During the period of ‘evolution’, language is created (naturally), it progresses from the simple to the perfect. Having reached a state of perfection, it can only decay or degenerate during the period of its ‘history’. Nineteenth-century linguists found it very

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  difficult to overcome this myth of the original perfection of the primitive language followed by inevitable decay, which was deeply ingrained in their theories since Schlegel and Bopp (even though not in these Hegelian terms) (cf. Bopp 1816:10–11), and to see that the history of language (governed by free will) could be studied in evolutionary terms. The doctrine of ‘uniformitarianism’ proved to be a very useful tool to exorcise the Hegelian ghost. In his lecture on the form and function of words (cf. Bréal FF), in which

  he argued against naturalism and mysticism in German linguistics, as well as in his lecture on the progress in comparative grammar (cf. Bréal 1868a), Bréal had already pointed in the right direction. Whitney developed an evolutionary theory of the history of language in his most popular works; but the one who advocated a truly Darwinian linguistics in the most sober and reasonable terms was Charles Lyell.