The Kingdom of Speech

I have been convinced for some time that Darwin’s theory is highly flawed. In fact, it is clear that even many biologists, as well as other evolutionary “scientists” know full well the problems with the theory. However, they view Darwinian evolution as providing the scientific foundation for their materialistic beliefs. For this reason, most biologists aggressively defend the theory even while they desperately look for a naturalistic alternative. Author Tom Wolfe sees Darwinian evolution for what it is, a failed theory. In recent years, more and more authors have been critical of Darwin’s ideas but Wolfe demolishes the theory with the most potent weapon available – ridicule. He also exposes, with biting humor, the sleazy politics that gave Darwin credit for evolution via natural selection when Alfred Russell Wallace clearly beat him to the punch. For those who know or suspect that Darwinian evolution is just flat out wrong on most counts, the book will confirm their suspicions and entertain them at the same time. For the committed Darwinist, this book should come as a punch in the gut.

Besides taking on icons like Noam Chomsky, and the question of where language comes from, Wolfe takes the reader on a trip to the jungle of south America to show how mythic our understanding of our most basic human attribute, speech, really is. He slices and fixes the reigning orthodoxy and skewers it with data and a good story.

For sheer entertainment, this book is a tremendous read. I highly recommend it.. While they might not like what he says, most honest people will admit that Tom Wolfe is a terrific writer. This a terrific historical take down of the evolutionary theory that men evolved from primates. I am going to wait a decent interval and read it again.

Wolfe has made his bar high with Bonfire, The Right Stuff, A Man in Full, etc, etc, so when I say, "meh", it's with this in mind. Interesting for a guy
like me who deals with the language disordered on a daily basis, probably not for the average Wolfe fan... S W Zimostrad PhD, MI.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in how men think, and how they remember what they have thought. Fascinating discussion of what Chomsky and his epigones now concede is Universal Grammar's failure to explain what language is. And of course Tom Wolfe is more fun to read than any professional linguist!

When you mix good journalism with great writing you have a book worth reading, of making notes in the margin and lending to your GYN... I mean, you have to talk about SOMETHING other than what is going on!

The Kingdom of Speech is an excellent account echoing the Wolfe greatness as shown in The Right Stuff, The Painted Word, From Bauhaus to Our House and so many others, non-fiction and fiction. May he keep publishing for a long time.

I predict that Wolfe’s new book will enjoy/endure that kind of literary fame that Freud characterized as “Many enemies, much honor.”

The Kingdom of Speech divides into three parts: the story of the formulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and its difficulties with accounting for the “evolution” of human speech; the attempt by linguists, especially Noam Chomsky, to posit an innate, language-generating organ with a hard-wired logic of structural “recursion”; and Wolfe’s own view of language as neither a product of evolution nor neural structure in the brain, but as a “cultural artifact,” the most powerful tool ever developed by any species on earth.

The two groups who predictably will howl at Wolfe’s presentations are the evolutionary biologists and many (but not all) professional linguists. What will make Wolfe’s presentation extremely galling is the combination of light-hearted wit with extremely damaging (though his enemies will not concede this) assemblages of biographical facts about the lives and ideas of the people he discusses (though maybe the word “disses” would be more accurate).

By nature, Wolfe is an anti-establishment writer: liberal New York cultural leaders who supported the Black Panthers, the art history and criticism establishment, architectural theorists, Detroit auto designers, etc. He almost always sides with the scorned outsider — West Coast kar kustomizers, Chuck Yeager, Junior Johnson, and, in The Kingdom of Speech, Alfred Wallace and Daniel Everett.

I suppose that, since I’ve never been at the pointed end of Wolfe’s rapier, I can enjoy his savaging of social and academic hierarchies, self-important theorists, and other Dickensian entities and characters of American and European cultural leadership. Long may he write (and laugh)!

Too snide for words. hey the seventies are over! If occupy Wall Street were a book this would be it. Everything's a conspiracy. It did lead me to the book "Don't sleep there are snakes" which is an example which destructively tests the rule that Wolfe's target Chomsky has set for a language. "Don't sleep there are snakes" is part Linguistic argument partly a harrowing autobiographical work written by a missionary turned linguist.

Tom Wolfe's Kingdom of Speech is great writing! I am not a specialist in the subject matter, so I first determined that it was mentioned as a non-fiction book. The best part was following how personalities and sociological constructs influenced the contours of "hard" science. Reading this book stimulated me to aquire more books that I will actually read as well! Your critical thinking faculties will be engaged.

Tom Wolfe. Needs no introduction. One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century is still shipping in the twenty-first. I love it when Wolfe sticks it to the pretentious and powerful. The job Wolfe does on Chomsky here - "an air-conditioned linguist with their bluish computer complexions and faux-manly open shirts" - is comparable to his delicious dismemberment of Leonard Bernstein - Bernsteeeeen! - in Radical Chic. The "flycatcher" Daniel Everett, whose entire family nearly dies of malaria whilst he researched the prim - er, indigenous - language of a prim - er, native - people in the the store, is a great hero of any book. His fieldwork, genius and perseverance destroyed Chomsky and his laughable Language Organ theory that had became dogma in linguistic theory for over thirty years. Chomsky's entire theory and authority was based on made up fantasy. La La la land nonsense from a guy sitting at a desk. Emperor's clothes style dogmatism. It would be hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that Chomsky is one of the most cited authors in history.

I still have my graduate level text in General Semantics. It has been angrily ripped apart in three places and crudely taped back together, a little evidence of my frustration at spending half a semester using what is known as Predicate Calculus trying to prove "a tiger is a tiger in a possible world." The author is Noam Chomsky, an American known as the world's greatest linguist. Our young professor at Morehead told us students we should genuflect at the mention of his name.

In The Kingdom of Speech, the iconoclastic Tom Wolfe not only denounces the great Chomsky, but seven other certified geniuses, including Darwin and B.F. Skinner, for their failure to explain the origin of speech, the main attribute that separates man from the lower animals.

If you love language you are bound to enjoy and profit from Wolfe's irreverent and highly readable comedy of errors.

This concise but profound analysis of the history of language research takes stale subject matter and tranforms it into compelling drama, replete with ambiguous characters and cliffhangers. Along the way, you will learn a good deal of science and history. May the white-suited sage give Methuselah's mark a challenge!

The book reviews Everett's finding of a language without recursive grammar which refutes Chomsky theory, and the brutal attacks of Chomsky's "gang" against Everett. These are important events in the history and sociology of science. Unfortunately the style makes the reading inconvenient.

Wolfe's first mistake is he thinks human language is an artifact, not an instinct. This is wrong because children are born knowing the difference between "I" and "me," but many grown-ups think the sentence, "My mother and me went to the store," is grammatically incorrect. I learned this from The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language (P.S.)

What motives this error, I suppose, is that Wolfe thinks the theory that language is an instinct supports the theory that humans evolved from apes. Calling language an artifact, like sky scrapers, supports the theory that humans are superior to apes and did not evolve from them. This brings us to Wolfe's second mistake.

He thinks Darwin thought and now most biologists think human beings evolved from apes. He believes this because he takes Darwin and Darwinists at their word. He should know better than to assume Darwinists have integrity because he quotes Nietzsche's comments about "barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods" to show the connection between Darwinism and the horrors of WWI and WWII.

