First, what it’s not. In his last book, the late author Tom Wolfe, known for his iconoclastic journalism in works such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff, took on language. In The Kingdom of Speech,[1] Wolfe skewered Charles Darwin for plagiarizing the theory of evolution from Alfred Wallace. He also pointed out that Darwin never showed that human language evolved from anything else — birdsongs, mother’s coos, animal grunts, and so on — though he desperately wanted to. No one has credibly argued for an evolutionary origin, since, as well.
Having done in Darwin, Wolfe then trained his sights on Noah Chomsky, who almost single-handedly invented the discipline of linguistics with theories of a “ language organ” somewhere in the brain that picks up on a “universal grammar” enabling us all to learn to speak a particular language. Using sources including a personal interview, he showed that Chomsky himself no longer believed in the ideas that made him famous. The great linguist now admits ignorance as to the evolutionary origin of language.[2]
In fact, Wolfe argues convincingly that language is a cultural artifact, something human beings created quite apart from evolution. And if a product of human culture, then it is a product of mind that we do not share with any other creatures. So, while humans evolved physically like lichens and lemurs and leopards, language is…
