When the message makes sense in thechildren's own language, and doesn't contain any unfamiliarwords like 'phenotype' or 'allele', it survives. Instead of mimickingthe sounds phonetically, each child recognizes each word as amember of a finite vocabulary and selects the same word, althoughvery probably pronounced in a different accent, when passing iton to the next child. Written language is also self-normalizingbecause the squiggles on paper, no matter how much they maydiffer in detail, are all drawn from a finite alphabet of (say) twenty-six letters.

The God Delusion On page 193 Monday, November 5, 2012 @ 1:54pm