The greater the number of codes, the smaller is the number of species which possess them, as it is shown in Figure 8-4. Such a pyramid could give the impression that evolution is somehow “oriented”, but in reality there is no need to explain a perfectly natural outcome with the intervention of additional and unnecessary guiding principles.
(4) Even if the evolution of an organic code could be extremely long, the “origin” of a complete code is a sudden event, and this means that the great evolutionary novelties associated to that code appeared suddendly in the history of life. This is a new explanation of the discontinuities that paleontology has documented, but it is not an “ad hoc” explanation, because the observed effect is a direct consequence of the codes’ properties.

The language model

The fact that new words can easily be incorporated into everyday language (and later into dictionaries) may give the impression that a language can accept any term, but this happens only because we are not aware of the great number of words that a language cannot accomodate and must leave out. We have already seen that terms like “blinket” and “dax” can be assimilated without difficulty, but there are also terms which are impossible to deal with, as Massimo Piattelli Palmarini has pointedly shown.
“Take for example the imaginary verb ‘to breat’, whose meaning is defined as ‘to eat bread and...(something else)’. So, ‘to breat tomatoes’ would mean ‘to eat bread and tomatoes’, ‘to breat cheese’ would signify ‘to eat bread and cheese’, and so on. Well, it has turned out that a verb of that kind is linguistically impossible. A simple statement such as ‘John has never breaten’, for example, is already ambiguous because it could mean either that John has always eaten things without bread, or that it has consistently eaten bread with nothing else. And with phrases just a little more complex the ambiguity becomes unbearable. Let us assume that we ask somebody ‘what did you breat without asking permission for?” and that the answer is ‘absolutely nothing!’.