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Introduction

In February 1837 -- even before he sailed on the Beagle -- Charles Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline, discussing the linguist Sir John Herschel's idea that modern languages were descended from a common ancestor. If this were really the case, it cast doubt on the Biblical chronology of the world: ``[E]veryone has yet thought that the six thousand odd years has been the right period but Sir J. thinks that a far greater number must have passed since the Chinese [and] the Caucasian languages separated from one stock''.

The example of language change was a lifelong influence on Darwin's thought (see Figure 1). In The Origin of Species, he argued that our ability to order languages genealogically, despite their having changed and divided at different rates, shows that the same can be done for species [2]. And in The Descent of Man, he noted that: ``The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel''.
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@article{whitfield08languageAndSpeciesEvolutionPLOS,
  author={John Whitfield},
  title={Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution},
  journal={PLoS Biolology},
  year={2008},
  month={July},
  volume={6},
  number={7},
  pages={1370-1372},
  note={e186},
  doi={10.1371/journal.pbio.0060186},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/whitfield08languageAndSpeciesEvolutionPLOS.html}
}

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