In Tom Wolfe's 'Kingdom,' Speech Is The One Weird Trick

[rug]

August 27, 2016
12:42 PM ET
NPR STAFF

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.

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.

Interview Highlights

On animal communication

There are no traces of any evolution of language through the sounds that apes make, or dolphins, for that matter. It is something that is completely new, and the reason for that is, it's an invention, invention by human beings, who are the only creatures who are able to perform this trick. And the trick is, you convert sounds into codes. And the code may be t-r-e-e "tree," or it could be "typhoon," there's no telling. But it enables this creature, man, to remember things ... as a result, human beings rule every other creature in the world.

Physically, we are really pretty pathetic ... our dominance in the world is all thanks to this trick of coming up with these codes.



The Kingdom of Speech
by Tom Wolfe
Hardcover, 185 pages

http://www.npr.org/2016/08/27/491492977/in-tom-wolfes-kingdom-speech-is-the-one-weird-trick

5:06 audio at link.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Wolfe's mind now appears pretty pathetic

As I said, I’ll go into more detail about Wolfe’s thesis within the week, but some of its more ridiculous claims can be heard in the interview. The surprising thing is that host Scott Simon sat back amiably, letting Wolfe say the most outrageous things about linguistics and evolution without challenging him. Wolfe’s quotes are indented below:

“It’s misleading to say that human being evolved from animals, and actually, nobody knows whether they did or not. There are very few physical signs except the general resemblance between apes and humans.”

. . . “It’s time for people interested in evolution to say ‘The theory of evolution applies only to animals.'”

This is pure untrammeled hogwash. All rational people—I used to include Wolfe in that group—accept the mountainous evidence that human beings evolved not just from animals, but from other apes. Indeed, we are animals, Mr. Wolfe, and if we didn’t evolve from other animals, just how did we get here?

And what about the fossil evidence: that sequence of fossils, beginning about five million years ago, showing a modern-human-like creature evolving through a branching tree from early primates that had much smaller brains, and were barely bipedal? The fossils alone refute Wolfe’s claim.

But of course there is plenty of other evidence (documented in Why Evolution is True) of our common ancestry with other animals, both living and extinct. This includes the presence of “dead genes” in the human genome: nonfunctional bits of DNA that are the vestigial remnants of genes present in our ancestors, and still active in some of our relatives. Humans, for instance, have three genes for egg yolk proteins: all are nonfunctional, but all are functional in our relatives like birds and reptiles. How do you explain that, Mr. Wolfe? What about our nonfunctional olfactory-receptor genes, or our dead gene for synthesizing Vitamin C? I would love to confront Wolfe with that data. How does he explain it?

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/08/28/tom-wolfe-discusses-his-new-book-on-npr-claims-that-humans-didnt-evolve-from-animals-npr-doesnt-challenge-that/

Who knows what has happened to him?

[rug]

2. Electric Kool-Aid Acid.

[Schema Thing]

3. He saw the sales potential.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Ah, could be.

You'd think he'd want to retain some respect, though.

Looking around for recent pronouncements from him, I see he doesn't see Hillary as preferable to Trump:

Beset by controversy over his rumbustious rhetoric, Republican presidential candidate Don­ald Trump has received a useful boost from one of the most influential US writers.

Tom Wolfe, author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, is confident Mr Trump has the charisma to be president and compares him with Ronald Reagan, whose earlier career as an actor did not prevent him from doing “awfully well” and winning the Cold War.
...
Wolfe stops short of saying he will vote for Mr Trump. Democrat contender Hillary Clinton does not meet his approval either. “They both have incredible flaws,” he said.

Mrs Clinton, he said, has “moved so far to the Left” and is “very different from her husband (Bill), who’s extremely charming. She is not.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/us-election-donald-trump-a-new-arnie-or-reagan-says-tom-wolfe/news-story/311b133c6b56896edda1889152a75cd1

Which still means he could be just an asshole, or saying any old stupid shit for publicity.

[Schema Thing]

10. all of the above? smdh

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Wow, pathetic. Speech is incredibly important but denying evolution is ignorant & stupid. Period. nt

[Jim__]

6. Ah, his new book. That must be why he felt qualified to mock Chomsky's linguistic theories.

In the August 2016 edition of Harper's, Wolfe has an essay, The Origins of Speech, In the beginning was Chomsky, that mocks Chomsky's attempts at theorizing about linguistics. A short excerpt:

Nobody in academia had ever witnessed or even heard of a performance like this before. In just a few years, in the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student — a student, in his twenties — had taken over an entire field of study, linguistics, and stood it on its head and hardened it from a spongy so-called “social science” into a real science, a hard science, and put his name on it: Noam Chomsky.

At the time, Chomsky was still finishing his doctoral dissertation for Penn, where he had completed his graduate-school course work. But at bedtime and in his heart of hearts he was living in Boston as a junior member of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and creating a Harvard-level name for himself.

