One part of the analogy that does stand, I feel, around the issue of abiogensis is that neither diachronic linguistics nor biolgical evolution actually require a compelling account of first origins in order to be valid.
I read (not as part of class work) Whorf's "Language thought and reality". I wasn't really convinced that the Hopi (and other Indians) think differently, but they sure talk differently.
I remember the essay on the "The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi"
(I'm amazed by Google - I found an example on line)
[the segmentative aspect] Is formed by reduplication Of the CVCV verb stem And addition of the suffix –ta.
For example, ha’ri = "describing an arc"
As opposed to hari’rita = "meandering";
Ho’ci = "describing a right angle"
And hoci’cita = zigzagging"
I still have a dog-eared copy on my shelf from undergrad days; great read, very stimulating, and probably dead wrong -- but hey, that's rational enquiry for you.
A few quick thoughts (half-baked, it's been a long day) on other analogies before signing off:
The whole concept of 'a language' is a bit fuzzy, like the concept of 'species;' difficult to make a hard distinction between dialects (sub-species) because of the variations within a population of speakers, or to draw an absolute boundary between them. There are enormous differences between the speech of a man from the Hebrides and a man from Barbados (phonetically, some differences greater than between a Londoner speaking English and a Berliner speaking German)--but as long as they still communicate, we regard them as speaking the same English language. And evolution works on populations, not individuals (a point many seem to miss about biological evolution). Indeed, a principal mechanism for the creation of a new language is the isolation of a sub-population of speakers of the ancestral language.
If nothing else, maybe we should flag all this up so the hard-core Creationist crowd can go after a soft science like linguistics and leave the biologists in peace for a while. All of their dopiest but ever-recurring arguments can be raised, e.g., linguistics is contrary to a literal reading of the Bible, no one has ever observed one language suddenly becoming a different language in a laboratory, my great-great-granddaddy didn't speak no proto-Indo-European, there might be micro-evolution (changes within one language, from Chaucer to Shakespeare) but not macro-evolution (Proto-Germanic into English), something as complex as grammar had to have been 'designed' by a superior intelligence, what would be the use of half of a pluperfect tense, and of course--this is the clincher--linguistics leads inevitably to the obnoxious and dangerous politics of Noam Chomsky, quod erat demonstrandum
Jeepers, what a can of worms we may be opening here! If this catches on, I hope the biologists will thank us for gaining for them a respite!