Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Little, Brown and Company (2016), 192 pages
Description
Science. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML: First there was the word. Or was there? Before Tom Wolfe was a bestselling novelist, he was a groundbreaking journalist. Now the maestro storyteller turns his attention to the mystery behind the creation of hiw own most important tool. In The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe makes the captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech�??not evolution�??is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the self-taught Englishman who beat Charles Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it for its inability to explain human speech, to the neo-Darwinists, who for years argued that there is a language "organ" in the human brain, Wolfe explains how science has repeatedly tried and failed to account for man's gift of gab. Flash forward to the present day and the controversial work of another outsider, anthropologist Daniel Everett. After thirty years of studying a tribe isolated deep in the jungles of the Amazon, Everett revealed a people whose prehistoric level of speech had led to a society without religion, ceremonies, hierarchies, marriage, or ornaments, and without the ability to plan ahead or to consider a past beyond personal lifetimes, thus defying the current wisdom that language is hardwired in humans. With trenchant wit and uproarious humor, Wolfe cracks open the secretive, solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zigzags of Darwinism, both old and neo-, and he shows the endless importance of the courageous outsider in overturning our most cherished ideas about ourselves. Provocative and fast-paced, this is a tour de force from Wolfe… (more)
Media reviews
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
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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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But every part of this story is wrong. Chomsky’s views were influential but hardly, as Wolfe maintains, a universal paradigm — perhaps not even the majority view. And Everett didn’t slay universal grammar: Later linguists found that the Pirahã language indeed had recursion (e.g., “I want the same hammock you just showed me”). Finally, the technical notion of “recursion” was never the totality of Chomsky’s theory anyway. He highlighted the idea in a brief paper in 2003, but his theory always consisted of operations for merging words into bigger and bigger phrases, something no one disputes.
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All this grammatical structure, genetic data and uniquely human behavior implies something Wolfe cannot abide: that our language is — horrors! — the result of . . . evolution! But why would evolution do that? If the good Mr. Wolfe thought about it for a minute, maybe he’d see some advantage in our group-living, problem-solving ancestors producing and comprehending language — and realize that any mutually intelligible language needs, well, rules and conventions! And those who most effortlessly understand and follow such conventions — might they not have a reproductive advantage? And wouldn’t that produce genetic change? But of course he can’t bear to think about that . . . for it leads him back to bearded old Darwin.
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Somewhere on his mission to tear down the famous, elevate the neglected outsider and hit the exclamation-point key as often as possible, Wolfe has forgotten how to think. Show Less
In an increasingly batty finale, Wolfe explains that Darwin and Chomsky screwed up by trying to apply evolutionary theory to language, which, as a man-made artefact, exists outside biological constraints. And it is language alone, Wolfe concludes, that accounts for humankind’s progress and
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fundamental difference from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Well, where to start? Take Wolfe’s great revelation about the uniqueness and importance of language: that has long been a basic given. And the new post-Chomsky consensus follows the proposals of Terrence Deacon nearly 20 years ago that human language did indeed evolve, over several million years, beginning with the proto-languages of our ancestor hominids. Deacon also proposes that languages themselves are subject to intense evolutionary pressure; either they are learned by children or not, and if they aren’t, they die. So languages have evolved to be learnable by toddlers. Language isn’t Darwin’s nemesis as Wolfe thinks — it provides triumphant vindication of evolutionary theory’s almost-universal application.
If Wolfe’s argument is all over the shop, his style also comes unstuck. All attempts to enliven what is basically a history of ideas with wordplay, daft ellipses and repetition of key words in this context seem rather lazy and silly and embarrassing, like a vicar getting down with the kids at the youth club by dancing the twist. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member Widsith
Not having read any Tom Wolfe before, I was riveted by the prose style of this book, with its ellipses, colloquial asides, and multiple exclamation marks. I am sure it is possible to write a great book with this technique and perhaps Tom Wolfe has already done it, but this one is unfortunately a
I say ‘unfortunately’ because as a matter of fact I agree with his basic position. What Wolfe is trying to do is summarise the internecine fighting of the linguistics world that followed Daniel Everett's work on the Pirahã language, which attacked Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar. I've written lots about all this in my review of Everett's Language: The Cultural Tool; suffice to say here that UG had become more of an ideology than an academic theory, an aggressively enforced orthodoxy that had never produced any very interesting results, or been proved even slightly to reflect physiological or neurological reality.
Wolfe sees this as a David v. Goliath story, plucky little Dan Everett taking on the mean old dictator Chomsky, and in his telling the characters, and the arguments, are so simplified as to become cartoons. Furthermore, the first half of the book for some reason is about Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, a diversion that is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading; the main effect on me was of exhausting my patience with Wolfe's cavalier approach to historical incident (‘Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie…said Lyell’).
