Can languages be treated as if words were genes?

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"Some researchers think that the evolution of languages can be understood by treating them like genomes — but many linguists don't want to hear about it" Emma Marris reports in Nature News. (Paywall)
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Treating language families like a genome evolving over generations raises some interesting questions. We must assume that the speakers of languages do not have much conscious input into the fate of languages, just as we do not have much conscious input into our physical genetic codes. Can we all say out loud together "reductionism"?

As a general rule, reductionism does not work when any given thing is reduced below the level of meaningful information. We will not understand an angry cat's behaviour much better by seeing him as a mass of biological molecules. In one sense, he is that, and the molecules are worth examining. But the usual best level to understand an animal's behaviour is at the level of the whole organism working together.

We have lots of input into language. One thinks immediately of the significance certain phrases acquire during an election campaign. Barack Obama, for example, may well have rescued the word "audacity" from near oblivion by his phrase, The Audacity of Hope. However, I think it will go back to near extinction in a few years.

Some might argue that a sort of Darwinian process governs which innovations or recoveries succeed. Maybe, but the process begins with intelligent design. The skilled orator knows what effect he intends to have and how he proposes to create it. Given the importance rhetoric has played in the oldest cultures, we can assume that skilled orators have had their hand in the system all along.

A friend enumerates reasons for doubt more academically than I can:

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Languages clearly are hierarchically-structured systems while actual science is far from understanding the hierarchical structure of genomes (if any);

Languages are tools daily used by intelligent agents who constantly use them (and change them) to express meanings. As such languages evolution is driven by intelligence. Genomes are not used daily by intelligent agents this way and even Darwinism [Darwinian evolution] denies a front-loader designer at their beginning;

Language always expresses concepts and manifests thought and ideas, it is fully teleological. According to Darwinism, genomes are not teleological systems.
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Of course, some processes in language do work without our giving much thought to them. I am reminded of the way in which the word "skirt" in Scandinavian languages was rendered "shirt" in English (which tends to soften the consonants). Then later, English speakers also grabbed "skirt" and made it mean the bottom garment rather than the top one. To maintain the distinction, we had to maintain the Scandinavian phonetics. The first grab was probably automatic, but the second was not.

And then, when I was young, the skort made a brief appearance - essentially a skirt with built-in shorts, pictured above. I am glad to see it has not entirely gone out of fashion. The word "skort", at any rate, was a deliberate coinage by an intelligent agent.

I would hate to think of an earnest researcher attempting to compile "laws of descent" for the English language and spending many hours trying to show how "skort" arose without any intelligent agency involved. On another planet, perhaps.
Also, just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: Meditation really can change the brain

My experiences point to truth but yours are classic examples of brain rot? (Charlie Brown's sister Lucy's theory of psychiatry, but not a cartoon)

Jeff Schwartz lectures in Ireland on changing the troubled brain by changing the mind

Neuroscience: First detailed map of the Grand Central Station of the brain