How Amaotic!

Dalton City is one of the albums in Lucky Luke. It features a telegraphist who confuses D with M, A with I. Similiarity of Morse signals ... for some reason his employment is as stable as that of Gaston Lagaffe. Even though his fault liberates Joe Dalton rather than Joe Milton.

Now, confusing one letter for another is the very essence of mutations.

Someone may argue, this is also the case for sound laws. In certain ways, yes, though many are limited to unaccented places in the word. Swedish "gata" is Danish "gade". The stressed syllable "ga-" is the same (or nearly, two different prounciations of A), but "-ta" which is preserved in Swedish is become "-de" in Danish, because it is an unstressed syllable.

However, sound laws can be really impressive. Any word extant in both Latin and French is the different shape it is because of sound laws from Latin to French.

So, while in some cases the sound laws may impede communication (Dalton / Milton being more a Morse law than a sound law), they overall have the effect of creating a new language. To those who know French but not Latin, the newer one may even seem a more useful one per se, as more intelligible. Thing is, any language you learn is intelligible, any you don't know isn't, unless it's close enough to one you did learn (Danish in writing, I didn't need to learn, Danish orally, it took me some months in Denmark).

Also, this is only half the story. Sound laws as much as Morse laws do on occasion make things unintelligible - the ones leading from "solum" (soil) to "sol" were also leading from "solem" (sun) to "sol". French keeps the "sol" that's "solum" and replaces the theoretically possible other "sol" with "soleil" - which in Latin would have been "soliculum". The sun takes up smaller space above the horizon than the soil below it, so the sun became a diminutive. This kind of reparation is not "mutation" or even just "natural selection", it is a replacement of what is "naturally" selected away, and one which smells "Intelligent Design" a long way.

Some atheists see no intelligent designer, so they need to trust mutation and natural selection anyway, but as to Christians who like Evolution, I'll borrow a word about their choise from the telegraphist : how Amaotic. Remember, A and I are what get confused, as well as M and D. Also, I'm not saying it about their overall persons (Matthew 5:22), but I am saying it about that choice, "Theistic Evolution"./HGL

PS, if you haven't figured it out, "amaotic" stands for "idiotic" - the example in Dalton City lacks the ending "ic" or "ique", only features the noun .../HGL