by JERRY A. COYNE
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Where did language come from? Not evolution, Tom Wolfe argues in his new book, which attempts to refute Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. PHOTO/Mark Seliger
Tom Wolfe is known for two things: his trademark prose, liberally studded with exclamation marks, italics and ellipses, and the way he wields it to demolish pompous, status-seeking, class-conscious Americans. Who can forget his skewering of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein in the essay “Radical Chic,” or his takedowns of modern art and architecture — and their critics — in “The Painted Word” and “From Bauhaus to Our House”?
But sometimes his style shrouds both a mean-spiritedness — for Wolfe has the talent to make anyone look bad — and a superficial take on his subject. “Painted Word” and “Bauhaus” for instance, were criticized for their ignorance of art. Sadly, his latest book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” suffers from the same mix of sarcasm and ignorance, this time in attacking the claim that human language is partly a product of biological evolution.
Here Wolfe’s victims are two renowned scholars, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, whom he considers the most vocal exponents of the “hardwired” school of language. But Wolfe’s argument ultimately backfires, for the book grossly distorts the theory of evolution, the claims of linguistics and the controversies about their connection. Finally, after misleading the reader for nearly 200 pages, Wolfe proposes his own theory of how language began — a theory far less plausible than the ones he mocks.
Using the surgical kit of New Journalism, Wolfe flays Darwin and Chomsky as imperious, self-aggrandizing snobs, each humiliated by a lower-class “clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers.” In Darwin’s case it was the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who not only hit on the idea of natural selection at roughly the same time as Darwin, but then argued that it couldn’t explain important aspects of humanity. Hunter-gatherers, Wallace said, have brains far bigger than required to support their lifestyle. Why would they need the neural equipment to play chess, do higher mathematics or express complex, abstract ideas? But with the right environment and training, they can do those things. It appears, Wallace said, that somehow our brains got much bigger than evolutionarily necessary. Since selection can’t give you traits useful only in the future, Wallace saw our overachieving brains — and their ability to produce and comprehend language — as impossible products of evolution and probably vouchsafed by a higher power.
Wolfe agrees that our big cranial payload is a fatal flaw in evolutionary theory, though he’s too savvy to invoke divine intervention — perhaps remembering that Wallace’s spiritualism led him right off the deep end, as he spent the rest of career trying to communicate with the souls of the dead. But his and Wallace’s logic is off base. Hunter-gatherers certainly put their big brains to good use: They were sophisticated naturalists, toolmakers, huntsmen and politicians, not least because they could pool their knowledge and coordinate their actions through language.
And it’s not as if modern Westerners are born with the ability to produce the Principia Mathematica, airplanes and skyscrapers — these cultural inventions depend on millennia of accumulated discoveries, and no single brain could produce them from scratch. Just as a computer programming language, even if originally designed to help solve one kind of problem, can support an unlimited number of other programs, so the brain may have been selected with a cognitive tool kit that can be applied to endless new challenges.
By agreeing with Wallace, Wolfe joins those creationists who, if they can’t personally and immediately see how evolution could produce something complex, declare that the problem is insoluble and that an entire scientific edifice has crumbled.
But in fact Wolfe doesn’t even understand the theory he so despises. Evolution, he argues, isn’t a “scientific hypothesis” because nobody’s seen it happen, there’s no observation that could falsify it, it yields no predictions and it doesn’t “illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science.” Wrong — four times over. We’ve seen evolution via real-time observations and ordered series of fossils; evolution could be falsified by finding fossils out of place, such as that of a rabbit in 400 million-year-old sediments; and evolution certainly makes predictions (Darwin predicted, correctly, that human ancestors evolved in Africa). As for evolution’s supposed failure to solve biological puzzles, Wolfe might revisit Darwin’s description of how evolution not only unlocks enigmas about embryology and vestigial organs, but clarifies some perplexing geographic ranges of animals and plants. Or he could rouse himself to read recent biology journals, which describe multitudes of evolutionary riddles being solved.
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