Tom Wolfe’s Stomping Takedown Of Evolution – JP

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Tom Wolfe has done it again – in his last published work.

He has skewered a holy grail (or two) of contemporary society, bringing his gimlet eye and effervescent prose style to a subject sure to enrage the professorial, your-betters class.

The book, The Kingdom of Speech, takes us on a journey of discovery of how incredibly, magnificently the power of speech came only to man and is the dividing line between man and animal that no process of evolution could ever bridge.

Wolfe takes aim at contemporary society’s greatest shibboleth – the password to enter the elevated company of the elites – which, against all odds and true science, still remains the Law of Evolution.

Oops! I misspoke. It is actually the Theory of Evolution, and remains one of the biggest and longest lasting hoaxes perpetrated on the human race. (As always, we are talking about the total fiction of macro-evolution, that one species somehow evolves to another, rather than micro-evolution, which is another way to phrase adaptability to the environment.)

Wolfe, despite being a “lapsed Presbyterian” and atheist, goes on a blistering tour of the falsities of Darwin’s (r)evolution, starting with how Darwin upstaged a young, lower class behavorist, Alfred Wallace, whose title as “discoverer of evolution” he blocked by unethically preempting him. He continues with how the animal-man chasm of language was ignored for 75+ years, until a certain Noam Chomsky came along and, like a 2,000 pound gorilla (his direct ancestor?), sat atop the academic pile called Linguistics.

(Wolfe mentions, but glosses over, the fact that Darwin scooped his own grandfather by not giving him due credit for early evolution soup; nor does he dwell on how Social Darwinism – if “survival of the fittest” pertains to all animals, why not to man? – led directly to the massacre of over 100 million less fit souls in the 20th century, with Marx, Stalin, et al, idolizing Darwin.)

Without going into the rarified academic debate – with Chomsky insisting on a “language organ,” “universal grammer,” “deep structure,” or “language acquisition device,” all of which are fantasies about how language could have “evolved” – along comes another young Wallace-like disruptor, Daniel Everett, who in 2005 proved through long, hard field work that the Amazon tribe named the Pirahã, had no such organ, dethroning the gnomish Noam.

Chomsky, like Darwin before him, mounted an effective counter-attack, which resulted in FUNAI, the Brazilian acronym for the National Indian Foundation, barring Everett from ever visiting the Pirahã again because, of all elitist epithets, he was “racist.” Chomsky stooped so low as to call Everett a “charlatan” in an interview with Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest circulation leftist rag.

Eventually, in 2011, Everett published Language: The Cultural Tool, arguing that, per Wolfe:

…speech, language in not something that evolved in Homo Sapiens, [but rather] is man-made. It is an artifact…and it explains man’s power over all other creatures in a way that Evolution all by itself can’t begin to. [p.145]

As this agrees with Wolfe’s conclusion, that speech is unique to man, he classifies the book’s publication as the death knell to Chomskyism.

All this is told in a rollicking fun manner, in the ineffable Wolfian style, as language-mad as a Hunter Thompson or a James Joyce.

When writing a review, I almost never reach for prior reviews, even less for what the far-left psyop named Wikipedia might opine. But knowing how angry the hive of bees would be at this one, I couldn’t resist a glance at Wiki’s “Critical Response” section, which marshals about 8 critical opinions to 2 supportive of Wolfe’s last work. The supportive blurbs somehow also include stinkers, the first lamenting that the book is “too glaringly flawed,” while the second opined that Wolfe’s view of evolution (recall, that if you disagree with Evolution, you can’t be elite) is “too simplistic.” Hahaha, when in truth you have to be a simpleton to still believe the thoroughly discredited theory. (Darwin himself wrote that if the fossil record did not support his theory of species-to-species transitions – which it doesn’t – his theory would be in serious trouble – which it is, and was, from the start.)

To give credit where credit is due, Wolfe points out:

The first person to refer to Darwin’s tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978. [p.70]

He also isn’t the first, in book form, to address the controversy. Books such as Thomas Suddendorf’s The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals and Mortimer J. Adler’s The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, among others, plough the field. But none have done so in such an accessible, and entertaining, manner.

My hat off to Wolfe, not only for his iconic dressing up to go out but for his strong BS meter, for all the inanities of contemporary civilization. One tut-tuting critic adds – as yet more proof of Wolfe’s goofiness – that he’s “compelled to snicker at one of the foundations of modern science: [furthermore] He’s called another one, the big bang, ‘the nuttiest theory I’ve ever heard’.”

(As confirmation in The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe skewers “the current solemnly accepted – i.e. ‘scientific’ – big bang theory, which with a straight face tells us how something, i.e. the whole world, was created out of nothing.” [p.22])

Bravo Mr. Wolfe! Your last fusillade was right on target, pointing out the absurdity, the intellectual masturbation of the so-called “foundations of modern science,” yelling for any who have ears and care to hear that the Emperor has no clothes. And this from a man who didn’t even have a biblical basis for his perspicacious views!

God uses whom He wishes to, using divinely granted speech.

Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech, Little, Brown and Co. (2016, New York), 2017 Back Bay Books paperback edition

Ben Batchelder is the author of four extended travel yarns and has been a Contributor to The JP since its inception. Contact him at his author site benbatchelder.com