A child learns to speak.
At first, the child is learning from a world already organised by other people.
Words are already there.
Meanings are already there.
Ways of asking, answering, explaining and evaluating are already there.
The child develops within this environment.
Then something changes.
The child begins to contribute.
A new expression appears.
A familiar word is used in an unfamiliar way.
A question is asked that nobody expected.
A story is invented.
A distinction is made.
Most of these things disappear.
Some are taken up.
Someone else repeats the expression.
Another person understands the distinction.
A story is retold.
A new way of saying something becomes familiar.
The child's development has begun to alter the developmental environment of other people.
This is more than communication.
Communication passes something from one organism to another.
Here, something else is happening.
The organism is changing the conditions under which another organism can develop.
A child learns a word.
The child uses it.
Another child encounters it.
The word becomes part of that child's possibilities.
The second child uses it differently.
The variation enters the population.
The population changes.
The next child develops within a slightly different environment.
Development has begun to modify its own conditions.
This is the recursion we have been following all along.
The organism develops within an environment.
The organism changes.
The changed organism changes the environment.
The changed environment becomes part of the conditions for further development.
But with language, the changes can accumulate extraordinarily quickly.
A biological change may take generations to spread through a population.
A linguistic change can spread through a conversation.
A new expression can become familiar in a day.
A new distinction can circulate through a community.
A new way of construing an experience can become part of the repertoire of people who were not present when it first appeared.
The developmental environment can therefore change within a single generation.
And the changes do not have to be genetic to be inherited.
They can be carried by language.
This gives the developing organism a new kind of evolutionary significance.
The organism is no longer simply adapting to conditions produced by previous generations.
It is participating in the production of conditions for subsequent generations.
The child becomes part of the history that future children will develop within.
The distinction matters.
An organism that changes its physical environment already changes the conditions for other organisms.
But an organism that changes a semiotic environment can change what other organisms can notice, distinguish, construe, remember, anticipate and imagine.
The organism can alter not only what is available to do.
It can alter what is available to mean.
And because meanings can be taken up, transformed and passed on, those changes can accumulate.
The environment becomes historical in a new way.
A word carries traces of previous uses.
A practice carries traces of previous participants.
A concept carries traces of previous distinctions.
A story carries traces of previous tellings.
The developmental environment becomes a repository of possibilities produced by earlier development.
But it is not a static repository.
Every participant can reorganise it.
The child who learns becomes the person from whom someone else learns.
The organism that was once shaped by the environment becomes an organism capable of shaping it.
The developmental relation has become reciprocal.
And this changes the meaning of inheritance.
What is inherited is no longer only what has been transmitted biologically.
A child inherits a world already altered by previous organisms.
The child develops within that world.
Then alters it.
The altered world becomes part of what the next child inherits.
The inheritance is therefore not a copy.
It is a changing developmental condition.
Something has happened to evolution.
The organism is no longer merely one of the things evolution changes.
The organism has become part of the process by which the developmental environment changes.
And once language is involved, that process can become cumulative, rapid and extraordinarily open-ended.
The organism can change the environment.
The environment can change development.
Development can produce new meanings.
New meanings can change the environment again.
The cycle has become capable of generating its own history.
We began with a child developing within a world organised by other people.
We have arrived at an organism capable of organising part of the world in which other people will develop.
The child has become part of the developmental environment.
And that means intelligence has acquired a new evolutionary role.
It can change not only what an organism can do.
It can change what the next organism can become.
Which leaves us with one final question.
What happens when language becomes part of this evolutionary process itself?
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