This book was intended to become a study of English historical phonology and morphology based on a generalised Darwinian model of linguistic evolution. Its basic idea, going back in my case to a summer reading of Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene, is that languages represent teams or populations of replicating mental patterns, which use their human hosts, that is, speakers, for the purpose of their essentially selfish replication. As my attempts began to take some shape, I presented ideas for a few chapters at various conferences and had some of them published in journals and conference volumes. Although they were usually well received, however, nobody seemed to understand why I needed what came across as ‘biological metaphors’.

As far as I was concerned, however, the concepts I employed were not metaphors at all, and the accounts I gave only made sense, I thought, within the particular perspective I had begun to take. The failure of my colleagues to understand that I was not just using exotic language to lend more hype to otherwise perfectly conventional stories caused me considerable worry, and I therefore tried to be more explicit about my approach, its theoretical foundations and its advantages over the more established view that languages represent mental tools which speakers use and modify according to their needs. As I went on with this task, it began to seem more and more likely that this book would become a plea for a theoretical perspective rather than an exercise in description, as I had originally intended. And this is indeed what it seems to have become.