Richard Dawkins made once a famous comparison between the way biological organisms evolve and that in which a culture changes. He called the single cultural unit a 'meme', and described how fashion and ideas in a society evolve as an ecosystem would. I was thinking of a particular case of this, namely that of language: there might be a particularly close analogy lurking between the way words combine together to form a language, and the ways in which organic molecules comine to form cells and animals.
Note that both are extremely complex, but their complexity derives largely from the intricate combinations of a few elementary building blocks: phonemes on the one side, and sugars, lipids and aminoacids on the other. Both sets of elementary blocks assemble in slightly different ways to form structures that are at first sight very different from each other, and yet under a close look remarkably similar: different languages on the one hand, and different cells and organisms on the other.
The different structures that make up a language, in order of complexity, could be put in correspondence with the different structures that make up an organism: phonemes with organic compounds as above (common raw materials), words and sentences (bead chains) with proteins, polysacharides and nucleic acids (although there the similarities are more shaky, for instance what are gene homologs in language?), grammar with biochemistry proper (the rules according to which elementary bricks and strings interact with each other), a language with a species, multi-language societies with an ecology.
In fact, both languages and organisms evolve and differentiate over time, and so form a genealogy among themselves. For example, species and races could correspond to languages and dialects. A family of languages like Indoeuropean might correspond to a family of species like, say, that of birds. Different languages might appear entirely unrelated to each other and be already so different that they are incompatible, and yet they might have the same underlying structures built on different vocabulary, etc, possibly from having a common ancestor (though languages reproduce asexually, or rather, don't die like organisms do). Examples are also present of parallel evolution, of species/language competition and interaction in an ecology/society, and of the need to preserve rare and extinguishing languages/species.
It would be interesting to see where ideas from biology (for instance sexuality) lead to in linguistics, as well as the other way round. Comments are welcome!
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