The Kingdom of Speech Paperback – December 5, 2017

Tom Wolfe has always been able to spin out a yarn. Wolfe uses conflict and characterizing some as good guys and others as bad guys to create a narrative structure that tells a story. In this case, two stories tied together by a deeper problem. What is humanity? The book starts with the publication of the papers at the Royal Society by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. These were presented simultaneously, but it turns out that Wallace had sent his paper for Darwin's review and Darwin responded by creating an abstract of his own work so as not to be left in the dustbin of history. Wolf uses this story to discuss the tactics of Thomas Henry Huxley who was instrumental in advancing Darwin's views and priority over Wallace and using the whole as cudgel against Creationism and the Church. However, Wolfe smashes into the problems of Darwin's thesis that became apparent in that day and waited for Genetics to give these ideas a second wind. But, Wolfe examines this interchange in the frame of the next step, is man a truly descendent of the apes? The problem being that human behavior is wildly different than any other animal. This difference seems to be because of the presence of language. And, language has emerged within an eye-blink of "evolutionary time." Then, Wolfe brings forward a similar story of Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett in the pursuit of what is the nature of Human Speech. More intellectual conflict over the proposed existence of Universal Language is discussed, but in the end, Wolfe proposes that speech is an artifact, a creation of humanity that transcends evolutionary forces.The book is incredibly well researched. But, it deals with living people and wades into the most contentious debates of our time, so the reviews contain much bomb throwing and strident language motivated by a number of sources from political to professional to simply irrational. The Kingdom of Speech is not a journal paper but a mass market book intended to open these questions for the general public's enlightenment. Both Huxley's in his day and now Chomsky's forces use tactics of smear, threat and professional ruin to exclude any contrary opinions and thereby create a consensus of fear rather than allow the chips to fall as they may. But, Wolfe also over simplifies for dramatic effect and this has to be accepted in this type of book.What struck me most about this book is that the conflict that Wolfe characterizes between these two sets of men is more about personality than good vs. bad. Wolfe's baddies are INTP personalities. His knights are INTJ. It is a dispute between theorists and experimentalists. Darwin's work long preceded Wallace's but Darwin was pursuing perfection which is often an INTP issue, and only the presence of Wallace's paper kicked him into gear. Wallace as characterized by Wolfe was a fly catcher. He went to remote regions and documented what he found. Wolfe doesn't provide the background for folks to understand the terms "natural selection." Artificial selection is called Breeding. Wolfe correctly points out that "selection" is not a mechanism for generating new species. Artificial selection has odds in its favor because of being able to control place and time, but even with these advantages, breeding cannot propagate a new viable species based on sexual reproduction. Natural selection depends on populations reproducing in isolation and slowly drifting apart so much that they cannot interbreed with the prior separated population. Fruit fly experiments simulating millions of years of evolution have not so far managed to produce populations dissimilar enough not to create viable offspring. Something else is happening. Genetic sequencing shows evidence and ultimately this question will probably be solved in time by these methods. But, that isn't the point. The point is that both Darwin's "Origin of the Species" and Noam Chompsky's "Universal Language facility" were theoretical speculations that have become objects of faith rather than science. Neuroscience and computational science will very likely ultimately answer the questions of the nature of speech as explored by Ray Kurzweil, but the nature of the people who investigate will always be with us. INTP theorists see into patterns and speculate what "could" explain the reality as they understand it. Intuition spans the gaps of observation with rules. Even simple rules like F=ma require intuitive leaps to get beyond experimental variation and other factors such as friction. INTJ experimentalists attempt to discern if the meaning of what they see or can construct. This method can fail to see the forrest for the trees, but at least it does see the trees. Both use theory and intuition to make meaning, but often this meaning can seem oppositional. INTJ's are often better communicators and are more interested in providing hard examples that others can see, touch and accept. But, Wolfe more than anything is warning against the errors of Politics and Pseudo-Religious thought holding itself out as science. Science itself evolves out of conflict and competition, but mostly it is judged by the same criteria as true prophets, does the predictions it makes work? This is why Quantum Mechanics based solutions are used when scientists can't at all understand really important things beyond the mathematical models which make accurate predictions. Einstein just hated Bohr's pragmatism on this but Bohr was found to be right in the end, but that took almost 50 years. Science takes time. However, Einstein and Bohr never resorted to politics and threats to assert their views. Physics advanced much faster for this choice.

