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"In Tom Wolfe's 'Kingdom,' Speech Is The One Weird Trick", NPR Weekend Edition Saturday 8/27/2016:

One of America's most distinguished men of letters says he believes that speech, not evolution, has made human beings into the creative, imaginative, deliberate, destructive, and complicated beings who invented the slingshot and the moon shot, and wrote the words of the Bible, Don Quixote, Good Night Moon, the backs of cereal boxes, and Fifty and Shades of Grey [sic].

The Kingdom of Speech is Tom Wolfe's first non-fiction book in 16 years. Wolfe tells NPR's Scott Simon that speech is "the attribute of attributes," because it's so unrelated to most other things about animals. "We've all been taught that we evolved from animals, and here is something that is totally absent from animal life," he says.

There seem to be several different ideas all mixed up together here.

One is the notion that "speech is special": not just a modest re-purposing of anatomical structures, physiological capacities, and behavioral dispositions that we share with other animals, but rather a qualitatively different sort of thing. This is not exactly a new idea, to say the least, though it remains controversial, in large part because it's far from clear how to interpret it.

And then there's a (different) claim, that whatever is special about speech and language is such a large change from the pre-human situation that theories of evolution have nothing interesting to say about it — and maybe can't have anything to say about it even in principle. This is also not a new idea, and remains even more controversial, again in large part because the answer is so dependent on questions of definition. And there's very little in the way of relevant data about certain aspects of the question: there's evidence to support a plausible story about the evolution of the vocal tract, and perhaps also about the evolution of some relevant parts of acoustic perception, but there's little that bears on the evolution of "theory of mind", and nothing at all that bears directly on the development of phonology, syntax, and semantics.

Meanwhile, lurking in the background are all sorts of issues about nature vs. nurture and culture vs. genetics and variation vs. universality and so on.

I still haven't read Wolfe's new book, but what I've gleaned from reading about it suggests that the NPR headline writer's sly joke — "one weird trick" — nails it: The Kingdom of Speech is linguistic clickbait. So, good for Wolfe: we can only hope that this is early evidence for the emerging trend I've been predicting since 2005, even if the evidence turns out to be links in "Around the Web" sections rather than headlines in supermarket tabloids …

Since I'm in the process of preparing my lecture notes for the fall's edition of LING001, I'll point you to the page for "A Biological Perspective", which takes up some of the same issues. This page hasn't changed in relevant ways since I first put the course together almost 20 years ago, and the ideas in it were not new then. For a shorter version, here are the slides for the associated lecture.

And a few relevant LLOG posts:

"Signs or symbols? Words or tools?", 6/15/2004

"Chomsky testifies in Kansas", 5/6/2005

"A new idea about the evolution of language", 6/11/2005

"The elephant fights back", 7/2/2005

"JP versus FHC+CHF versus PJ versus HCF", 8/25/2005

"Finch phrase structure", 10/1/2007

"Ask Language Log: Sounds and meanings", 3/9/2008

"Creole birdsong?", 5/9/2008

"Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited", 2/12/2009

"Bickerton on Fitch", 2/15/2009

""Silence on the Savannah!" On Bickerton's Yodeling Australopithecines and Missing the Point of Musical Protolanguage", 2/20/2009

"The hunt for the Hat Gene", 11/15/2009

"Gene/Culture co-evolution", 6/13/2013

"Ideas and actions", 6/22/2014

"Modeling repetitive behavior", 5/15/2015

"Commentary on the 'The Mystery of Language Evolution", 11/3/2015

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