Darwinists are suffering from cognitive dissonance because they believe life ends in the grave. This conflicts with the reality that the prophetic religions of the Near East, the wisdom religions of China, and the mystical religions of India all say that we pay for our sins when we die. This causes emotional and mental stress and inhibits Darwinists from thinking intelligently and rationally and behaving honestly. Darwinists know perfectly well that human beings are embodied spirits and that science can not contradict the Biblical account of the creation of Adam and Eve. I offer as proof that Darwinists lack integrity the following quote from a Darwinist:

"Among the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of evidence favors some from of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism." Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False( location 69 of 1831)

There is nothing "traditional" about dualism. It is just a bright idea from DesCartes, whose real contribution to metaphysics is, "I think, therefore, I am." The theory judged to be true by rational people is just what Nagel said. Thomas Aquinas expressed this by saying unity is a transcendental property of being. Nagel is implying that Thomas Aquinas believed in dualism. He is giving this misinformation, I think, because he does not want to admit that the mind-body problem leads to the metaphysical argument for God's existence.

There is a lengthy discussion of this argument in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy titled, "Cosmological Argument." The writers of this article, unfortunately, don't understand the argument. It must have been written by Darwinists. The argument is this: Humans are finite beings. Finite beings need a cause. Hence, an infinite being exists.

Another great book by Wolfe: interesting, informative, profoundly entertaining, witty and very much in his own writing style.
Yes you could read a condensed version of it in the article that appeared in Harper's and get the full idea of the current discussion on the field of linguistics, but reading Wolfe is not only about getting informed, is it?
You should also see the other side of the coin and check out what happens when experts on evolution have a say on Wolfe's theories;
for example; Jerry A. Coine's opinion is in the Washington Post.
Regardless of offended Chomskyites, yes,
Go ahead and read it if you like this literary giant and would like to enjoy his latest.

Enjoyable rump around something that we've used almost all of our lives, speech. And hooking a theory onto an already suspect theory is a very questionable thing to do. No matter how brilliant the world thinks you and your theory are.

Wolfe is a skilled and funny researcher and writer. He covers the subject of language
evolution thoroughly and tells of items I was totally ignorant of. Makes you wonder Who
taught Adam to speak.

Bad, bad pseudo-science. Wolfe writes a good novel, and he should stick to that. This attempt to shed light on a complex topic is flawed and one-sided. I wonder if it was intended to explain a topic or be a platform for an opinion. If he hoped for the former he missed it by a mile. If the latter, then he should make that clear from the outset.

Darwinism is an easy target for ridicule. It is a pretentious faith whose doctrines claim that it answers all questions about how life arose from a few damp chemicals and arrived eventually at me writing and you reading this review on incredibly complex electronic devices.

There is remarkable little evidence to support Darwinism's claims. The faith conflicts with the geological record, fails to account for the origin of life, and cannot explain the origin of information stored in our DNA. Most importantly, Darwinism cannot account for the origin of the many traits that distinguish man from other animals.

Many Darwinists, in despair of ever answering the challenges to their faith coming from discoveries in molecular biology, have fallen back to spouting vehement invective. Others bring lawsuits to prevent discussion and teaching about the failures of Darwinism. Still others engage in the politics of personal destruction in hopes of silencing those scientists who try to publish scientific results that conflict with the Darwinist faith.

These failures are sometimes recognized by prominent Darwinists. Most famous, perhaps, is the late Stephen Jay Gould. He compared Darwinian explanations to Kipling's just-so stories. Wolfe explores that branch of critical thinking along with many others.

Is it worthwhile to read yet another book deconstructing Darwinian myths? In this case, yes. Tom Wolfe adds to the rich literature debunking Darwinism by examining Darwinist explanations of the origin of human speech.

Wolfe starts at the dawn of the Darwinian Age when world-renowned linguist Max Muller pointed out that Darwinism had no explanation for human language. Muller was arrogant and joyfully sarcastic, so he enjoyed ridiculing the origin stories invented by Darwinists. Many others through the years have continued this tradition. Wolfe ultimately arrives at a recent paper by world-renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, et. al. in which today's most distinguished linguists conclude that 150 years of research have provided no Darwinian explanation for the origin of language.

Along the way Wolfe tells engaging, frightening, and very funny stories about scientific presumptions being overturned by individuals who actually go out into the field to gather evidence concerning those presumptions. Those who stay home at their desks and merely think about how things "must have happened" simply cannot compete in the realm of ideas.

I fault the book for lacking a table of contents and an index. Such features are vital for those of us who want to return to useful parts of the book. I also think the price of $16.25 was rather high for so few pages with so little text on each page. Then again, I am reminded that Saint Thomas Aquinas followed the reasoning of Saint Augustine and Albertus Magnus. He concluded that a just price is determined by the buyer's willingness to pay as well as by the seller's reluctance to sell. Readers are more likely to pay more for a Tom Wolfe essay than for one written by someone of lesser talent. At any rate, I note that the store has already reduced the price by 65 cents since I bought it 10 days ago, reflecting either the store's recognition of buyers' reluctance or their desire for greater sales.

Other enjoyable books deconstructing Darwinian myths about what it means to be human include G. K. Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" and David Stove's "Darwinian Fairytales". Both are available, of course, from the store.

NOTE ADDED 3/25/2017
The failures of neo-Darwinism have become so obvious that the world's top biologists are now discussing the failures openly at meetings of the Royal Society without losing their jobs.
"New Trends in Evolutionary Biology", November 7-9, 2016, London, England

Perry Marshall points out:
... part of the problem is that evolutionary biology has been running on the wrong set of rails for 70 years, and 90% of the scientists have been looking in the wrong places. Or else making up stories about natural selection to fig-leaf hide their inability to explain things.

It is forbidden to post URLs in these reviews, so you will have to do your own searching to learn more about the collapsing neo-Darwinian paradigm.

Searching the following text strings will get you started:
new trends in evolutionary biology royal society
what happened to evolution at the royal society
stephen meyer perry marshall

I saw of a CBS interview where the interviewer referred to the ideas in the book as "very dangerous." So I immediately bought it.

I recommend this book. I enjoyed it immensely.

To address some of the controversy, there is plenty of hostility to Darwin but I didn't perceive much hostility to evolution itself. I take it Wolfe does not believe in evolution but that doesn't matter to me at all. The only sentences where this comes out are in the final paragraph. If it matters to you, you might not like this book or, for that matter, any other book written before the 19th century and many books written in the 19th-21st century.

The early chapters focus on Darwin and Wallace: some of their relationship, Darwin's inability find an evolutionary explanation of speech and Wallace's belief that the existence speech implied something more. This is interesting history and, in my opinion, uncontroversial.

The chapters on Chomsky border on vicious. Chomsky is portrayed as a smart man and superior debater who, through force of personality, was able to make a whole field accept untested and ultimately wrong theories of language. Chomsky is further presented as petulant and childish when experimental evidence that contradicts his theories appear. Whether or not you believe this is, of course, up to you but I found the arguments convincing. I have added Everett's "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" to my reading list.

I take it there are "experts" in linguistics writing negative reviews on the store. Given the behavior of Chomsky acolytes described in the KoS, this is unsurprising.