The author, Tom Wolfe, is already accepted as one of the great writers of the last part of the 20th and first part of the 21st Century because of classic works like "The Right Stuff" and "Bonfire of the Vanities", etc. But he's still writing and as sharp as ever in this short (169 pages) exposition on Evolution, Charles Darwin, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Everett, social Darwinism and the origin of speech.For readers unfamiliar with Wolfe, he's old-school paleo-conservative and loves to tweak (well, more like loves to punch in the nose) the noses of liberals and does so with erudition and wit. It seems that Wolfe worked backwards from linguistic theories rejecting liberal icon Chomsky's opus claiming that speech (and every other human convention) is a product of evolutionary genetics. Connecting the dots, the first part of the book notes that Charles Darwin piggy-backed his ideas of natural selection on to the originator of natural selection as the modus operandi of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace. Many others have noted with increasing frequency that Darwin was rather underhanded in getting credit for evolution when he really came in second. Books like David Quammen's "Song of the Dodo",  The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction , and multiple others have come to much the same conclusion. But there are a large number of Biologists and Evolution boosters (Evolution with a capital "E" because this is a religion to them) who have turned Darwin into a demi--God for liberals - for a variety of reasons mostly rejecting Religion.And so Wolfe shoots down Darwin and his enthusiasts as only Wolfe can. Wolfe actually quotes Darwin's works. And lots of these works like "On the Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" are full of half-crazy Victorian suppositions. Wolfe calls them "Just So Stories" (after Kipling's stories like "How the Leopard Got His Spots") and this part of the book is laugh-out-loud funny as Darwin muses that his dog must see him as God just like humans look up to a Deity. Then there is Darwin spending time looking closely at the face of a dressed-up orangutan in various moods. God only knows what that was supposed to have shown. And then Darwin claims speech came from horny male birds. (Yes, that's direct from the demi-God's book in so many words.) And then we get the further extension of evolution that human behavior, institutions, beliefs, and, well everything are simply the genetically derived products of evolution - an idea called Social Darwinism. And Wolfe rightly attacks this idea with a vengeance.The next dot that Wolfe connects is linguist's Noam Chomsky's contention that speech is a result of an evolutionary "language organ" that no one has ever seen or identified. Then along comes a researcher, Daniel Everett, who fires the first shot in a backlash that has become general. Turns out that speech is probably a tool, invented by humans just like a club and a hammer, to better exist in the world and that speech has no evolutionary basis whatsoever.I think Wolfe was really just having a ball insulting Darwin, his worshipers, and Chomsky, who is better known for his political screeds than his science these days. All in all, I found this to be greatly entertaining and I even read multiple sources cited by Wolfe.This is NOT a scientific rebuttal and quite incomplete, but I still found it informative in addition to the high comedy of Wolfe making fun of liberal icons Darwin and Chomsky. Being the recipient of advanced degrees in Biology myself, I was indoctrinated with Darwin worship and the general liberalism in the American University system and found much of it ridiculous, so I had already come to Wolfe's world view.The book is choppy and incomplete so I wouldn't rate it a 5 star work. And if you're a) liberal, b)Evolutionist (with a capital "E" and not just a run-of-the-mill biologist like most of us who use the principles of evolution and natural selection to explain all kinds of things but not speech and much of human behavior) c) a lover of Noam Chomsky and liberal screeds, you probably won't like this book. 4 stars and an easy read.

