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Article

Words as alleles: connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift.

Proceedings. Biological sciences - 7 Feb 2010

Reali Florencia, Griffiths Thomas L

Abstract excerpt

Scientists studying how languages change over time often make an analogy between biological and cultural evolution, with words or grammars behaving like traits subject to natural selection. Recent work has exploited this analogy by using models of biological evolution to explain the properties of languages and other cultural artefacts. However, the mechanisms of biological and cultural evolution are very...

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Identifiers

PMID: 19812077
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1513
PMCID: PMC2842651

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PubMed metadata and Literature Corpus relationships. Corpus snapshot updated 7 Sept 2026. Manifest publication-graph-cohort-2026-09-07.1.

Source receipt: pubmed, retrieved 7 Sept 2026.

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