Word meanings evolve. As Deacon (1997) points out, languages have adapted to human use. ‘The brain has co-evolved with respect to language, but languages have done most of the adapting’ (122).
If meaning spaces are more or less isomorphic, the etymologies and histories of words should give us some sense of the relationships between various concepts whose current names can be traced back to the same root. For instance, dear reader (in French, lecteur), you might consider how reading is conceptually related to both selection and intelligence, based on this etymology given by the OED:
Intelligent: from Latin inter (between, within) and legere (to bring together, gather, pick out, choose, catch up, catch with the eye, read).
(‘Catch up’ is used here in the sense of ‘pick up,’ not in the more recent idiomatic sense, as in ‘Slow down so I can catch up with you.’) This etymology gives us a broader sense of what is implicit in the act of reading, and how it is related to the processes of learning and evolution, which are also selective. The prefix inter- also suggests a connection with dialogue.
Of course the study of etymology, like any other, has its pitfalls. Some changes in the evolution of a linguistic form may have nothing to do with its meaning – for instance the historical accident by which the -leg- root changed to -lig- in some combinations (which is why you are intelligent rather than intellegent). A pun may be a revealer of hidden connections, or it may be funny because an apparent connection is illusory. (The root of illusion is ‘play.’) The Latin verb legere can be traced back to the Greek lego, which has (according to LSG) two distinct meanings: one is about speaking, conversing, meaning and so on, and comes into English in words like ‘dialect’; the other is about choosing (as in English ‘selection,’ ‘election’ and so on). What motivated the selection of a single verb for these two different families of concepts? Are they related in some hidden way? Or was it just an accident? And what about the connection between lego and logos, dialogue and dialectic?
Questions like these can only be resolved pragmatically: catch up the idea (it’s an abduction!) and run with it, and see where it takes your reading of the Word.