© Natalie Fobes/Corbis ImagesChief Marie Smith Jones, the last speaker of the Eyak language in Alaska, died in 2008 at age 89.
Many people know about the threatened polar bear and extinct passenger pigeon, but few have heard of endangered and extinct languages such as Eyak in Alaska, whose last speaker died in 2008, or Ubykh in Turkey, whose last fluent speaker died in 1992, says Tatsuya Amano, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and lead author of the new study.
It's well known that economic growth or the desire to achieve it can drive language loss, he notes - dominant languages such as Mandarin Chinese and English are often required for upward mobility in education and business, and economic assistance often encourages recipients to speak dominant languages.
Whereas specific case studies demonstrate such forces at work, such as the transition from Cornish to English in the United Kingdom and from Horom to English in Nigeria, this is the first study to examine losses worldwide and rank economic growth alongside other possible influences, he says.
Comment: Not only does every cell in our body contain reams of information, our very neurons are capable of performing complex feats of information processing. And yet mainstream science tells us all this information and creativity is the result of bits of matter randomly bumping into other bits of matter. What is the source of information, if not intelligence?