By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Wolfe, Tom. Kingdom of Speech. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016. 185 pp.
It all began in the Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of Argentina. Alfred Wallace, a self-taught British naturalist, fulfilling an assignment, noticed that the Fuegian inhabitants he encountered were brown, sun-wrinkled, and hairy. The hair on their heads was as wild as any hairy ape. Their legs were too short and their arms were too long for their hairy torsos. Wallace concluded that there was little to distinguish the Fuegians from the higher apes except the power of speech.
Wallace subsequently wrote an essay entitled, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.” The concept “descent with modification” was born. In his 20-page essay, Wallace provided the first-ever description of the evolution of species through natural selection.
Before seeking publication of his manuscript, he thought it advisable to get the opinion of Sir Charles Lyell, a renowned geologist whose judgment, if positive, would enhance his prospects for publication.
Wallace solved the problem of an unknown like himself getting the attention of Lyell by asking Charles Darwin, with whom he had corresponded as a fellow naturalist, to convey the manuscript to Lyell.
Darwin read the manuscript and found it supportive of an idea he acquired while on the exploratory voyage of the Beagle. Viewing the flora and fauna of the many regions where the Beagle had anchored, Darwin became convinced that all life on Earth was the result of “transmutations” that must have taken place over millions of years.
When Darwin presented Wallace’s manuscript to Lyell, both were aware of the significance of Wallace’s theory. Lyell wanted to present Wallace’s paper at the soon to be held Linnean Society meeting (July 1, 1858). Darwin had not written or published anything on the subject, but here he had in his hands a theory of evolution, descent with modification by an author with no academic credentials. It was unthinkable that an unknown should trump an established figure like Darwin.
Lyell’s solution was to have two papers presented at the Linnean Society’s meeting. They would be presented in the society’s usual practice of acknowledging speakers in alphabetical order. Thus Darwin’s paper would be offered first, giving the impression that it was his original work that was supported by a junior colleague. Problem! Darwin did not have a paper. A hastily prepared précis of what was taken to be his thought was produced by Lyell and an associate and read as Darwin’s contribution.
It was not until three months after the Linnean Society’s meeting that Wallace learned that his paper was discussed and later published by Lyell. He was 7,200 miles away at the time and did not return to England until 1862.
Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. Devastating criticism by Max Muller, a professor of language at Oxford, and similar criticism in France and Germany did little to damage Darwin’s reputation.
In Thomas Huxley, Darwin found a strong apologist. Huxley produced five long reviews of the Origin of Species, placing them in major journals within the space of four months. “Huxley,” Wolfe tells us, “became an ardent Darwinist not because he believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection — he never did — but because Darwin was obviously an atheist just like he was.”
Among the upper class, subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, English minority who resided far above the mass below.
Wolfe’s narrative continues: “In 1874 Nietzsche paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with his declaration, ‘God is dead’.” Nietzsche saw the implications of Darwinism: “The doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal will demoralize humanity throughout the West; it will lead to the rise of barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods.” Wolfe adds, indeed, Nazism, Communism, and Fascism.
From Darwin’s perspective, man has no special place in the universe. Man was not created in the image and likeness of God as the Church has taught. Man is an animal descended straight from other animals. But where is the evidence?
The theory of evolution immediately gained status as an intellectual fact despite the lack of evidence. Darwin followed his earlier book with The Descent of Man, a work designed to reinforce his contention that man, his speech included, had evolved from primates. Again, where was the evidence that speech and abstract thought, what Aristotle called meminisse, are the product of evolution?
The subject of the origin of language remained. In 1872 nothing about language made sense. There was no convincing explanation of the origin of language, a condition that lasted until 1959 with Noam Chomsky, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Chomsky’s studies led him to conclude that language was not something you learned but something you were born with, namely, a language organ. It functions the moment you come into the world, just as your heart and kidneys do. It doesn’t matter what a child’s first language is, every child possessed a deep structure, universal grammar, language-acquisition device. That language device is physical, empirical, and organic, clearly biological.
Two years later Chomsky published a book with the title Syntactic Structures. Wolfe maintains that Chomsky’s radical discovery of the purported “language organ,” given his personal charism, gave him an immediate following and launched a spate of papers on the subject by devotees, in spite of significant professional criticism.
A few years later, with two colleagues, Chomsky introduced another concept, namely, recursion. Recursion occurs when the speaker puts into a simple sentence one thought inside another. For example, take the sentence: “He is no longer a good baseball player,” which if unpacked, contains a number of subordinate notions.
The theory of recursion is too complicated to describe in this space. It was presented as more than a theory; it was declared a law. Every language depends on recursion. Recursion is the one capacity that distinguished human thinking from other forms of cognition. Recursion accounts for man’s dominance among the animals of the globe.
That thesis was undermined when its universal character was challenged by Daniel Everett, who had been studying the Piraha, a small tribe, geographically isolated in the wilderness of Brazil, who preserved a civilization virtually unchanged for thousands of years. They spoke only in the present tense. They had virtually no concept of the future or of the past. The Piraha made no tools, made no artifacts; their language contained only three vowels. Certainly they used no subordinate clauses.
In 2014, Chomsky and three MIT colleagues jointly published an article entitled “How Could Language Have Evolved?” Wolfe, with his usual sarcasm, comments: “Chomsky had spent sixty years on the subject. He had convinced not only academia but also an awed public that he had the answer. And now he is a signatory of a declaration claiming that language has evolved like any other trait of a living organism, telling us ‘Language is a particular computational system implemented naturally, but we are not sure how….The evolution of the faculty remains an enigma’.”
With wit and incisive comments, Tom Wolfe obviously delights in exposing questionable dogmas of the academic world. Suffice it to say that The Kingdom of Speech relegates Darwin’s theory of the evolution to the level where it belongs, a hypothetical explanation, beyond empirical confirmation.
This book is reminiscent of another published by the French philosopher Etienne Gilson, entitled From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again. Published in the late 20th century, the book has recently been made available in paperback by Ignatius Press (ignatius.com); it is well worth revisiting.
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