As he spoke, I imagined his words transforming themselves into physical shapes before me. With each additional syllable, another fragment appeared, latching onto the previous one to form an ever-lengthening strand of blocks in front of him. This is, at least, was what was going on in my mind as Émile, the leader of the local university’s French group, informed me of this week’s conversation topic.

“C’est la politique, cette semaine.” Politics, he said. 

But I couldn’t concentrate on the topic. As I continued to watch his words in their mysterious transformation, they started to take on a more familiar shape. His lips, forming each sound with precision, seemed to act as a DNA polymerase apparatus. As they worked, it was as though they were piecing together successive nucleotides in a spiraling double helix. I kept talking, but I couldn’t stop seeing linguistic morphemes transforming into base pairs, language working and flowing as if it were a genome. 

Soon, I would come to realize that the connection between linguistics and genetics lies much deeper than the fact that words and genes are both patterns pieced together from smaller bits. In fact, even the ways in which languages morph and mutate over time mirror those of genomes. Evolution, whether it takes place in a species or in a language, is the result of a neverending progression of minute changes that over thousands of iterations add together and become something greater. 

If I just look hard enough, everything eventually comes to life.