In this case, the old-school Darwinists and the linguists are livid.
As linguistics is not my field, I’m not qualified to judge Wolfe’s claims concerning Noam Chomsky. Nonetheless Wolfe’s suggestion that for decades, hardly anyone bothered to seriously research the origin of human language, and that still today we have made discouraging progress on solving the problem… does give one pause.
As for Darwinism, I did write a book about it (Evolution 2.0) which took ten years of research. Kingdom of Speech isn’t so much a critique of evolution itself as it is an expose on how much credit Darwin took for work not his own.
One weakness of this book is Wolfe does not adequately address what Darwin did or did not accomplish on the HMS Beagle. One gets the impression from Wolfe that Darwin did a lot less science on the Galapagos than most people think. In any case the true story simply is not clear.
One bridge Wolfe does not cross (and I’d be surprised had he done so as this is still not well known) is that cells themselves are linguistic. When confronted with stress, they mutate in linguistic patterns.
Readers should search for a TED talk by Bonnie Bassler called “How Bacteria Talk” where she shows how organisms send messages to each other and communicate by exchanging molecules built from syntactical modular elements.
There is an entire field in biology called biosemiotics (semiotic = “signs and language”). The field has two dedicated peer reviewed journals. Notable researchers include Howard Patee, Sungchul Ji and Gunther Witzany. This field goes back many decades. Ji of Rutgers authored an excellent paper “Linguistics of DNA.”
The 1984 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Niels Jerne, used Noam Chomsky’s linguistic model to describe behavior of the human immune system. Another linguist, Gerald McMenamin, devotes an entire section in his book Forensic Linguistics to the language of DNA.
Bacteria under stress re-arrange and exchange DNA with each other in linguistic patterns, rapidly adapting to threats. This is why you have to take antibiotics and finish the bottle - you either kill those suckers dead or they come back with a vengeance. They’re not just passively mutating, they’re actively searching for ways to defeat the antibiotic. See James Shapiro, “Evolution: A View from the 21st Century.” Another good title is COSMOSAPIENS by John Hands.
Knowing honeybees communicate via waggles that closely mimic something in quantum physics called the flag manifold, it doesn’t seem too outlandish to suggest that human capacity for language may draw on something that is deeply cellular.
To me the genius of Wolfe’s book was linking the deficiencies of Darwinism in explaining human language with theoretical attempts in linguistics which, Wolfe argues, are similarly lacking in empiricism.
An interesting parallel to Wolfe’s linking of these two fields is the eerie symmetry between the Darwinists - who fail to teach you how evolution actually works (you’ll learn almost nothing useful or accurate from Richard Dawkins or Bill Nye on this matter) - and Intelligent Design advocates, who outright deny that evolution is possible. Also failing to teach you how evolution works, by default.
Neither Dawkins’ books, nor Stephen Myer’s book “Darwin’s Doubt,” tell you anything useful about cellular linguistics or the actual mechanics of evolutionary mutations. But in fact most empirical, real-time evolutionary events are triggered by semantic changes in the genome. Not “random” mutations.
Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for discovering transposition, which is the cell re-arranging its own genome; Lynn Margulis, ex-wife of Carl Sagan, popularized Symbiogenesis, the theory that new species come from cellular mergers. Both of these phenomena are driven by linguistic capabilities of cells.
Kingdom Of Speech is a very fun and easy read. Wolfe does not indulge in showing off his verbal prowess; rather he exercises all his faculties in constructing a rollicking read.
If you’ve always suspected that science is far from settled, read this book. It will provoke you with old questions, new questions, and an exciting sense of the unknown.
However, if you’re confident that the major operating principles of the universe are well understood, and if you believe science exploration from here on out is just a cleanup exercise, this book will make you furious.
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