In all, it is a well written, entertaining book. If you have an emotional need to revere Darwin or Chomsky, you won't like it. I enjoyed it.

Finally, since we live in stupid times, I feel the need to share some relevant credentials: I am an atheist with a degree in genetics. I believe in evolution but what's more I understand evolution. I am utterly unoffended by the existence people who believe the earth is 6000 years old and think that belief is no reflection on their intelligence. I AM offended by the existence of people who think scientific understanding starts with the capacity to believe a scientific theory. It generally amuses me to find someone who becomes dyspeptic about people who decline to believe in evolution but need Google to complete the sentence, "Evolution is a theory of X"

Tom Wolfe is in fine company. Like Mark Twain and H.L.Mencken he is a fine satirist and a devastating wit. And like them he is a very fine hater. And he has chosen some very rich company to hate in the Kingdom of Speech--Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky.
This book I should note is very little more than an expanded essay and Little Brown has used the helpful expedient of using physically small pages to stretch out this essay to 176 pages. The book has two basic sections. The first attacks Charles Darwin in language even the most credulous Creationist would balk at. Wolfe portrays Darwin as petty and privileged. He dismisses evolution as a "Just So" story and as not even science. He uses all those verbal tics and tocks that have served him so well all these years to knock Darwin's image down to size. Darwin's theory of evolution in Wolfe's telling has no more scientific validity than Navajo myths of creation.

He also tells a little myth where Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin danced some cheerful Mau Mau dance like Norman Mailer did with the radicals in the seventies or Neal Cassidy did with that darn hammer in Kesey's band of merry minstrels. In short, Wolfe repeats himself, repeating his greatest hits in 19th century English history, with the whole darn bag of tricks in hand. Wolfe imagines Darwin experiencing paranoid feelings of being Smashed (italics in Wolfe's text) by Wallace. And then, in the end, Wallace betrays Darwin by suggesting evolution may not after all this explain modern man at all, that speech puts us beyond nature, and Darwin responds by writing the Descent of Man which Wolfe cheerfully launches all his possible bile toward.

Still this is all amazingly entertaining. No finer stylist is writing in America than Tom Wolfe and this nonsense is great fun.

Wolfe wraps up evolution with a quick reference to Mendel--as if genetics somehow invalidates evolution!--and drops the subject completely. The fact that evolutionary science more or less ignored speech--a rather logical thing to do if you think about--Wolfe treats as an astonishment. Wolfe writes (and this quote gives a hint of his style, which is both amazingly entertaining and obfuscating of anything like serious thought) "It was dumbfounding---utterly DUMBFOUNDING! Three generations of Darwinists (note the derogatory term) and linguists kept their heads stuck in the sand when it came to the origin of the most important single power man possesses" (That would be speech for those of you foolish enough to think Wolfe meant tools or the opposable thumb or air conditioning.)

The second part of the book examines Noam Chomsky--on the whole a more vulnerable figure than Darwin, though Wolfe cheerfully builds him up as one of the great men of our time--and how his theories have been challenged by Daniel Everett. Now, Everett's book Don't Sleep, There are Snakes is one of the most entertaining works of anthropology and linguistics ever written--and a major attack on Chomsky's ideas of innate grammar. Everett maintains speech is an artifact of man, like any tool, not an evolved capacity. He could be right. But his argument allows Wolfe to expand into some of the most ludicrous bad thinking any good writer has ever indulged himself in.

Without the foggiest bit of evidence, Wolfe launches the conclusion of the book into one of the woolliest and most wild eyed sections anyone has ever written. Only Wolfe's status in America's literati allowed such a lame and overblown bit of pseudo-reasoning to see publication. You see, speech is nothing more than a mnemonic device (Wolfe,now taking the robe of the great genius in hand, helpfully explains to all us vulgarians how to pronounce mnemonic) like I before E except after C. And you see this little trick--why this little trick humans parsed and dolphins thought silly--let us build our great cities and wonderful civilizations and downright have dominion over all the Earth! And as for that ultimate vulgarian, that witch doctor spinning myths, Charles Darwin, and his unfortunate belief that man descended from some hairy ape or another, well Wolfe writes "To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo's David."

This is a fun and entertaining book which is why I gave it 4 stars. The best parts of the book are the social satire on Darwin and Chomsky--though I do wonder how much is fiction--and the synopsis of Everrett's book. Wolfe wears a black hat in this book (literally, look on the dust cover). However, his stance on Darwinism is completely worthless and linguistics is definitely a changing subject. If you are really interested in evolution, I would suggest you read some of Stephen Jay Gould's old essays, still the best introduction to the layman to the controversies and intellectual world of evolutionary science. And for linguistics? Well, as good as Wolfe's precis of Don't Sleep There are Snakes is, the original book is still better.

`

They say that forewarned is forearmed. So stand forewarned: My customer review is a bit all over the place, as is the book under review.
Tom Wolfe (born in 1931; Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University, 1957) is a fashionable prose stylist and satirist. In his new book The Kingdom of Speech, he gently spoofs Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Noam Charisma’s linguistics theory. For his irreverent spoofs, Tom Wolfe may be banished – or worse! -- by the political-correctness police, because they do not like to have their secular sacred cows spoofed – especially by one of their fellow atheists.

But what could the political-correctness police say or do to Tom Wolfe that would be worse than banishing him from the ranks of respectable secular intellectuals? Perhaps they could say that Tom Wolfe is really a closet conservative. In fact, that charge would be sufficient to banish him. But he is a southerner (born and raised in Richmond, Virginia). And he studied English at Yale University at a time when the southerner Cleanth Brooks, who distinguished himself as a Faulkner scholar, was a big shot in English at Yale. So perhaps Tom Wolfe is culturally a conservative southern agrarian, not a Yankee industrialist, eh?

Years ago now, the Canadian Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943), aligned himself in spirit with the southern agrarians in his article “The Southern Quality,” which is reprinted in the book The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962 (McGraw-Hill, 1969, pages 185-209). In addition, he irreverently spoofed Yankee industrial culture in his short-essay-commentaries on various artifacts in his copiously illustrated book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Viking Press, 1951).

Years ago now, after McLuhan had published his controversial books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), Tom Wolfe helped propel him to extraordinary fame by publishing his article “What if He [Marshall McLuhan] is Right?” which is reprinted in Tom Wolfe’s book The Pump House Gang (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, pages 133-170).

Of course the political-correctness crowd today does not think that Marshall McLuhan is right. For them, he represents one road not taken. But what if Tom Wolfe today is still convinced that Marshall McLuhan is right? Wouldn’t this help explain why Tom Wolfe today is spoofing certain sacred cows of the political-correctness crowd in his new book? Wouldn’t this conviction be sufficient reason for him to risk the wrath of the political-correctness crowd?

Now, Tom Wolfe is not the only person today who is offending against the spirit of political correctness. The developer Donald J. Trump of New York, the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential candidate, has garnered an enormous amount of free media coverage of various things he has deliberately said to offend the spirit of political correctness. And he has a fervent base of white middle-class male supporters cheering him on in his assault on the spirit of political correctness. But Trump’s fervent supporters do not strike me as likely to read Tom Wolfe’s new book, even though he gently spoofs certain secular sacred cows.

