ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of phonology and evolution, in a biological sense. Evolution, reduced to its bare essentials, consists of three rather abstract processes. These are: transmission of information, variation on this information and selection of certain variants over others. The effect of evolution is tautologically to optimize fitness in population. Evolution can be considered a process that optimizes a population for some purpose. The study of evolution of speech investigates which traits of human anatomy and cognition have undergone selective pressure related to language. These are the traits of human anatomy that have changed over time to improve people's ability to produce speech. When formulating language change in evolutionary terms, it becomes possible to apply to it powerful computational techniques that have been developed for reconstructing biological evolution. These tools include methods to reconstruct plausible family trees for groups of languages, methods to construct networks that represent relatedness and methods to reconstruct possible patterns of dispersal for language.
