The Kingdom of Speech

by Tom Wolfe

  Thirty-one years later, in 1902, another British writer published another tour de force of literary imagination concerning the origins of animals and man. The writer was Rudyard Kipling, and the book was called Just So Stories. A typical story was “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” It seems Leopard lived in the barren, dirt-tan, sandy-colored upper reaches of a mountain overlooking the jungle. Leopard’s hide was the same color as the terrain, a sandy tan with no markings. Smaller animals didn’t even see him until he leaped out of the background and had them for lunch. Leopard’s hunting pal was an Ethiopian, a man with light yellowish-brown skin. He used a bow and arrow to turn passersby into mouthfuls…until bad luck drove him and Leopard down into the darkness of the jungle below. Down there sandy-tan Leopard suddenly stood out like a nice bright mouthwatering meal himself…for any pair of incisors that happened by. The Ethiopian wasn’t too happy about hanging around with him anymore. To save his own too-light hide, the Ethiopian found some blacking and turned himself black from head to toe. That way he could disappear into the shadows. He had a lot of the black gunk left on his fingers, and so he had a go at Leopard’s hide, too, leaving fingerprints all over it. With all the black fingerprints, Leopard looked like nothing more than a pile of rocks on the ground in the jungle’s dark green gloom. And that was how the leopard got his spots.60

  Kipling’s intention from the outset was to entertain children. Darwin’s intention, on the other hand, was dead serious and absolutely sincere in the name of science and his cosmogony. Neither had any evidence to back up his tale. Kipling, of course, never pretended to. But Darwin did. The first person to refer to Darwin’s tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61 Orthodox neo-Darwinists never forgave him. Gould was not a heretic and not even an apostate. He was a simple profane sinner. He had called attention to the fact that Darwin’s Just So Stories required a feat of fiction writing Kipling couldn’t compete with. Darwin’s storytelling power soared in The Descent of Man precisely where it had to, i.e., in accounting for this perplexing business of language.

  Language, said Darwin, originated with the songs birds sang during the mating season. Man began imitating the birds, a cappella. By and by he started repeating certain birdsong sounds so often they began to stand for certain things in nature. They became words in embryo, and man began creating a “musical protolanguage.”62 But mating songs are sung by male birds only. What about human females? No problem. The females started mimicking the males, although in a higher register, and the protolanguage became far more pleasing. In no time the females were talking circles around the males. Female protolanguage, said Darwin, persists to this day…in the form of mothers cooing to their babies. The sounds have no dictionary meaning at all. Yet they signal love, protection, coziness, and mealtime.63 Anyway, that was “How the Birds Gave Man His Words.”

  And why is it that Homo sapiens was descended from hairy apes but wound up naked—as Wallace had gone to some pains to point out? Even in hottest horrid-torrid Africa, animals such as antelopes had fur to protect them from the wind and rain. So did man…way back in that invisible past, where Evolution lives. Starting out, said Darwin, man was as hairy as the hairiest ape. Why no longer? Blind, aren’t you, Wallace? You didn’t get the second half of my title, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, did you. Evolution, said Darwin, had turned Homo sapiens into a more sensitive animal, which in turn gave him something approaching aesthetic feelings. The male began to admire females who had the least apelike hides because he could see more of their lovely soft skin, which excited him sexually. The more skin he saw, the more he wanted to see. Obviously valued by the males because their hides were much less hairy, the most sought-after females began to look down their noses at the old-fashioned hairy males, one crude step away from the apes themselves. Generation after generation went by, thousands of them, until, thanks to natural selection, males and females became as naked as they are today, with but two clumps of hair, one on the head and the other in the pubic area, plus wispy, scarcely visible little remnants of their formerly hirsute selves on the forearms and lower legs and, in the case of some males, the chest and shoulders.b Yes, their backs got cold, terribly cold, as Wallace had argued. But what poor Wallace didn’t know was that the heat of passion conquered all…and that was “How Man Lost His Hair Over Love.” (Got that, Wallace?)

  The truth was, Kipling didn’t rate an “ism” at the end of his name. Darwin did. When it came to making up stories, Kipling lacked Darwin’s great resource, “my dog.” For example, how did man obtain the power of abstract thought? Obvious, all too obvious. How can anybody dispute the fact, said Darwin, that even small mammals far below the status of ape have it? “When a dog sees another dog at a distance, it is often clear that he perceives that it is a dog in the abstract, for when he gets nearer his whole manner changes, if the other dog be a friend.”64 Was that his, Darwin’s, dog? He doesn’t say, but often in The Descent of Man, “my dog” steps forth as major evidence. “When I say to my terrier, in an eager voice…and I have made the trial many times”—the “trial” suggesting a controlled scientific experiment—“‘Hi, hi, where is it?’ she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all around, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scent for any game, but finding nothing, she looks up any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly shew that she had in her mind a general idea or concept that some animal is to be discovered and hunted?”65

  Religion? You have but to observe my dog. “The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, gratitude, hope for the future…” We see “this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear and perhaps other feelings.”66 He once noticed my dog lying on the lawn on a hot, still day. Not far away “a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol,” and my dog growled fiercely and started barking every time. “He must, I think, have reasoned to himself…that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent…The belief in spiritual agencies would easily pass into the belief in the existence of one or more gods…A dog looks upon its master as on a god.”67 And there you have it. This reverence moves up the great chain of Evolution until it reaches man.

