Language Evolution

So I am almost done with this book. I am now reading chapter 12, which I think is the most interesting, fun and catching of all the other chapters in this book. This chapter focuses on the “Prisoners dilemma”. At first when I read about the “Prisoner dilemma” I did not really understand it until we played in class the other day. I was up on the first round with Laura Duarte and we had to play this game, we did 10 rounds and at the end we ended up being tied. This game was really fun and it was what I most enjoyed in tonight’s reading. But then I started to think, how I could relate chapters 11, 12 with Macbeth. But nothing came to my mind I was still in game mode with the “Prisoners dilemma”. The words default and cooperate kept running through my mind and at the same time I was still analyzing all of the strategies, and which I should use next time in order to win. And I my mind kept thinking about this, and so I had to start re-reading tonight’s homework. As I, again started chapter 11 I came across this line, which enlightened the connection path between MacBeth and The Selfish Gene.

"Language seems to 'evolve' by non-genetic means and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution" (p 189). Immediately as I saw the word language, Shakespeare came to my mind. The way that Shakespeare implements language in his works is extremely appealing. And this is totally true as time passes people go changing the languages adding some words over here and omitting some others over there. And if we compare our present-day English language with Shakespeare’s we will find it with the same bases, but we will clearly see a difference. And this difference as Dawkins says is ‘genetic evolution’.