Date: Sat, 04 Oct 1997 17:33:20 -0400
From: Brygg Ullmer
Organization: MIT Media Lab
Subject: Dyson: Clades and Clones
Freeman Dyson, "Disturbing the Universe" (1979)
Points Beyond: Clades and Clones (p223, paperback Basic Books edition)
In biology, a clone is the opposite of a clade. A clade is a group of
populations sharing a common origin but exhibiting genetic diversity so
wide that they are barred from interbreeding. A clone is a single
population in which all individuals are genetically identical. Clades
are the stuff of which great leaps forward in evolution are made.
Clones are evolutionary dead ends, slow to adapt and slow to evolve.
Clades can occur only in organisms that reproduce sexually. Clones in
nature are typically asexual.
All this, too, has its analog in the domain of linguistics. A
linguistic clone is a monoglot culture, a population with a single
language sheltered from alien words and alien thoughts. Its linguistic
inheritance, propagated asexually from generation to generation, tends
to become gradually impoverished. The process of impoverishment is easy
to see in the declining vocabulary of English from Shakespeare to
Dickens, not to speak of Faulkner and Hemingway. As centuries go by,
words become fewer and masterpieces of literature become rarer.
Linguistic rejuvenation requires the analog of sexual reproduction, the
mixture of languages and cross-fertilization of vocabularies. The great
flowering of English culture followed the sexual union of French with
Anglo-Saxon in Norman England. The clade of Romance languages did not
spring from Latin alone but from the cross-fertilization of Latin with
the languages of the local barbarian tribes as the empire disintegrated.
In human culture as in biology, a clone is a dead end, a clade is a
promise of immortality.
Are we to be a clade or a clone? This is perhaps the central problem in
humanity's future. In other words, how are we to make our social
institutions flexible enough to preseve our precious biological and
cultural diversity? ....