What separates us from the other animals? The list of proposed answers is as long as your arm: rationality; cooking; religion; pointless games; making stuff; and so forth. But one popular answer has always been our power of language. The exact process by which we acquired it is mysterious. So here is Tom Wolfe to tell us why everyone to date has got it wrong.

The book tells the story of two little guys up against two establishment bullies. The hard-grafting Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently co-discovered the principle of evolution by natural selection, didn’t stand a chance against Charles Darwin, who enjoyed “the eternally Daddy-paid-for life of a British Gentleman”. Darwin imagined his theory could explain everything, but Wallace eventually decided that it couldn’t explain language, which must after all have been God-given.

A century later comes Noam Chomsky, revolutionising linguistics by suggesting that humans have an innate (therefore evolved) capacity to acquire languages: a built-in “deep grammar” or “universal grammar” or “language acquisition device” which explains, for example, how toddlers can easily construct novel well-formed sentences. (See also Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct.) “Nothing about Chomsky’s charisma was elegant,” Wolfe complains, perhaps wishing the object of his abuse had worn a white suit, and yet, he says, Chomsky ruthlessly dominated the field. Until, that is, a plucky, outdoorsy underdog called Daniel Everett spent some time with an Amazon tribe called the Pirahã and reported that their language lacks a certain feature (recursion, or nesting of ideas) that Chomsky had suggested might be universal, and so proved Chomsky wrong. The smoke cleared and the origin of language remained as elusive as ever.

Wolfe tells these stories with the kind of free-wheeling vim familiar from his brilliant books such as The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Particularly in the way he ventriloquises the thoughts and worries of his protagonists, the book is superbly written, when it doesn’t tip over into a kind of self-parodic babble. (Darwin, we are assured, “was also a slick operator … smooth … smooth … smooth and then some”.) The only problem with Wolfe’s tales, really, is that they are irresponsibly partial accounts, riddled with elementary falsehoods.

Wolfe insists, for example, that Darwin had no “evidence” for his theory of evolution by natural selection; in fact, as is well known, he adduced a lot of evidence at the time, including the geographical distribution of species, comparative anatomy, fossils and the existence of vestigial organs. Today, of course, evolution is observed in real time in the laboratory, among microbes or insects, a fact that Wolfe either doesn’t know or is mysteriously careful not to mention. Meanwhile, the argument between Chomsky and Everett is much more controversial than he allows. (Others point out that even if the Pirahã have no recursion in their language, which some deny, they are easily able to learn Portuguese, which does have it.) And in any case, some version, at least, of the idea of a “language centre” in the brain is now uncontroversial – not in the sense of a uniquely dedicated physical sub-organ, because that is not how the brain works, but certainly in the form of specialised neuronal “circuits” that are predictably active during language processing.

Wolfe tells his stories with the kind of free-wheeling vim familiar from The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Kingdom of Speech, then, is a sad example of the interface of literary celebrity with publishing. An author less famous and bankable than Wolfe would surely have been saved from such embarrassment by more critical editorial attention. Even a cursory fact‑check could still have prevented howlers such as the statement that “Einstein discovered the speed of light” (no he didn’t). Wolfe has insisted that he is an atheist rather than a creationist (though this book has of course been welcomed with open arms by the creationist American “intelligent design” movement), and we may as well take him at his word. He is not making a crypto-religious argument; he just hasn’t researched his subject properly.

Never mind facts. The USP of this book, finally, is that Wolfe himself, just by thinking about it a bit, has single-handedly solved the problem that “has left endless generations of academics, certified geniuses, utterly baffled”. He alone knows how language arose. Darwin’s own guesses – the imitation of animal sounds, for example – were, Wolfe scornfully writes, just that: guesses, or “Just So stories”. But Wolfe has the one true answer. What is it? Er, that humans invented language as a mnemonic device, to help remember things. (He doesn’t explain this very clearly, but I think I was supposed to imagine a caveman trying to remember to bring another rock indoors and grunting “Rock!” as an aide-memoire.) This, of course, is no better a Just So story than any of Darwin’s. As it happens, though Wolfe doesn’t mention it, the ancient Epicureans already thought much the same thing, considering that animals “labelled” parts of the world with particular honks and squawks, and humans just developed the habit further.

But now we know what the Epicureans didn’t and Wolfe still apparently doesn’t: that the brain is an evolved organ, or that the human larynx evolved into a shape very different from the larynxes of our closest primate cousins, enabling us to make speech-noises they can’t. We still don’t know precisely how it happened and may never do, but it is obvious to everyone that speech must have evolved – to everyone, that is, except those who are congenitally suspicious of scientific authority, and perhaps especially those professional super-users of language who feel forlorn at the prospect of their life-defining power being demystified by geeks.

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