Review of Tom Wolfe's "Kingdom of Speech"

I was asked to write this review by one of my patrons, so how could I turn him down. This is a pre-publication version that is available exclusively for my patrons.

Review of Tom Wolfe’s “The Kingdom of Speech”

(portions of this have appeared in Howard Rheingold’s e-book, Mind Amplifier)[i] 

By Howard Rheingold

If we accept Darwinian theory as the origin story of humans, we accept that our species is a kind of animal that has been shaped by billion-year processes of mutation and natural selection. But what about language? Why do no other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria exhibit the human ability to invent on the fly sentences like this one that have probably never been invented before – and thereby convey complex meaning? By now it’s clear that Darwin’s notion that human speech evolved from imitation of birdsong is not an adequate explanation. Is this unique human capability a “cardinal distinction” between homo Sapiens and all other creatures? Despite a century and a half of debate and research, the answer is still not unequivocal.

The field of linguistics, for more than half a century, has been dominated by the assertion by Noam Chomsky that humans are born with an innate capacity for constructing grammars. This question of whether and how language distinguishes humans from other products of biological evolution is the starting point for Thomas Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, in which he attacks – not too strong a word – both Darwin (for subtly deprecating the role of Alfred Russel Wallace in the provenance of evolutionary theory) and Chomsky (for attacking and provoking others to attack any challenger to Chomsky’s linguistic dogma). Think of The Kingdom of Speech as a snarky and consciously unacademic (but meticulously footnoted) literature review. I liked it. I recommend it. I’m not endorsing its argument. Reading Wolfe is always a funhouse ride. I liked the way he attempted to lead my thinking about the chain of problems underlying linguistic dogma and counter-dogma. That doesn’t mean I conclude that he’s right or totally accurate. If science thrives on skepticism, then Wolfe’s is a valuable contribution to discourse about the origins of language, whether or not his arguments hold much water.

Wolfe would probably agree that his CONSCIOUSLY HYPED UP ZOOM! ZOOM! ZOOM! language and the forcefulness of his Darwin-snarking, Chomsky-debunking arguments set up the reader for…something. Is Wolfe building to “we don’t really know where language came from, despite the decades of research and (mostly) theorizing?” He sets that up pretty strongly. Or…and Wolfe is nothing but audacious, so this seems likely…is he setting us up to tell what language really is? It turns out that he does…and doesn’t. (Caution: Spoiler). Language, according to Wolfe is not, as Chomsky famously declared, hardwired into some as-yet unlocated “Language Acquisition Apparatus.” Language is…*(here’s the spoiler). Language is an artifact. Another way to say it: language is not the direct result of Darwinian biological evolution; language is something that homo Sapiens created.

Darwin sat on his developing theory for decades, aware of the storm of controversy that was sure to follow his claim that the species gradually transformed through natural processes instead of being created by God. Then he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, who was in Malaysia collecting biological specimens. Wolfe points out that Darwin was a privileged member of the landed gentry, while Wallace was a “fly collector” of lower social status who made his living by capturing and sending back to England biological specimens. Wallace asked Darwin to submit his paper to Charles Lyell, a well-known geologist who is remembered for his claim that the earth has been shaped by long-term geological processes. Lyell, like Darwin, was a “gentleman,” and according to Wolfe, conspired to deprecate Wallace’s discovery in the absence of a publication by Darwin. A joint paper by Darwin and Wallace (who had not been asked for permission to publish) was presented to the Linnaean Society in London. Wolfe claims that this was a subtle way of concealing the primacy of Wallace’s discovery. 

While Wolfe’s hostile bio of Chomsky encompasses Chomsky’s politics and his cult-like dominance of the field of linguistics, including his active attacks on challengers and his encouragement of attacks by Chomsky acolytes, Wolfe’s argument against Chomsky’s theory focuses on the challenge to the Language Acquisition Device by anthropologist-linguist Daniel Everett. Part of Chomsky’s theory claims that all human languages exhibit “recursion” – the embedding of multiple concepts in sentences. “I see the tree” is a simple sentence with a single subject; “I see the tree where I fell and broke my arm” is a recursive statement that includes seeing the tree, the fall, and the broken arm. Everett, spent decades with a remote Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, whose exceedingly simple language (he asserted) did not include recursion. (Later observers challenged Everett’s claim regarding recursion.)

