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EB Ver Hoeve's picture

Ancestors

After discussing the significance of the story on Thursday and contemplating Darwin’s quote, “The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously the same,” I started thinking about some observations to support these ideas.  I think I found some.  Consider the Romance Languages.  Included in this branch of languages you have Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, and many more.  So then, as with all categorization, one must look to where this “branch” of Romance languages began.  All Romance Languages are descents of  “Vulgar Latin”.  This is significant to the story of evolution because from a single language, or initial language, speech has evolved and specialized into a variety of different ones-but they all stem from the same beginning and therefore all include traces of similarity.  This idea can also be seen in the cat family.  In the cat family there are currently 40 different feline species alive today that can all be traced back to a single ancestor (Wikipedia).  Like the languages, the feline family has branched out from a single ancestor over 10.8 million years ago and now include species of tigers, lions, leopards, jaguars, cheetahs, bobcats, and many more.  All of these felines share similar characteristics and this is because they too are from the same branch.  There is an unmistakable similarity there and I think Darwin was a pretty amazing thinker to have hypothesized on such a remarkable observation.    

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