  Parental affection? That begins very low in the animal hierarchy, with starfish, spiders, and Forficula auricularia. Forficula auricularia are earwigs in biology-lingo Latin. The moral sense? Parental affection, including the earwigs’, is the moral sense in embryo, says Darwin.68 It has evolved into the sympathy that mammals feel not only for their own kind but also for creatures from other species entirely—even to the point of risking their lives for them. Sympathy “leads a courageous dog to fly at any one who strikes his master…I have myself seen a dog”—my dog?—“who never passed a cat who lay sick in a basket without giving her a few licks with his tongue, the surest sign of kind feeling in a dog.” He goes on to say, “I saw a person pretending to beat a lady, who had a little timid dog on her lap, and the trial had never been made before”—another scientific trial—and the little creature instantly “jumped away, but after the pretended beating was over it was really pathetic to see how perseveringly he tried to lick his mistress’s face and comfort her.”69 Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with social instincts, which in man would be called moral. “Dogs,” he says, “possess something very like a conscience.” Dogs seem to be able to restrain themselves in deference to their master’s rules, and “this does not appear to be wholly the result of fear.” For example, they will “refrain from stealing food in the absence of their master.”70

  Doggedly, doggedly, Darwin hauls down all Wallace’s signs of “a new power of a definite sort” and returns them to the barking, whining, itching, scratching animal life of his Theory of Evolution.


  But his great overarching goal was to drain Max Müller’s damnable Rubicon dry. If Müller was right or even seemed to be right, that was the end of Darwin’s being known as the genius who showed the world that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal. Language was the crux of it all. If language sealed off man from animal, then the Theory of Evolution applied only to animal studies and reached no higher than the hairy apes. Müller was eminent and arrogant—and made fun of him!71

  The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was not nearly the sensation that Darwin alternately hoped and feared it would be.c His naturalist colleagues, notably Lyell and Huxley, and by then much of the reading public, took it for granted that the real subject of The Origin of Species twelve years earlier had been the descent of man from out of the trees, where the monkeys lived. This new book was just filling in the details. By then the Theory of Evolution had won the intellectual status battle, even within the ranks of the Anglican Church’s young clergymen. They were turning from clergy into the clerisy themselves. The reviews approached Darwin as an already Great Man. The Annual Register, a yearly survey of British intellectual life, compared him to Isaac Newton, discoverer of the law of gravity and creator of the fields of physics, mechanics, modern astronomy, and the Rules of Scientific Reasoning in the 1600s. The Register’s anonymous reviewer said everyone knew “how profound was the influence of the Newtonian philosophy over the next two or three generations.” Darwin’s theory will have a comparable impact, he predicts. “One comes across traces of its influence in the most remote and unexpected quarters, in historical, social, and even artistic questions…We are everywhere meeting with that series of ideas to which Mr. Darwin has done more than any other man to give prominence.”72

  Darwin’s goal was to show that all Müller’s and Wallace’s Higher Things evolved from animals—animals even as small as earwigs. He had no evidence, causing him to fall back over and over on the life and times of my dog. Fellow naturalists, as well as the linguists, seemed less than riveted. This new theory of language prompted no Ahahh! responses, let alone Ahura! Negative reviews criticized the thinness of his reasoning as well as the lack of evidence, and positive reviews avoided bringing up the subject at all.73 Obviously Darwin was as baffled about the origin of language as everybody else.

  The very next year, 1872, the Philological Society of London gave up on trying to find out the origin of language and would no longer accept papers on the subject or countenance bringing it up at society meetings.74 The members were getting almost as batty about language as Darwin and Wallace. All the endless cerebration had proved to be pointless. It clarified nothing and drove the society in no direction but into the slough of despond. The Linguistic Society of Paris had banned the subject on the same grounds six years earlier, in 1866.75

  Of course, philologists and Darwinists were different creatures, as demonstrated when Max Müller took on Darwin in 1861, pooh-poohed him, and declared that language was a sheerly dividing line elevating man above animal in a final and fundamental way. But when Darwin’s own attempt, in The Descent of Man, failed to clear up the muddle, Darwinists threw their hands up, too. The subject of the origin of language and how it works entered a dark age that was to last for seventy-seven years, comparable in the annals of science to the Dark Ages that descended upon Europe after the invasion of the Huns. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man—language—was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

  By the time Darwin died, in 1882 at Down House, of a heart attack after almost three months of intermittent chest pains, his great PR army, the X Club, was in a bad way, too, thanks to the same malady, old age. In 1883 one member died of typhoid, and of the remaining eight, only two were healthy enough to continue meeting regularly. One of the ailing was Huxley, the onetime boy wonder, who suffered from severe recurrent depression and dropped out for good in 1885, at age sixty (and died ten years later). A bid to recruit new members was rejected. The X Club, the most powerful backers any new scientific theory ever had…passed away unceremoniously in 1893.76

