Richard Dawkins

There is an intermediate and interregnum when natural selection favors anything to differentiate them, anything to make them sound different or look different or smell different, to exaggerate the difference.

And so there is a kind of acceleration of the speciation process.

Well, drift is, in a way, the opposite of natural selection.

Evolutionary change can come about through drift.

where there's no selective force.

There's no advantage in this gene or that gene.

It's just random drift.

And that's probably a very important force in evolution.

It's not the force that produces interesting things.

It's not the force that produces adaptation, that produces better wings, better legs, better voices.

But especially if you look at a molecular level,

If you look at evolution molecularly, what you see is that changes are neutral.

It's rather like changing the font on your word processor from Geneva to Times New Roman.

The meaning is the same, but the actual letters are different.

So that's an extreme example of drift, and it's very important.

But selection is the interesting part of evolution.

What I wonder is...

really putting a question back to you now, is there, is it all drift in language evolution or is there a, we could call it memetic selection where if you think of words as memes then using the word meme in the proper sense by the way, not the so-called internet meme, is there a sense in which natural selection, not natural selection, a form of selection favors certain

What about the great vowel shift, for example?

Is it possible that... Meaning, why the word... I made a hat.