I don’t claim sufficient expertise to rule on Wolfe’s challenges to Darwin and Chomsky. The Wikipedia entry for The Kingdom of Speech summarizes and links to reviews by more expert reviewers in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Times, The Spectator and other media that challenge both of Wolfe’s attacks. I am puzzled, however, at Wolfe’s grand conclusion regarding language as an artifact. Although I have no expertise in linguistics or evolutionary theory, I am reasonably certain that no human tribe has been discovered that has no spoken language at all. If language is not biologically inherited in some presently unknown manner, but invented, how is it that all humans in all places seem to have invented it?

I haven’t looked deeply into the Darwin-Chomsky language dilemma, but I’ve done a little research and writing about the way human brains use a process of exaptation to create entirely new cognitive capabilities from pre-existing biological elements. The concept may be obscured by the more well-known role of adaptation, but it is not unknown in evolutionary biology: before dinosaurs could become birds, they needed to develop feathers, which one theorist suggests became an enduring trait because vaned feathers helped the first feathered reptiles to run more swiftly.[ii] Other examples can be cited. I don’t offer exaptation as the solution to puzzle of how our brains are wired – or learn – to produce language. But I strongly suspect it’s part of the puzzle.

To say that Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device has not been located in the brain is not to say little is known about the neural components that enable language. Specific areas of the brain are linked to specific aspects of language. Neuroscience and paleontology offer clues, as does the study of speech pathologies and brain malfunction. Now the grand challenge is to piece together the evidence to resolve conclusively the question of whether language is a “cardinal distinction” between humans and other animals. An evolutionary neurobiologist by the name of William Calvin introduced me to the notion of culture as a process of exapting various functions our biologically evolved brains. Calvin’s first book, which I read a couple of years before I met him, was evocatively named The Throwing Madonna because it presented the argument that brain mechanisms for speech are closely connected with brain mechanisms used for ballistic calculations — like throwing a rock at a moving rabbit.[iii] 

In order to hit a moving target, different neural computation networks are required to make predictions and sequence actions. These brain mechanisms, Calvin hypothesized, were adopted later to form sentences in the brain and coordinate the muscular actions required to speak them — estimating where a running rabbit is likely to be when your stone reaches that location turns out also to be useful for modeling the future, planning, and putting words together into meaningful sequences. Think about the way some invisible mind mechanism seems to fetch the right words to finish your sentences, even if you weren’t sure where they were going when the sentences started. 

Language encourages generative thinking — not just learning and remembering, but inventing. Even the least creative person invents new sentences every day. Invention and learning by searching the possibility space of what might turn out to be useful, testing it, and adopting the experiments that work is another uniquely human capability that might have grown out of the need for rapid ballistic estimates. 

Exaptation’s gradual repurposing of previously evolved organs to create new organs, requiring random mutations and millions of years, explains how small bones in the jaws of ancient reptiles turned into auditory organs. Human exaptation is uniquely powerful because of our ability to repurpose in real time, rather than geological time, the way we use our innate information-processing hardware — and to teach others how to do it. We don’t have to wait for mutations to enable us to read and write, we can use parts of our brains that evolved to read tracks in the mud and to throw rocks more accurately to recognize visual symbols and sequence words into sentences. 

Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University. Wolf, an expert on the neural, cognitive, and cultural components of reading, confronts the issue of how media such as books or computer networks affect the brain. In the process of her inquiry, Wolf demonstrates how literacy – the skill of encoding and deciphering visual symbols to convey meaning and represent spoken language – uses innate capabilities that probably evolved in response to different environmental pressures. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Wolf wrote: “We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences. Our ancestors’ invention could come about only because of the human brain’s extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain’s ability to be shaped by experience. This plasticity at the heart of the brain’s design forms the basis for much of who we are, and we might become.” [iv] Human thinking processes are neither “wired” nor “rewired,” although it is convenient to think of them in that way; although the probability that a specific set of brain cells will fire in synchronization does resemble fixed circuitry, the brain works in a more dynamic way than the wiring metaphor implies. Wolf emphasizes that groups of neurons create new connections and strengthen pathways between them in specific networks whenever a person acquires a new skill. “Thanks to this design,” Wolf noted, “we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it.”[v]. This is the “neural plasticity” feared by Carr.