Perhaps we should note here that Trump’s fervent white middle-class male supporters see the secular intellectuals in the political-correctness crowd as engaging in top-down social and political change – to the detriment of their economic and social standing.

Historically in American culture, intellectuals have played a big role. So perhaps top-down political and social change is part of our American heritage, eh?

Now, in Tom Wolfe’s estimate, Jesus is one of the six most influential people in world history (page 165). Charles Darwin is another one of the six, but, alas, Noam Chomsky is not.

Tom Wolfe even paraphrases certain points from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which he characterizes as “the most radical social and political doctrine ever promulgated (page 166). No doubt many Christian believers today would agree with his assessment.

But don’t Noam Charisma and the political-correctness crowd fancy themselves as promulgating “the most radical social and political doctrine” in contemporary American culture? You bet, they do. In addition, they tend to see themselves as pitted against Christian and other religious believers. Their secular spirit could be summed up in the rallying cry, “Atheists of the world, unite!”

Unfortunately for the atheists, religionists in American culture still outnumber them by a wide margin, and American religionists tend to be organized at the grassroots level into activist cells known as churches and synagogues and mosques and the like – some of which tend to be more conservative in terms of social and political doctrine, while others tend to be more liberal and progressive.

However, in terms of contemporary American culture, it is hard to imagine the rallying cry, “Religionists of the world, unite!” Of course in terms of contemporary world culture, it is also hard to imagine the rallying cry, “Religionists of the world, unite!”

But not so long ago, the official anti-religion position of communism did evoke widespread anti-communism in American culture and world culture. Fortunately for contemporary American culture, our idealistic atheist intellectuals/activists under the influence of Noam Charisma and other charismatic leaders have not yet managed to evoke a widespread response as strong as anti-communism hysteria once was in American culture. Nevertheless, the secularists are working on it.

Perhaps we should recall that the British novelist George Orwell (1903-1950) was an atheist socialist who, like Tom Wolfe at a later time, like to write satirical spoofs. Surprise, surprise! Anti-communists in postwar American culture co-opted the British atheist’s novels Animal Farm (1946) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) to help advance anti-communist hysteria in the United States after World War II. So couldn’t enterprising American conservatives today co-opt the American atheist’s new book The Kingdom of Speech to help advance the conservative critique of the spirit of political correctness? In theory, perhaps conservatives could do this. However, I do not think it is likely that conservatives are going to do this.

Now, the charismatic Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is Jewish, has at times described himself as a socialist. However, in his presidential primary campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination, he did not go out of his way to identify himself as a secularist out to advance an anti-religion agenda. On the contrary, Senator Sanders publicly praised Pope Francis for his spirited strafing of capitalism.

In addition, in his presidential primary campaign here in Minnesota, where I live, Senator Sanders shrewdly declined former Governor Jesse Ventura’s offer to endorse him publicly. When former Governor Ventura was in office, he often mocked Christians for their tendency to turn the other cheek – something a big tough guy like Ventura would never do.

In Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential primary campaign against Senator Sanders, she managed to advertise her Methodist faith. Even though I do not understand fully how certain persons may seem to others, or at least to some others, as charismatic, it strikes me as fair to say that Hillary is not a charismatic speaker (but neither am I).

There are far too many American voters who identify themselves as religious believers of one kind or another for any hopeful presidential candidate to espouse an explicitly anti-religion position.

For this reason and others, I do not think that Noam Charisma or other secular intellectuals would be viable presidential candidates.

Arguably Noam Charisma and other secular intellectual today can be understood as secular embodiments of the spirit of ancient Hebrew prophets such as Amos who called for economic justice (also known today as social justice). In this respect, Noam Charisma and other secular intellectuals today can be contextualized in the American Protestant tradition of the American jeremiad. See the Jewish scholar Sacvan Bercovitch’s book The American Jeremiad, 2nd ed. (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

Now, under the leadership of the prophet Moses, God’s chosen people set out from Egypt for the “promised land.” But the “promised land” means that they were to become agrarians – you know, like those more recent southern agrarians mentioned above.

Nevertheless, to purify them for their eventual religious destiny in the “promised land,” they wandered around in the desert for forty years. They needed to be purified spiritually of their cultural conditioning in Egypt.

For more than forty years now, the political-correctness crowd has been wandering in the secular intellectual desert, following their various secular intellectual prophets. Arguably McLuhan was one alternative prophet that intellectuals could have followed, but he was a Roman Catholic.

Disclosure: I would characterize myself as a theistic humanist, as distinct from a secular humanist. In our contemporary culture wars, I tend NOT to endorse the anti-religion position of certain secular humanists. In general, I tend to see economic libertarians such as the Koch brothers as a far greater threat to the common good than religionists of various kinds. However, certain secular intellectuals tend to see religionists as a far greater threat than the economic libertarians.

But I digress. Back to Tom Wolfe’s new book.

Throughout his book Tom Wolfe refers to the Word (his capitalization), meaning speech, language. However, he does not happen to advert explicitly to the famous prologue of the Gospel According to John, which begins, “In the beginning was the Word” (Greek, “Logos”; Latin, “Verbum”) – a play on the opening words of one account of creation in the book of Genesis. As to the reference to the Word, the anonymous author of the prologue was likely familiar with a similar usage by Philo the Jew of Alexandria.

Nor does Tom Wolfe happen to advert explicitly to the Christian custom of referring to the supposed Second Person of the supposed divine trinity as the Word (also known as the supposed Son and as the supposed Christ, or Messiah).

Now, in the book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, the American Jesuit cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) discusses the Word (capitalized) as this term is used in the Christian tradition of thought and the word (lower-case).

It is in the realm of the possible that Tom Wolfe is familiar with Ong’s 1967 book The Presence of the Word. In any event, Tom Wolfe’s book The Kingdom of Speech is not incompatible Ong’s book The Presence of the Word. But Ong’s book is deeper and more profound than Tom Wolfe’s new book is.

Now, Tom Wolfe describes speech, language as a human artifact. But is it an artifact?

However, in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy in which Ong as a Jesuit was trained, human beings have a distinctively human nature (or essence) that sets them apart from all infra-human animals. In that framework of thought, speech, language is an aspect of distinctively human nature. Distinctively human nature is also referred to as the distinctively human soul (the translation of the Greek term transliterated as “psyche” or “psuche”).

Because it is also fashionable in certain academic circles today to reject so-called “essentialism,” see the Aristotelian philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum’s article “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism” in the journal Political Theory, volume 20, number 2 (May 1992): pages 202-246.

But human beings are known as rational animals, which distinguishing them, on the one hand, from infra-human animals and, on the other hand, from disembodied spirits such as angels and God. However, as rational animals, human beings also have an animal soul. Therefore, the key question is, “How do we know the moment of ensoulment with the distinctively human soul?”
In my estimate, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade established a reasonable guide-line when it legalized abortion in the first trimester. But of course certain religious zealots do not agree with that ruling.

For an informed discussion of the distinctively human soul (also known in short as the intellect, or mind), see the Aristotelian philosopher Mortimer J. Adler’s accessible short book Intellect: Mind over Matter (Macmillan, 1990). Adler was not a secularist.

For a carefully reasoned position regarding legalized abortion in the first trimester, based on deontological moral theory (derived from Kant), see James H. Fetzer’s book Render unto Darwin: Philosophical Aspects of the Christian Right’s Crusade against Science (Open Court, 2007, pages 95-120).