This moment was the high tide of the "scientificalization" that had become fashionable just after World War II. Get hard! Whatever you do, make it sound scientific! Get out from under the stigma of studying a "social science"! By now, "social" meant soft in the brain pan. Sociologists, for example, were willing to do anything to avoid the stigma. They tried to observe and record hour-by-hour conversations, meetings, correspondence, even routes taken by individuals, and make the information really hard by converting it into algorithms full of calculus symbols that gave it the look of mathematical certainty. And they failed totally. Only Chomsky, in linguistics, managed to pull it off and turn all - or almost all - the pillow heads in the field rock-hard.

Even before his Ph.D., Chomsky was invited to lecture at Yale and the University of Chicago. He introduced a radically new theory of language. Language was not something you learned. You were born with a built-in "language organ." It is functioning the moment you come into the world, just the way your heart and your kidneys are already pumpimg and filtering and excreting away.

...

The essay goes on for more than 15 pages, just about all of it having the same flavor as the above excerpt. Wolfe's trigger seems to have been a book, Don't Sleep, There are Snakes, written by Daniel Everett about the language of the Pirahã. Apparently Everett's book contradicts some theories of Chomsky. Wolfe was livid that some linguists wrote a long, peer-reviewed critique of Everett's book. He was also livid that Chomsky did not critique the book. His essay doesn't contain any information that would allow the reader to attempt a judgement concerning the validity of Everett's claims.

[rug]

7. I wonder if that Harper's article was an excerpt from this book.

[Jim__]

8. You're right, it is. I didn't see that footnote.

Maybe his book contains sufficient information for people to make an intelligent comparison between Everett's claims and Chomsky's theories.

[rug]

9. It's more likely he used that excerpt to promote the book.

[Jim__]

11. That excerpt definitely convinces me not to bother reading the book.

Those scornful ad hominems can be entertaining in fiction. When attempting to make a scientific point, they are a strong indication that the author is not worth reading.

[Jim__]

12. A reply to Wolfe's mocking essay.

In the LTE column for Harper's October 2016 issue, Professor Pesetsky replies to some of Wolfe's criticisms.

An excerpt:

Tom Wolfe paints a florid and darkly conspiratorial picture of a decade-old discussion in linguistics, in which my colleagues and I are as-signed the role of bad guys [“The Ori-gins of Speech,” Essay, August]. The dispute concerns Daniel Everett’s as-sertion that Pirahã, an indigenous Brazilian language, has unique fea-tures that overturn a supposed lin-guistic orthodoxy attributed to Noam Chomsky. I was one of three authors of a 2009 paper that weighed in against Everett’s claims, a paper extensively discussed by Wolfe in dramatically negative terms (“a swollen corpus of objections—cosmic, small-minded, and everything in between&quot .

There is so much to object to in Wolfe’s narrative. There is the name-calling and over-the-top rhetoric (“Little Dan standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky&quot . There are the many passages in which Wolfe purports to know my private thoughts and those of my colleagues, despite having made no effort to contact us for interviews. There is the descrip-tion of my department at MIT as a den of “modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts"—contrasting, apparently, with the genuinely manly field linguistics practiced by Everett. (Many of my MIT colleagues and students are women, by the way, and some of them are fieldworkers.)

But the most important shortcoming of Wolfe’s essay is his misrepresentation of the scientific issues at stake. In a 2005 paper, Everett argued that the Pirahã language lacked subordinate clauses (“Mary said that it is raining&quot and the ability to nest possessors inside of other possessors (“Mary’s canoe’s motor is big&quot , along with a few other properties. He further maintained that these “gaps" contradicted a theory about language that he attributed to Chomsky. Puzzled by the apparent weakness of the evidence presented for these claims and the significance alleged for them, Andrew Nevins, Cilene Rodrigues, and I decided to investigate. In his own previous papers, we found blatant counterexamples to Everett’s claims, which he had left not only unexplained but unmentioned, and we argued that many of the supposedly unique properties of Pirahã had precedents in other languages of the world.

Crucially, we also pointed out that even if Everett’s new factual claims about Pirahã were correct, they would have no bearing whatsoever on the issues that he believed his work addressed because he misrepresented those issues. Chomsky has never proposed that every language must have subordinate clauses, nested possessors, or any other specific grammatical construction. All linguists know that languages vary in the constructions they allow and disallow, and the principles that underlie this variation constitute one of the main topics of our field. In the Science paper that Everett cited repeatedly for the assertion that every language must have subordinate clauses, Chomsky and his co-authors actually said nothing of the sort, mentioning subordinate clauses only as an illustrative example in a broader discussion of the human capacity for hierarchically organized phrase structure.

more ...

[rug]

13. It's long past someone thanked you for elevating the discourse in this Group.

[Jim__]

16. Thanks for saying that. I do think that Pesetsky's reply to Wolfe was well written and on-point. n/t

[struggle4progress]

14. The evolution of human speech may be quite complex. I don't know the current status

of the theory here, but I was at one time highly intrigued by an overview suggesting that human hand evolution (including opposable thumbs) reduced the importance of the mouth for grasping, which allowed some reorganization of the neck and (thereby) development of the human larynx, necessary for vocalization

[rug]

15. I remember the look on my older daughter's face when her baby sister first spoke a sentence.

She couldn't have been more astonished if the dog asked for a piece of ham.