Humans are born biologically equipped to recognize visual patterns and to extract meaning from those patterns, but meshing language, vision, and attention to transmit knowledge was invented — reading is a mind technology. The visual component of reading appears to make use of deeply embedded perceptual mechanisms that probably evolved in order to track predators and prey by deciphering their footprints.[vi] Each of the innate capacities recruited by the brain for use in the reading process evolved in response to some survival requirement. Wolf put it this way: “it would seem more than likely that the reading brain exploited older neuronal pathways originally designed not only for vision but for connecting vision to conceptual and linguistic functions: for example, connecting the quick recognition of a shape with a rapid inference that this footprint can signal danger; connecting a recognized tool, predator, or enemy with the retrieval of a word. When confronted, therefore, with the task of inventing functions like literacy and numeracy, our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns of information; and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these areas automatically. In one way or another these three principles of brain organization a foundation for all of readings evolution, developments, and failure.”[vii]. 

Reading requires these separate perceptual and cognitive functions to work in a highly coordinated manner: the visual recognition of a letterform, the sequencing of letterforms, and recognition of sequences as representations of words, all must synchronize in ways that our brains did not acquire through biological evolution. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker put it, “children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.”[viii]). By training humans to read, those naturally not-coordinated processes can be harnessed to create a valuable new meta-process — the ability to encode knowledge in written marks, transmit those marks across time and space, and to for any other trained person a thousand miles away or a thousand years in the future to decode that knowledge. The display of letterforms on a blackboard, the rote recitation of the alphabet by students — tools that go back to the dawn of civilization — are brain-changing methods for creating entirely new mental mechanisms by connecting existing ones in a new way. Another reading expert, Stanislas Dehaene, calls this adoption of previously-evolved brain mechanisms to serve new tasks “neuronal recycling.”[ix] 

Although it isn’t a Language Acquisition Device, new knowledge about infant’s auditory perceptions lends another clue: Infant brains appear to actively listen for sounds and frequencies that are repeated and which are repeated in proximity to each other – a kind of statistical sampling and algorithmic filtering that computer signal processing uses. Neural networks become attuned to French or English and/or Japanese through hearing – which is why native Japanese speakers have trouble distinguishing the English use of the letters r and l.[x] 

At some point, somehow, humans learned to repurpose our abilities to perceive and think. Many pieces of the puzzle have come to light, but that liminal zone between biological evolution and the emergence of language and culture still lacks certainty about the “cardinal distinction” question. 

[i] Howard Rheingold, Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? (New York, TED books, 2012)

[ii] Luis M. Chiappe, “Downsized Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary Transition to Modern Birds,” Evolution: Education and Outreach, June 2009, Volume 2, Issue 2, pp 248-256 < https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12052-009-0133-4> accessed Jan 24, 2018

[iii] William Calvin, The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain, (New York, McGraw-Hill 1983). <http://www.williamcalvin.com/bk2/bk2.htm> accessed January 24, 2018.

[iv] Wolf, Maryanne, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

[v] Ibid

[vi] Dehaene, Stanislas, Reading In The Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention, New York: Viking, 2009.

[vii] Op.Cit, Wolf

[viii] Pinker, Steven, “Foreword” In D. McGuinness, Why Our Children Can’t Read — and What We Can Do About It: A Scientific Revolution in Reading, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997

[ix] Op.Cit Dehaene.

[x] Patricia Kuhl, Pinkel Lecture, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science University of Pennsylvania. < http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/pinkel/lectures/kuhl/kuhl_full.pdf> accessed January 25, 2018.