godibilissimo, acuto e profondo

I, who am usually quite critical, must admit I found this book absolutely enjoyable from the beginning to somewhere near the end at the point when Tom Wolfe offers hints of his own theory of language. If like me you tire of reading academic prose that disguises its emotions & intentions and pretends to be nothing but objective, this little scholarly opinion piece should delight you, as well. It is an outright polemic against both the extremes of Darwinian evolution (which cannot account for the emergence of fully human language) and Chomsky's contorted theories of innate computational language mutation in the brain (which also cannot come close to explaining the origin of language). In clear and succinct – and often dagger-tipped – prose, he defends the idea that language is a cultural artifact, that is, it was culturally invented by human minds and passed down over generations (until, presumably, brains adapted to it and began to anticipate its arrival in humans).In this, he calls upon several difficult-to-deny sources, but especially upon the recent work of anthropologist-linguist Daniel Everett, who discovered a tribe in the Peruvian Amazon basic so very archaic (i.e., primitive) that they had few tools or weapons and whose language exists only in the present tense – with *no recursion* (which Chomsky had stated is essential & innate in *all* human languages). They could not refer to the past or to the future, and this one case proved Chomsky's innateness theory false. Of course, Chomsky soon adapted his theory once again by claiming the tribe were simply undeveloped computers and that "language is computation not communication". It's a real eye-opener to see how Chomsky and his minions closed forces and went on on prolonged & vicious personal attacks against Everett (who has been defended against the Chomskyites by academic paragons like Tomasello (2009), Rochat (2009), and Evans & Levinson (2009)).Thankfully few independent intellectuals have listened to the desperate Chomsky crowd's counterattacks, and this should mean that Chomsky's dictatorial dominance over cultural construction in linguistics should now be ended at last. However, he has a pack of devoted followers as extreme as any cult, so they haven't given up yet. I am with Wolfe and Everett in everything they say though neither seems to understand the idea of a "symbolic threshold", that is, that single words or phrases or symbols in language have meaning only within the invisible background of a meaningful language (symbolic system) itself. Meaning is derived by differentiation, not by representing objects or processes in the external environment. (See the continental holistic linguistic philosophy of Saussure (1959) or Taylor (2016), for this.)Human language, then, must have begun within the last 100 thousand years with late H. sapiens. Before that was "protolanguage" with only nominative pointers. I also admit I was unconvinced by Wolfe's own briefly summarized theory toward the end that all human languages were created & spread as a result of the human propensity of mnemonic memory, but it was so underdeveloped as not to be taken seriously.Still, this is a short, sharply-written, well-informed and most enjoyable diatribe, and it is very hard to resist the late Tom Wolfe's major points. A paradigm shift in linguistics has taken place, and Chomsky's mechanistic rule will soon be over.Citations:Nicholas Evans & Stephen C. Levinson, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science.” *Behavioural and Brain Sciences* 32 (5), Oct 2009, 449-492.Daniel L. Everett, *Language: The Cultural Tool*. Vintage Books, 2012.Daniel L. Everett, *How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention*, Liveright-Norton, 2017.Philippe Rochat, *Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness*. Cambridge University Press, 2009.Charles Taylor, *The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity*. Harvard University Press, 2016.Ferdinand de Saussure, *Course in General Linguistics*. New York Philosophical Library, 1959. Original in French 1916.Michael Tomasello, “Universal Grammar is Dead.” *Behavioural and Brain Sciences* 32 (5), Oct 2009, 470-471.

Outstanding. Enjoyed this enormously, especially the intelligent polemics. Slaughters holy scientific cows left, right and center. The style sticks to the middle ground between journalism and the best, most entertaining fiction. Superficially, this book is about linguistics but not really. It is written at breathtaking speed, motivated by the power of language, with some great protagonists and antagonists, showing that science is also, but not only, a social affair. I used it as additional ammunition for a talk about natural language processing (NLP), which is a machine learning (= AI) application. It helped me understand how little understood language is so that I could more properly assess the potential of NLP.

Magnífico libro escrito con ironía y pasión en defensa de la dignidad del lenguaje y del hombre. Se lee rápido.

Brilliant book about speech from Darwin to Chomsky to Everett. Darwin had to explain how speech had come about through his theory of evolution and Chomsky tried and failed to have one grand theory to explain it. Tom Wolfe ends with a simpler explanation of this ability of humans to use words. Written in an engaging style.