Richard Dawkins

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.

Okay, so suppose one vowel shifted for some reason...

then that might have caused a necessity for other vowels to shift in order to disambiguate because there might have been confusion resulting from the first vowel shift.

Could the whole series, a cascade of vowel shifts, have followed for functional reasons disambiguation?

What I don't understand is why North Americans don't differentiate between can and can.