At a deeper level, both genes and languages can be represented as digital systems of inheritance, built on the transmission of discrete chunks of information—genes in the case of biological organisms, and words in the case of language.
Linguistic and biological evolution share features beyond descent with modification and selection, including mechanisms of mutation and replication, speciation, drift and horizontal transfer (Table 2). At a deeper level, both genes and languages can be represented as digital systems of inheritance, built on the transmission of discrete chunks of information—genes in the case of biological organisms, and words in the case of language. Genes in turn comprise combinations of the four bases or nucleotides (A, C, G, T) while words can be modelled as comprising combinations of discrete sounds or phones (in fact, phones or sounds vary in a continuous space but languages are commonly represented as expressing a particular set of discrete phonemes).