Now, in the book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (Macmillan, 1967), which young Hillary Rodham (born in 1947) read in the summer of 1967 and was impressed with, Ong comments explicitly on the problematic that Tom Wolfe discusses in connection with Darwinian evolutionary theory:

“At a point where living organisms approximating the present human body were appearing [in our evolutionary history] the first [distinctively] human soul is created by God, infused within a body in the material universe. This is, of course, a special act of God, for the creation of the [distinctively] human soul in its spirituality transcends the merely material” (page 78).

Elsewhere, Ong says, “Each [distinctively] human soul, it is true, is created by a direct act of God” (page 76).

Of course Ong’s claims are anathema to atheists who hold a materialist philosophical position. Nevertheless, Tom Wolfe’s argument about speech, language is open to being used to support Ong’s claim about the distinctively human soul. In the larger framework of thought that Ong works with, Tom Wolfe’s argument about speech, language actually supports that claim that speech, language is an expression and manifestation of the distinctively human soul.

Rats! Banishment from the ranks of respectable secular intellectuals would be too light a punishment for Tom Wolfe. Perhaps secular intellectuals should torture him by water-boarding him – or by burning him at the stake. Secular intellectuals don’t want to hear Adler’s or Nussbaum’s Aristotelian argument about human essence. American pragmatic philosophy is the de facto materialist philosophy of most secular intellectuals – not Aristotelian philosophy – or Ong’s Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy.

For the information about young Hillary Rodham reading Ong in the summer of 1967, see Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice (Random House, 1999, pages 48-49).

Now, according to Tom Wolfe, “by now, the early twenty-first century, the vast majority of people who thought of themselves as intellectuals were atheists. Believers were regarded as something worse than hapless fools” (page 128).

Of course both Ong and McLuhan were believers, so I guess that today’s secular intellectuals regard them “as something worse than hapless fools.”

Tom Wolfe's "Kingdom of Speech" argues that....

Well, I don't really know what it argues. And that's the principal problem of the book.

Wolfe opens by describing the rise of evolutionary theory in the 19th century, paying special attention to the relationship of Charles Darwin with Alfred Russell Wallace. The history was enjoyable, and it was good to see Wallace given more attention- especially given his unique ideas later in life- but one can't help escape the impression that Wolfe has some kind of vendetta against Darwin personally. Now, I'm a creationist, so I have no instinctive loyalty to Darwin. But there's no question that Darwin was a great scientist and a deep thinker, and the barely concealed implications that Darwin stole everything from Wallace is unhelpful- as are the statements that Darwin provided "no evidence." Well, historical science trades in circumstantial evidence, and circumstantial evidence can be powerful- the "Origin" is filled with it. Darwin deserves better engagement than this. But this backstory is intended to lead up to the discussion of language. Darwin's critics argued that he had simply no explanation for the gradual rise of language. And they were right.

From here, Wolfe turns to Chomsky, a man whom Wolfe evidently despises. I don't know why he despises Chomsky so much, but this bleeds through every page of the book. I find Chomsky insufferably pompous, but the book would be better had Wolfe's personal feelings not been so evident. The excoriation of the modern "linguist" who knows no language other than his native tongue, however, is well-deserved, and very amusing. Chomsky's theory of "universal grammar" is well known- the idea that all languages have an identical substructure, and that this substructure is by implication wired into our brains or minds. In order to rebut this idea, Wolfe draws on the well-known work of Daniel Everett with the remote Piraha tribe in South America. The language of the Piraha conforms to none of Chomsky's allegedly "universal" rules. The account of Everett's work is fascinating, as is the account of the reaction against it by Chomsky and those who subscribe to the theory of universal grammar.

Yet, at the end, it's not clear what any of this is supposed to prove. Sure, Chomsky is a Darwinist like the rest of his peers, but his theory of universal grammar has never had a very deep connection with Darwinian theory, as Chomsky himself admits to being unable to explain the rise of this universal grammar in Darwinian terms. And while Everett started out as a Christian missionary, he is now a more ardent atheist than Chomsky, speaking at the "Freedom from Religion Foundation" and making some of the worst arguments against Christianity known to mankind. Let's say Everett is right and Chomsky is wrong. What does this mean for materialism or Darwinism? Well, not very much. Wolfe embraces Everett's view that language is a "tool" near the end of the book, but all this idea does is illustrate that linguists should be required to study philosophy. Language isn't a "tool" like a spear is a tool. Language is the precondition for advanced toolmaking, because advanced toolmaking nearly always requires the manipulation of abstractions: abstractions that, in virtue of their status as universals, cannot be grasped by the five senses. That's why we need to capture them in verbal symbols.

All in all, I gave the book the rating I did because it was an enjoyable read, and I learned about the controversy between Chomsky and Everett. But I can't rate the book as far as its success in promoting its thesis, because I couldn't really find a thesis that it attempted to promote.

A good romp. It shows that what sets human beings apart from the Plant and Animal Kingdoms is that we talk speak and write. A charming philosophical work that restores a balance between art and science.

The entire book an allegory -- how can evolution explain the desperate need for "theories that explain everything" innate in mostly every human being; and thoroughly disposing of Chomsky's unseeable, unknowable "language organ." In using speech to explain speech, Wolfe, offers evidence of how preposterous ideas -- through luck and guile-- become conventional wisdom and how anyone who disagrees will be otherized into oblivion. Wolfe offers praise for the "bug catchers" -- the actual scientists who do the often boring surely monotonous and probably uncomfortable fieldwork responsible for our cultural improvements. Something less than praise for those who sit in air-conditioned rooms conspiring with their fanboys for more intellectual stardom.

At no point would I say he is mean. He provides great roasts --- but he seems to actually understand and appreciate his subjects. This is actually one of the highest honors for Chomsky. I wish I was important enough some day for such attention from a talent as great as Wolfe.

There is nothing new in Wolfe's idea that language is a code. (We all know that, thank you for reminding, Tom.) As Wolfe himself admits, ancient Greeks knew that ("language is mnemonics").

Wolfe is dead wrong, however, when he asserts that language is a fully artificial creation of man (an "artefact"). All animals, including human beings, are born with some instinctive body language codes and intonational sound codes pre-wired in the brain, the same way as an ability to swim (but not to walk upright!) is pre-wired in a newborn infant (instinctive abilities can be unlearned or suppressed by the following conditioning, but that is another matter).

Animals' innate abilities are much more limited in the creative respect, but they are there: anyone who observed how one dog invites the other dog to play, knows that animals have their own language codes. Anyone who observed how parrots use memorized words and expressions, not randomly but according to circumstances, knows that animals can, to some limited extent, use artificial language codes quite ingenuously. Anyone who observed, how inventive and quick-witted (or mean, cunning, and planning ahead) are ravens and crows... I could make examples indefinitely.

