Brief review of Tom Wolfe's "The Kingdom of Speech"

I really wanted to like this book, for the simple reason that any book that the obnoxious fruifly geneticist Jerry Coyne is that contempuous of, can't be all bad. But sadly, it really is all bad.

Tom Wolfe's new book is indeed as bad as advertised, but it isn't creationist. His big idea is taken from linguist Daniel Everett (Language: The Cultural Tool), that language isn't a biological autapomorphy, like eyebrows or valgus knees, but a discovery or invention, like bifacial handaxes. The possibility that the dichotomy might be a false one apparently occurs to neither of them.

If it were not in some sense a biological feature, then it is difficult to explain why our vocal tract differs from a chimpanzee’s; and why you can’t teach a chimp to talk, as psychologists from Robert Yerkes on down have tried and failed to do.  And if it were not a cultural feature, then it is difficult to explain why people speak so many different more-or-less equivalent languages, rather than just one really good language. 

The first half of the book is a child’s romp through the career of Charles Darwin, written in an overtly anachronistic, and frankly sophomoric, style. The second half of the book leaps to savage Noam Chomsky. You can get distracted by Wolfe giving Ian Tattersall a post at MIT (p. 149), or awarding Joseph Dalton Hooker a knighthood 20 years before Queen Victoria did (p. 32), or his antiquated use of “man” as a generic term for the species, but it really isn’t even worth the time.  “Even the smartest apes don’t have thoughts, “ he writes on p. 162, “so much as conditioned responses to certain primal pressures.”  Who knew there were any real Cartesians left?

What ties the two halves of this short book together is not so much the history of linguistics (no Saussure, and a passing mention of Edward Sapir), but the foregrounded information that science is a social activity, with rhetoric, persuasion, and alliance as components. Somebody really ought to write a book about that.

Wolfe’s rhetoric is mainly deployed to boost the work of Everett, who seems to be rather a better linguist than ethnographer.  He says that the Pirahã language lacks the feature of recursion, which Chomsky believes that all languages have.  This ought to be little more than classic “Bongo-Bongoism” – the ethnographic demonstration that the mythical people of “Bongo-Bongo” lack whatever facet of human behavior all people are supposed to have, as first-generation ethnographers aggressively liked to point out a century ago.   But when Everett writes about the overall simplicity and primitiveness of the Pirahã language and lifeways, Wolfe notes that the published comments in Current Anthropology were dubious. “They all had their reservations about this and that,” Wolfe writes (p. 119). But “this and that” were actually the articulated doubts about the basic competence of Everett’s ethnography.  That is serious, because it means that the stuff being said about the Pirahã is not quite reliable enough to be considered as anthropological data. They “had preserved a civilization virtually unchanged for thousands, godknew-how-many-thousands, of years” (p. 113). When Wolfe calls them “the most primit – er, indigenous – tribe known to exist on earth” (p. 142), the sophisticated reader may be forgiven for reading it as romanticized pseudo-anthropological nonsense.  

After all, every sophisticated reader knows that the most primit - er, indigenous tribe known to exist on earth are really the KhoiSan

Yanomamo 

Hadza 

Ache

Tasaday.  

Oh shit, maybe these guys really are!

Anyway, without differentiating between (vocal) speech and (cognitive) language, Wolfe eventually deduces that speech is what made us significantly different from other animals, something that “no licensed savant had ever pointed ... out before”.  So you had better not look too hard for licensed savants pointing it out.

Wolfe concludes with a radical taxonomic proposition: that humans are cognitively so distinct that we should be alone in a higher taxonomic category.  If you don’t know that Julian Huxley said as much in the 1950s, and Terry Deacon (1997) more recently – at the subkingdom and phylum levels, respectively – then you might find the suggestion original or threatening. It’s actually neither. It’s just a matter of how much or how little you choose to privilege phylogeny when classifying. 

All in all, the wrong stuff. 