  More bad news for the Theory of Evolution broke suddenly in 1900, when three different naturalists from three different countries—Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands—each out to solve, on his own, the mysteries of biological inheritance, came upon the never-heralded and long-since-forgotten work of a long-since-deceased contemporary of Darwin, an Austrian monk named Gregor Johann Mendel. Mendel had been born plain Johann Mendel in 1822 (three years before Huxley) to a pair of landowning Moravian peasants who realized early on that they had a prodigy on their hands. They sacrificed themselves down to the bone for going on fifteen years to pay for his education, from first grade through a two-year university program he completed with honors. For whatever reasons, Mendel, like Huxley, began to suffer bouts of depression and entered an Augustinian monastery in northern Austria. As was the custom, he took the vows and was given a new, saintly name, Brother Gregor, and a typical monastery chore, gardening, to help provide food for all the brothers.

  The gardener had no training in biology, much less agronomy, but he began to notice certain patterns repeating in successive generations of pea plants, and in plant life the generations go by rapidly. In 1856 he began an experiment with green peas that took nine years and by and by involved twenty-eight thousand plants, very likely the biggest and longest agricultural experiment up to that time. In 1865 he laid out all the fundamental laws of heredity in a lecture and then in a monograph entitled Experiments on Plant Hybridization—and created the modern science of genetics. This was just five years after Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

  Experiments on Plant Hybridization barely made it into a dim German-language journal and wasn’t noticed at all anywhere else.d Fortunately for his equanimity, Mendel was an ace self-regarder. He was convinced that his laws of heredity for green peas applied to every living organism, animal as well as vegetable. Darwin died in 1882, unaware of Mendel. Mendel died two years later, in 1884, all but unread but also undaunted. Not long before he died, he wrote himself a note: “I am convinced it will not be long before the whole world acknowledges the results of my work.”77

  Dead he was, and dead right. Sixteen years after he died, an Austrian, a German, and a Dutchman discovered his work in the German journal and became Mendel’s posthumous Huxleys.

  Mendelian genetics overshadowed the Theory of Evolution from the very beginning. This new field had come straight out of purely scientific experiments that agronomists and biologists everywhere were able to replicate. The Theory of Evolution, on the other hand, had come out of the cerebrations of two immobile thinkers, one lying on a sweat-wet makeshift bed in a makeshift hut in Malay…thinking…the other behind a stalwart walnut desk in a stately mansion in the countryside near London…thinking…about things no man had ever seen and couldn’t even hope to replicate in much less than a few million years. Next to genetic theory, the Theory of Evolution came off not as a science but as a messy guess—baggy, boggy, soggy, and leaking all over the place. Nevertheless, Darwinists had never given up their cosmogonic determination to make Darwinism explain Everything. In the 1920s and 1930s they hit upon the bright idea of co-opting genetics and treating it as one of the Theory of Evolution’s components. A component is part of something bigger—right?

  That was how the Darwinists made a comeback after forty years as also-rans. Mendel’s theory became just one of their tools. Thus was born what came to be known as the modern synthesis. The leading synthesizer was a geneticist from Ukraine, Theodosius Dobzhansky, who had immigrated to the United States in 1927. In 1937 he published the modern synthesis bible, Genetics and the Origin of Species…and in 1973, two years before he died, he published a manifesto with a title Darwinists have been quoting ever since: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”78

  And nothing about language made sense to Do
bzhansky and his modern synthesizers. They pitied—pitied—people who still tried to study its origin. It was about as much use as trying to study the origin of extrasensory perception or mental telepathy or messages from the Other Side. To use a nom de bouffon from 1959, before the modern synthesis transmuted into neo-Darwinism, any academic who spent time on the origin of language was written off as…a flake.

  It was dumbfounding—utterly dumbfounding! Three generations of Darwinists and linguists kept their heads stuck in the sand when it came to the origin of the most important single power man possesses. It took a turn of history on the magnitude of World War II to get their attention.

  A prominent linguist named Morris Swadesh was the classic case. Before the war he had been a brilliant but thoroughly traditional linguist. In the 1930s he had trekked tirelessly to remote places nobody but the neighbors, if any, had ever heard of—in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, living off coconuts, fava beans, and beef jerky and, in the chronic absence of plumbing, lowering his pants and squatting down in the tall grass…all the while seeking out tribes and other ethnic enclaves few had ever heard of, either…to study their languages…Tarahumara, Purépecha, Otomi, Menominee, Mahican…close to a hundred of them before he had finished…and sorting them out into language families such as the Algonquin, the Oneida, the Tarascan…becoming fluent in more than twenty of them while he was at it.79 Then World War II broke out. Swadesh was thirty, well below the military draft’s cutoff age of thirty-five, and wound up in the army assigned to military intelligence projects involving mainline languages—Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Burmese, and country cousins such as Burma’s Naga language, for use in interpreting, monitoring, and possibly espionage. (Swadesh was a quick study. He soaked up so much Naga in one day touring around with a local guide that he managed to pull off a ten-minute thank-you speech in the language that night.80)