When we finally get on to the main event, Wolfe simply lifts anecdotes wholesale from Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes and retells them. It's impossible not to feel that you'd rather just be reading Everett first-hand. More dangerously, Wolfe gives the impression that the debate over language origins has now been solved, by Everett, which is very far from the case. Everett's main contribution was to puncture the Chomskyan hegemony; his own explanation, that language didn't evolve but rather was invented, like a bow and arrow, is interesting but a hell of a long way from conclusive.
That matters, because we already get too many writers making assumptions about where language came from, and when it developed, and what it was for, whereas the truth is that no one has the slightest idea – nothing about that has changed, and nor does it seem likely to, not that you'd know it from Wolfe's strange and breathless polemic.
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complete mess.I say ‘unfortunately’ because as a matter of fact I agree with his basic position. What Wolfe is trying to do is summarise the internecine fighting of the linguistics world that followed Daniel Everett's work on the Pirahã language, which attacked Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar. I've written lots about all this in my review of Everett's Language: The Cultural Tool; suffice to say here that UG had become more of an ideology than an academic theory, an aggressively enforced orthodoxy that had never produced any very interesting results, or been proved even slightly to reflect physiological or neurological reality.
Wolfe sees this as a David v. Goliath story, plucky little Dan Everett taking on the mean old dictator Chomsky, and in his telling the characters, and the arguments, are so simplified as to become cartoons. Furthermore, the first half of the book for some reason is about Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, a diversion that is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading; the main effect on me was of exhausting my patience with Wolfe's cavalier approach to historical incident (‘Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie…said Lyell’).
When we finally get on to the main event, Wolfe simply lifts anecdotes wholesale from Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes and retells them. It's impossible not to feel that you'd rather just be reading Everett first-hand. More dangerously, Wolfe gives the impression that the debate over language origins has now been solved, by Everett, which is very far from the case. Everett's main contribution was to puncture the Chomskyan hegemony; his own explanation, that language didn't evolve but rather was invented, like a bow and arrow, is interesting but a hell of a long way from conclusive.
That matters, because we already get too many writers making assumptions about where language came from, and when it developed, and what it was for, whereas the truth is that no one has the slightest idea – nothing about that has changed, and nor does it seem likely to, not that you'd know it from Wolfe's strange and breathless polemic.
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LibraryThing member charlie68
Mr. Wolfe does an excellent literary takedown of Charles Darwin and uses the second part of the book to take down Noam Chomsky. Arguments are entertainingly expressed and well documented.
LibraryThing member JosephKing6602
The book raised one's awareness of the problem of evolution; but it was a bit too light! The book conclusion needed to be explained with more depth. I was a bit disappointed . I liked wolfe's other books much more.
LibraryThing member adrianburke
Written with panache but probably rather biased against the big hitters in favour of the lone voice which rather undercuts his case. But the last chapter is a brilliant hymn of praise to language.
LibraryThing member ritaer
Wolfe becomes interested in origin of speech in humans, traces theories from Darwin to recent times including rise and decline of Noam Chomsky's belief in evolved grammar organ. Comes down on side of Everett's idea of speech as an artifact rather than evolved ability.
LibraryThing member adaorhell
A majority of this book is published in Harpers Magazine (this book tops out at about 150 pages). As someone who studied linguistics, specifically Chomskian linguistics, it was, surprising, jolting. Chomsky is in his 90s now if he's a day, and the desperation in which he spoke with Tom Wolfe about
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the pushback against his work, his life's work, is agonizing, as someone who sparked my love affair with language and with how we have created this monster that drives the world, his frailty frightens me, his cold dismissal that once excited me when leveled against political foes, now is aimed at everyone, is heartbreaking. I haven't studied linguistics in years. I'm thinking I'm going to have to start reading linguisitcs texts again because this book actually caused me physical pain. What do they say? Kill your darlings, kill your idols. Chomsky, no matter happens to his law of recursion, his universal grammar, is already in the patheon of immortals. 2016 has already cost me a lot in public figure deaths, and I'm not saying Chomsky is going to be one of them. But I'm watching him more intensly now than I have in many years. I don't even like fucking Tom Wolfe. But I'm calling this essential reading for anyone who cares about language and how language and speech got here, despite Wolfe's bizarrly smarmy, overly intellectual spewage, which I have no idea if Chomsky and Wolfe hate each other, but there is something really unduly vicious about the way he talks about Chomsky. Maybe not. Maybe it's time that someone took a sword to Chomsky and his words. We'll see. Read The Kingdom of Speech and think on your words carefully. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
192 p.; 5.75 inches
ISBN
0316404624 / 9780316404624