What makes human beings different from other animals is not something fundamental or definitive, it's the level of complexity, more powerful ability of the human brain to invent and combine new codes. Wolfe is correct when he attacks Chomsky's nonsense (there is no specific "language organ" or "language device" produced by evolution, only the opportunity (means) for being programmed). What is produced by evolution is our brain, which is the all-purpose memorizing, comparing, abstracting, prognosticating and coding biocomputer. Linguistic ability is there, in the brain, waiting to be used, it has been produced by evolution during one or more than one of its "bottleneck" periods, while a specific language is an invention shaped by conditions while using this innate ability. That's why some the storeian Indians quickly learn Portuguese but never need its "Universal Grammar" syntactic structures in their everyday life... their own, much simpler language fits their environment well enough.

Thus, Wolfe's attack on Chomsky, and on the whole dishonest and back-stubbing milieu of the 20th-century linguistics, is fair and correct. His defense of Everett aganst the orthodox Chomskyites is fair and correct.

Wolfe's attack on Darwin's early attempts to explain the evolution of language and of other human codes produced by brain (using Wallace as an underdog as compared with the rich and "smooth" Darwin) — is unfair and incorrect.

Wallace came up with the right idea but Darwin came up with the same idea much earlier (by that time it wasn't a new idea, anyway, for some educated people it has been self-evident since 18th century). And Darwin worked hard all his life to put a truly scientific, factual foundation under it. The fact that Wallace, under different circumstances, may have published his article before Darwin published his "Origin of the Species," is neither here nor there, at least as far as scientific truth is concerned. The fact that Darwin inherited wealth, wheras Wallace was poor, is also largely irrelevant. Mendel's discovery of genetics was not something separate from the theory of evolution: it just provided a necessary explanation of one of the most important mechanisms of evolution. Repeatedly calling Darwin "Charlie" and making cynical remarks about his poor health is ungentlemanly on Wolfe's part, to say the least.

Wolfe is right when he puts Big Bang theory down on the same level as other creationist myths but he is wrong when he tries to treat the theory of evolution as part of the same pile of rubbish. It doesn't work. Nothing that stuffed shirts of Chomsky's pampered ilk ever lectured us about serves to discredit the theory of evolution, which is supported by innumerable and incontrovertible factual evidence. Chomsky and his minions shall be deservedly forgotten in a few years; Darwin will always stand, for he was the first to have audacity (and, yes, the opportunity) to explain, how the living world around us came about, including speech, a human clever development rooted in brain, which is in itself the product of evolution.

Strangely jejeune. Just as Tom Wolfe so enjoys bringing Chomsky down a notch, so do we gun for Tom Wolfe. If Chomsky is a bit full of himself, certainly no one ever described Mr. Wolfe as modest. He merrily bashes everyone else's theories of evolution and language, but in the end, what does he do? What is his grand finale to the piece? His OWN theory! Get this: "Bango! One bright night it dawned on me -- not as a profound revelation, not as any sort of analysis at all, but as something so perfectly obvious, I could hardly believe that no licensed savant had ever pointed it out before. There IS a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech." Speech, the ultimate "artifact" which enables man to "eat up half the population of the sea," etc.

What a coincidence! I too OFTEN wake up in the night having solved those very mysteries of life which are confusing all experts in the field. And here's mine on the subject: To discuss the nature of speech as a subject separate from a discussion of thought is irrelevant. Remember how it goes: first pure consciousness, second a thought, then the spoken word.

So no, speech isn't the ultimate "artifact" but it was used by the human brain to codify thought. Remember, not all human brains do use speech for this purpose. The autistic, for example, use images.

Smug self-satisfied navel gazing at its worst. I thought I would get some insights into language and linguistics. Instead I read page after page of vitriol and ridicule aimed chiefly at Charles Darwin, but also encompassing most of the British scientific establishment of the 19th century. I simply could not finish this book, although I labored through about 60% of it. I just got thoroughly sick and tired of the jibes at Darwin for his intestinal troubles (probably would be diagnosed as IBS today) and the obvious relish with which Wolfe let loose his barbs. And, of course, none of this had the least bearing on the subject of the book. Well, as far as I could tell, none of the book had any bearing to the title for that matter. I had the feeling that I was trapped in an after-dinner gathering during which the illustrious but slightly drunken host regaled his (trapped) guests with all the funniest lines he had used before and was so self-absorbed that he did not notice that no one was laughing.

Read this is a single sitting. Couldn't help pondering how much speech played into the creation of the universe. Learned some things about the origin of "Origin of the Species" and the issue of whether mankind is none-the-less special. Loved how Tom Wolf (The Right Stuff, Bonfilre of the Vanities, etc.) used language to amplify speech being a real differentiator. "Don't fall asleep -- there are snakes"

Tom Wolfe fails to explain his position on "why/how speech as shot us-Homo Sapiens-up the evolutionary food chain". He briefly gives his position at the end of the book in an argument that isn't really well defended (to say "speech is...and speech is....and speech is definitely..."doesn't hold well in the eyes of Linguists). To give background information, I hold a BA in Linguistics and am a Graduate student for a MS and PhD in Speech-Language Pathology with an emphasis on bilingual speakers with aphasia and traumatic brain injuries.
Wolfe explains the positions of Chomsky, Darwin, Rodrigues and Evins. But he fails, in my opinion, to explain the differences among speech and communication. He also lacks in bringing to light the current research that highlights how speech is not only subjected to the Human species (studies conducted in the early 2000s show that Dolphins, Whales, Elephants and other mammals do in fact have speech; think about it this way, if you're not a speaker of Chinese, you obviously won't be able to understand. But you do know that it is a language used to communicate).
I don't recommend this book mainly because the evidence is not necessarily weak, but because it can be a hell of a lot stronger. Wolfe should've included WAY MORE evidence on both sides of the arguments for language. Oh, and as for the Pirãha, I did Sociolinguistic study on them for my undergrad. There concept of time is circular, as for many parts of the world excluding the Western (we run on a linear time frame). That is why they have no "words" or "expressions" for past of future tense. Native Americans such as the Sioux, Navajo, Apache, and etc utilize the same "lack" of expressions. The Pirãha's non-usage of numbers only indicates one thing: there is no need for an abstract concept (numerical calculations in our heads ) to have a concrete basis (counting numbers on our fingers). Again, some Native Americans have the same thing (although not as extreme as having no numbers, some of these Native American languages have a limit on the amount of numbers they go up to).
Thank you & save your money.