Scars of human evolution, part deux

Physical anthropologist Wilton Krogman wrote a classic article in 1951 for Scientific American called “The Scars of Human Evolution,” back when you could actually make sense of the stuff in Scientific American.  It addressed half of human evolution: bipedalism.

Hard as it may be to believe, the evolution of our other most basic adaptation is under-theorized.  I refer to our symbolic mode of communication, language.   Language, which is coterminous with symbolic thought – if you can think it, you can say it – was an unusual and apparently very good evolutionary innovation.  It was so good, indeed, that it created physical problems that the human body had to solve secondarily in order to make it work, and to some extent never did solve fully.

First, it expanded our heads.  Symbolic communication requires a big brain, as well as an extended period of immaturity in order to learn how to do it properly.  It is so difficult that we hardly even appreciate how difficult it is.  From the bottom up, we learn what sounds make sense.  Are “s” and “sh” variants of the same sound, or different sounds?  What about “l” and r”? Or “r” and “rr”?  Or the “Ch” in “Chanukah” or the “Zs” in “Zsa-Zsa”?  Are they their own sounds, or some weird variants of “Hanukah” and “Cha-Cha”?  We also learn how to combine those sounds, and use them to refer to objects, or acts, or states.  We could call those combinations of sounds “lexemes,” but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just call them “words”.  We also learn how to combine those words in meaningful ways – to state, inquire, praise, predict, recall, using any of the myriad grammatical forms at our disposal.  And on top of all that, we learn intonation, sarcasm, and bodily gestures to go along with the rules of sounds, their correspondences, and combinations.  The price for all of this was a brain inside a baby’s skull that hardly fits through the birth canal.  And the solution to that problem was to make birthing social.  Where an ape squats and delivers, a human almost always needs to have someone else around.

Second, language reorganized our throats.  To make all of those sounds, our larynx is positioned lower down in the throat than it is in apes and babies, who cannot make those sounds.  The price we pay is that the passage of air into our lungs and of food into our bellies now criss-cross, which they do not in apes, which means that we can choke on our food far more readily than a chimpanzee can.  The solution is: Don’t eat so fast, and try not to breathe while you are swallowing.

Third, language not only worked over our throats and brains, but our teeth as well.  Catarrhine primates often have large, sexually dimorphic canine teeth, which they use as social threats and in the occasional actual fight.  Classic sexual selection theory holds that in species in which males actively compete for mates, they do so using their canine teeth.   In species where there is less competition for mates, because males and females pair off, the males and females have equal-sized canine teeth, as in the monogamous gibbons.  This is often invoked as evidence that sexual selection has been reduced in the human species, which may well be true.  The problem is that those gibbon canines, which are non-dimorphic, are also actually quite large.  Ours are non-dimorphic, but small.  Why?  Because it is really hard to speak intelligibly through large, interlocking canine teeth.  Ask any vampire (and see if you can understand their response).  The price for the reduction of the canine teeth was that our canine teeth are not going to intimidate other members of our own species, nor defend us against member of other species.  Good thing we started using tools.

And fourth, in addition to reshaping our brains, throats, and teeth, language also reshaped our tongue.   To make the sounds we do, our tongue became more muscular, rounded,  and enervated than an ape’s tongue.   For this the cost was quite severe.  An ape dissipates heat, as most mammals do, by panting.  But to use your tongue primarily for talking, it will require that your body produce another way of dissipating heat.  Our ancestors did that by loading up our skin with sweat glands, for evaporative cooling.   But evaporative cooling only works efficiently with bare skin; so our body hair had to get shorter and wispier than that of an ape. 

Walking and talking are what are most fundamentally human, and it is quite extraordinary that they rhyme. So the next time you choke, sweat, scream for an epidural, or reach for a weapon to protect yourself because you lack confidence in your teeth to protect you, reflect on the fact that our body parts are interconnected, and that language was such a good way to communicate that it screwed you up in so many other ways.   I didn’t mention it, but there is a fifth price as well for language:  having to listen to people who don’t know when to shut the fuck up.