There are Plant and Animal Kingdoms forming major components of evolution, but now Thomas Wolfe gives us the “Kingdom of Speech” which he claims has no ordinary evolutionary origin. The metaphorical extension of Kingdom to speech is rhetorically cute, but unjustified. Speech is not a category of biological life, but an artifact of one highly evolved bipedal ape. While most would agree that language behavior is what sets bipedal man apart from the other great apes, there is no reason to doubt that it was the evolution of the brain, the digital hand, the inner ear, the ability to produce and enjoy melodies, to rapidly send and receive information via the vocal-auditory channel, and the change from an arboreal to a terrestrial environment, all of which did not occur suddenly but developed over millions of years. As speech gradually evolved in hominids, it became a game changer. Finally, as the brain neocortex and connectivity expanded, Homo sapiens communicating and planning cooperatively became the fittest; man was able to do much more than survive as he systematically eliminated prey and predators and his closest hominid competitors with his strategies, wit, and weapons including sharp crafted spearheads.
Tom Wolfe attacks Darwin and particularly his Theory of Evolution for its inability to explain the origins of language while defending Alfred Wallace who abandoned the theory because it did not explain language. Wolfe omits any discussion of 19th century linguistics in which the comparative methods of science were developed and adopted by Darwin. Darwin may not have provided specific evidence for language evolution but he made some very relevant observations of birdsong and non-verbal communicative expressions in apes which are now active avenues of research with apes learning sign language, and the songs of lesser apes being compared to those of songbirds.
Tom Wolfe attacks Noam Chomsky and his innate hypothesis for its inability to explain how language evolved or even what language is, while championing a single challenger, a field linguist and former Chomskyite named Daniel Everett. Many former students of Chomsky (especially generative semanticists) became major critics of his transformational-generative theories of syntax.The contentious debates have been summarized in a book titled The Linguistic Wars by Randy Allen Harris. While it is true that the generative theory of syntax spawned an exclusive academic Kingdom, it is not true that it went unchallenged in publications by traditional empiricists following Leonard Bloomfield and other scientists who never abandoned the anthropological roots of linguistics. There are many serious omissions in Wolfe’s caricature of recent history in linguistics. It is not true that empirical linguists did not know what language is. Chas Hockett, the doyen of empiricism among linguists over many years developed about sixteen design features of language for comparing human language with animal communications. It was no mere check off list, but provided specific frameworks for investigating the most important components of a language system. Only if a communication system possessed very highly developed features in all categories, did it qualify as language. The single universal feature claimed in syntactic generative theory was recursiveness, which can be found present, at least incipiently, in the songs of whales, et al. Recursiveness (nesting or embedding) refers to the inclusion of any linguistic unit as part of another unit of the same general type. A major type of embedding in English grammar is subordination. However, words and sentences play a minor role in polysynthetic languages. As the design features of language make clear, language cannot be defined by an abstract theory of English syntax. Language is all about a communication system (based not on syntax, but on sound and meaning) which has an evolutionary history spanning 50 million years of primate evolution in the tropical canopy.
It is not true that linguistics became empirical only after WW II as Wolfe implies. It may be true that some young linguists were influenced by Chomsky’s anti-war speeches during the Vietnam War, but Wolfe’s focus is on character assassination and shows no appreciation for Chomsky’s considerable contributions to political science. The generative theory of syntax could be considered pseudo science, but Wolfe, himself, is only able to suggest mnemonics as a possible explanation for language, Mnemonics may have motivated the invention of writing, but not of speech. Wolfe cites only a few secondary sources such as Daniel Everett to denounce the modular innate bulwarks of syntactic theory: universal grammar, the language organ, and the language acquisition device (LAD). To cite Daniel Everett’s notion that language arose out of culture is like ignoring the question of which came first: the chicken or the egg. It is hard to imagine that we could have human culture without language. Wolfe does not mention the late 20th century advances in brain science utilizing fMRI, etc., especially the amazing discoveries of plasticity in brain structure and function. The only meaningful reference to a language organ turns out to be the whole brain.
The Kingdom of Speech is an easy and fun read, but cannot be recommended as an accurate portrayal of recent linguistic history. It conveys the hegemony of the dominant syntactocentric theory of language in an entertaining manner, but omits critical elements of empirical linguistics that will be necessary to restore the discipline to its historic base as a scientific field utilizing the comparative method within the humanities. Wolfe is a wordsmith but fails here as a science writer.

Good, entertaining, review of both Darwin's and Chomsky's not very successful attempts to explain speech. Got it, hasn't been well explained. He then seems to attempt to explain it himself by claiming it is mnemonic device. OK that's fine but then it actually gets easier to see how speech could have evolved from natural selection like that. Then we conclude with a declaration that speech is so important because it marks us as humans and it marks humans as a totally different type of animal from all other life on earth. Short, somewhat funny, but ultimately not powerful.

Wolfe, Tom. The Kingdom of Speech

Those who delight in irreverence and journalistic brashness should find in Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech much to entertain them. The book is a brisk tour through the major thinkers and writers on language, focussing specifically on Naom Chomsky and his theory of ‘universal grammar’ and ‘deep structure’ in language. Wolfe, author of the popular novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, wears his learning lightly as he takes the reader from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to Chomsky’s Theory of the inbuilt Language Acquisition Device that every child is supposedly born with. On the way he looks at Wallace, Swadesh, BF Skinner and dozens of other linguists, both academic and field. What Wolfe is mainly concerned with however in The Kingdom of Speech is dethroning the once and no-future king of linguistics, Naom Chomsky. He does this rather well.

Wolfe’s book is lively and amusing, which is not what one might expect from any studious account of the rise and fall of the study of linguistics, which has produced a mountain of turgid tracts now heaped with dust in the archives of the learned. Wolfe calls a spade a spade, and a fool a fool. Unfortunately, all too often Naom Chomsky is painted as a sublime theorist rather than one prepared to listen to field-workers like, Wolfe’s hero, Daniel Everett, a man who took his family with him to live in the swamps of the the store amongst the Pirahã, an indigenous tribe with minimal language.

There is an apocryphal review of some play that goes: "for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they'll like." And, if you're the sort of person who really liked "Radical Chic" you'll certainly enjoy this book, the tiresome voice of someone is so much smarter than anyone you'll ever meet, but it's his cross to bear that he has to deal with halfwits like Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky.
Part of my irritation is the casual tossed-off errors. Einstein, he tells us, measured the speed of time (he didn't.) In his world, radiocarbon dating is used for dating rocks and bones (it only works on organic matter, not rocks.) During WW2, he claims, radar was vital because it could be used to guide bombs dropping from bombers (it was used to detect airplanes.) The Inuit live at the North Pole. How many other factual errors (or deliberate inaccuracies) did I miss?
Most of the book is a long, drawn-out description of a simplified story of development of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, told mostly to emphasize how the upper class snobs wronged Wallace. Then, you get a long, long, section on what a pompous jerk Chomsky is, and how little Chomsky actually knows.
At every page, practically every paragraph, is Wolfe's patented eye-rolling at political correctness and anything else someone wants him to do. Oh, that's right, we're supposed to call "Eskimos" "Inuits" now. Very well...
The question the book purports to address is: how did language develop? Did it evolve, like brains or eyes, from "lower" animals? Or is it an artifact, like a tool? After all, animals don't make tools (well, some actually do, but that spoils Wolfe's narrative, so we'll ignore that.)
So, in the last few pages, we get his opinion: language is a mnemonic device, like "red in the morning, sailors take warning" or "I before E except after C." It's quite a strange assertion, and there is absolutely no development of the argument, except that I guess we're supposed to have been so dazzled by his display of intellect heretofore that we'll accept it without question. How attaching the word "bird" to a flying creature, or "water" to the stuff in a creek, or "run" is that thing you do when you're trying to escape danger, will help us remember what it is, escapes me, and he certainly doesn't have time to elucidate it. Most animals, after all, appear to remember what water is without resorting to a mnemonic crutch, what is it about humans that might have caused us to develop it?
Part of my irritation is that I recently finished re-reading "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher, a book that does a brilliant job of describing and explain how and why languages develop and change. Compared to Deutscher, Wolfe is that smirking kid in the back of the class who cracks jokes about the instructor's mannerisms or choice of words ("She said abreast! A breast! I wouldn't touch that breast with a ten-foot pole!")

Here is an entertaining book written by one of America's top stylists, but it comes with a demand that you are mature and confident enough in your opinions to consider something which you may not agree with. It seems to me that only the dullest people restrict their reading to things which confirm their set beliefs — Hey, yeah! Great! Dat's just what I think! Good fer me!

It pains me to state the obvious, that just because Tom Wolfe has no honorific before his name or initials after it, it doesn't automatically mean that his reporting on such abstruse topics as evolutionary biology and linguistics is worthless. Academics do not have a monopoly on the truth. Wolfe simply states the facts clearly and cogently. Is he always accurate? On page 5, he states, "Einstein discovered the speed of light . . ." Wrong! (Look it up.) But for the most part, his narrative is well documented, and much of it is common knowledge to educated readers. So much so that the first half of the book has some dull spots. That Alfred Russel Wallace conceived of evolution through natural selection at the same time as or prior to Charles Darwin is usually covered in a footnote (or sidebar) in textbooks used in states where science is taught, and it ranks with similar controversies such as who invented calculus — Issac Newton or Gottfried Liebnitz — as curiosities in the history of science. Wolfe spends far too much time on the topic (better he should write a book on how Thomas Edison's press agents gave him credit for inventing the incandescent light bulb), and he does so in an annoyingly sarcastic manner, as if to discredit Darwin and thus natural selection as a whole.

Wolfe is correct when he points out that attempts to explain the human acquisition of language through natural selection have all been failures. But this no more negates the basic theory than the fact that the universe is inexplicably accelerating in its expansion, means that we must abandon the Big Bang theory and return to the steady-state, eternal universe as made by God. It is a mistake to assume that Wolfe is trying to entirely disprove evolution, when he is actually just smugly calling attention to the fact that this theory, which he correctly points out that we all believe, those of us who are modern and educated, does have occasional lapses and failures, in which it can't quite account for the evidence. The topic of this book is the development of language, but Wolfe might just as well have used homosexuality as an example, because Darwinians are always in a pother to explain how it is that genes (and the latest evidence shows that sexual orientation is already determined in the womb) which make an individual less likely to procreate, have survived and spread. How can that be?

An indication that Wolfe doesn't understand evolution is found on page 164, where he maintains that, "Speech has ended evolution."
Noooo, it hasn't. Apparently Wolfe has never lived in a NYC apartment building where the cockroaches are not bothered by boric acid because they've acquired longer legs, and he has not heard of the new, antibiotic-resistant bacteria now threatening us. (Wouldn't it be ironic if Wolfe contracted such an infection? Not that I wish him any harm.) The only thing which would stop evolution is if change itself were to cease.

After hosing Darwin down, subject of the book's second half turns to Noam Chomsky, who at one time was the most respected and celebrated individual in public life. Especially in Europe, thousands would pack auditoriums to hear the great man speak. I believe it was Ayman al-Zawahiri who said that he hated all Jews, except for Noam Chomsky. But then, Professor Chomsky began offending his followers. He dismissed the people who claimed to be teaching apes to speak American Sign Language (or a gorilla version thereof) by saying that only humans had the power of language in any form. The women teaching the apes retaliated by naming a chimpanzee "Noam Chimpsky." Etymologists and ethologists believed (and I was taught this in school) that bees returning to their hive do a "waggle dance" to inform the other bees where food could be found, and various breeds of bees have "dialects" of this dance that foreign bees can eventually learn. Chomsky, though, seized on the work of a lone biologist, A. M. Wenner, who claimed that although humans could detect information from the dancing bees, other bees usually ignored the dance and went about their usual foraging through scent. Chomsky lost much of his support when he denounced Israel for its apartheid state and continual theft of land and water rights from Palestinians. Soon, public opinion began to turn against him (at least in the USA) and in March, 2003, the Noe Yawkeh, in a long profile of Chomsky, quoted one of his former evangelists, Paul Postal (now at N.Y.U.), as saying of Chomsky, "I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. He will lie for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense."

Years ago, I heard Noam Chomsky speak at a gathering of rioters in Windsor, Ontario, who were about to cause a disturbance at a meeting of the World Trade Organization. I knew nothing of his work in linguistics, but I was impressed by the courage of some of his political opinions, so I went to hear the great man speak. I sat listening to his dull monotone aghast at the fraudulence of his arguments, and I gained the impression that Noam Chomsky is a mean and humorless egotist. Now, I was thus eager to witness Tom Wolfe turn his seltzer bottle on him, so for me, this was the best part of the book.

But the evidence adduced by Wolfe is primarily from Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the the storeian Jungle, a book by Daniel L. Everett, who spent years among a tribe that speaks a simple language which defies and disproves the linguistic theories of Chomsky, whose theories Wolfe then dismisses as a "universal display of ignorance." [pg. 151] Everett's adventure is the high point of this book, so it occurs to me that rather than read about what scoundrels Darwin and Chomsky are, you might find it more interesting to skip Wolfe's book entirely and go straight to the source. ( Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes is what the Pirahã people say to each other when they retire for the evening.)

That's my advice, because as clever as Wolfe's banter and japes against the respected establishment figures are, this is a book about an imponderable. The topic of language is interesting, because nothing else comes as near to dominating our lives as does language. We have nonverbal thoughts ("Oogh!"), but we ignore them in favor of those with words. Words cause us insomnia and insecurity. We can't shut them off! They're a good servant but a bad master. But no one will ever know for certain just how language came to be, so pondering its origins is similar to speculating about what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, and when Wolfe finally unveils his own precious theory of the origin of language, there is no cheering. Wolfe seems especially pleased with it, but really, it's worth about as much as any of the various other theories. By that page, I found myself resisting the notion that language is what separates humans from all other life forms (are we separate from all other life?), and wondering if one could remain human without words.

Wolfe is wrong when he posits that, "Speech and only speech, enables man to use mathematics." [pg.164] Pythagoras taught mathematics not with words or even numeral representations, but with characteristic figures, as on the sides of dice. I was taught that when a king asked Pythagoras to explain his famous theorem, Pythagoras drew a complex series of linked geometric figures and simply said, "Behold!" So strong is the basis of mathematics in figures, not words, that we still say >I can figure it out< or >It figures<. It is also why numbers have squares and square roots.

Likewise, an admirable human, Temple Grandin, thinks in pictures, which would seem to be an improvement. Being even more contrary than Wolfe the contrarian, this book set me to think of how life might instead be improved somehow if we had no language and, with our big brains, found some other way of communicating (pheromones?). We might be much happier or as happy as the Pirahã are with their next-to-nothing language.

Even before I finished this book, I couldn't keep from thinking about another of my favorite authors, Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). I consider The Bonfire of the Vanities to be the greatest American novel of the twentieth century, but Arthur Koestler, originally a journalist, wrote one of the greatest European novels, Darkness at Noon, ranked number eight on the Modern Library's list of 100 greatest novels. After their outstanding achievements, each author's successive books declined in quality, each being significantly worse than the previous one. Arthur Koestler wrote my favorite book about science, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (from which I gleaned the information about Pythagoras and his figures), but later in life, Koestler disappointed everyone by writing controversial, almost anti-science books, including one which attacked Darwinism. He became the world's leading ankle-biter of the scientific establishment.

A similar thing seems to have happened with Tom Wolfe. Fundamentally, that's what this book is.