by Matthew Cobb
US author Tom Wolfe has a new novel Back to Blood, which has just appeared in the UK [JAC note: there’s a mixed review of it in today’s New York Times.] I’ve seen it in Waterstone’s (a major UK chain of bookshops), but haven’t read it. I’m not sure I’ll bother, as although I enjoyed The Bonfire of the Vanities, I found A Man in Full over-long and unfocused (though it did tell me more than I wanted to know about reproduction in horses). I find his journalistic writing – in particular The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff, both of which remain inspirations to me – to be far more enthralling.
So I was particularly intrigued to read an interview with Wolfe in The Daily Telegraph in which Wolfe announces that his next book (he’s 81!) will be a non-fiction work on the theory of evolution, The Human Beast. (Most of the interview is about Back to Blood, which is about immigration, and prompted some pretty vile comments from loony readers.) It’s hard to tell from the snippets given in the interview whether this will be way off target or insightful, but Wolfe has been trailing this for several years now, and I fear the worst. In 2006 he gave this Jefferson Lecture in which he proclaims:
No evolutionist has come up with even an interesting guess as to when speech began, but it was at least 11,000 years ago, which is to say, 9000 B.C. It seems to be the consensus . . . in the notoriously capricious field of evolutionary chronology . . . that 9000 B.C. was about when the human beast began farming, and the beast couldn’t have farmed without speech
Leaving aside the sideswipe about ‘evolutionary chronology’, the fact that we don’t know precisely when we started speaking, and the truism that we’d have had a hard time farming without speech, Wolfe’s dating is way off. Think about it – we’d have a hard time creating the art at Lascaux, the Willendorf Venus, or honing and developing our tools, without speech. Even if we assume that only our species spoke (ie not Neanderthals or our ancestors), that would put the date, capriciously, at around 100,000 years ago… I hope that Wolfe has done some more research in the intervening years.
The Telegraph interview, by Richard Grant, concludes with a detail that I still can’t decide whether it was right or rude to include. Grant is correct to state that Wolfe would certainly not have omitted the image. What do readers think, about Wolfe, his next book, or the etiquette of revealing human frailty?
Titled The Human Beast, it will be a non-fiction book about the theory of evolution, its history, its shortcomings and the ways in which some contemporary neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists have taken it to absurd conclusions. The story begins in the aching, splitting, fevered head of the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. He came up with idea of natural selection on his malarial sickbed while collecting specimens in Malaya, and wrote it down in a letter that reached London before Darwin had published a word.
By the time Wolfe starts telling the story of Wallace and Darwin, he has already been talking for two hours, sitting there on the elegant antique sofa with his white trouser cuffs riding up over those Argyle socks. It has been more of a discursive, wandering monologue than an interview, consistently funny and engaging, but sometimes he has needed a reminder of what he was talking about five minutes ago that led him to where he is now. I’ve given up trying to steer him back to my original list of questions. It seems too rude to interrupt an elderly gentleman, especially one you have admired so greatly, as he relives his battles and skirmishes and famous ripostes.
‘Where was I? Oh yeah, Alfred Russel Wallace. Well, Darwin was an honest man up to a point, and when he read Wallace’s letter he saw that his life’s work had been negated…’
At that moment, a large drop of blood falls out of Wolfe’s nose and lands on his white silk tie. I watch transfixed, but he hasn’t noticed. The monologue continues. ‘Now Zola was obviously writing under the influence of Darwin, who said that there was no cardinal distinction – Nietzsche’s term – between man and beast…’
Another drop of blood falls and skids off his tie on to his trousers.
Um, you’ve got a nosebleed, I interrupt.
‘What?’ he says.
You have a nosebleed.
‘Really? My God. Sorry.’
He dabs at his nose, sees the blood on the handkerchief, and gets up, looking mortified. ‘Let me take care of this,’ he says, and exits the room.
I was going to withhold the nosebleed incident from this article, out of respect, but then it occurred to me that Tom Wolfe would never waste an image like that. The aged writer rambling away about ancient controversies, totally oblivious to the globs of blood falling from his nose and landing with shocking redness on his trademark white suit. Oh, the betrayal of the flesh!
Returning without his tie, and apologising for ‘the dramatic interruption’, he finished up his disquisition on The Human Beast with a wad of cotton stuffed up his treacherous left nostril.
Since speech doesn’t fossilize, no one knows.
My own guess is speech arose early, millions of years ago and evolved as are brains expanded.
1. We are a group living species. The advantages of intra-group communication are so great, they must have been selected early on.
2. You don’t have to have a huge brain to communicate. Even retarded people talk. A lot. So do parrots i.e. Alex or ravens.
Even my cats communicate with me. It’s not always verbal but they can get their needs and wants across.
If you’re going to characterise speech as “verbal sounds that convey wants/needs” (which, is rather a broad definition of speech, granted) then sure, hundreds of millions of years ago speech probably did arise! So really it depends what you mean by “arose” – sure, the basics were probably laid down long before there were homo sapiens, but at what level of complexity?
Enough to farm and make tools, which is the topic, I think.
As with all things evolutionary, there is no clear dividing line. There was no human who was the first to speak, just as there was no hominid who was the first human.
As others have observed, at the very least, all vertebrates are capable of some form of rudimentary communication. Invertebrates, too — it’s not hard to tell the difference between a happy honey bee going about her business (and don’t you agree that these flowers smell loverly?), one who’s annoyed with you and wish you’d go elsewhere, and one who’s drawn a line in the…erm…air. They’re also quite adept at telling their sisters where the good stash of nectar is, as well as rallying them to the defense of the hive. That’s some mighty sophisticated communication going on, especially considering how few neurons they have to work with.
So, then, the question comes to one of when well-defined verbal communication arose, presumably with a sizable vocabulary and grammar and what-not. Again, that didn’t happen in a single generation; instead, it slowly accrued generation after generation. There wasn’t ever a case of children and parents not being able to understand each other (aside, of course, from the usual “get off my lawn” complaints).
And, as such, any line you might care to draw will be entirely arbitrary. Indeed, a very powerful argument can be made that no truly complete language existed until Turing developed (the concept of) his famous Machine. But who would be so silly as to say that “real” language is less than a century old and that only machines and a handful of specialists are fluent in it?
Cheers,
b&
Damn! That is so hilarious! And I think he’s right, Tom Wolf would’ve told it that way too and for him to have told it as Tom would’ve is actually to show a great respect.
Tom Wolfe appears to believe that Intelligent Design is a credible scientific theory.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php
If this rubbish is a foretaste of his next book he is going to make a fool of himself.
It is self-referential writing, since “sheer mush” is obviously what it is when looking at the actual science results vs the fallacious “not evolution, so creationism” argumentation of creationists and their useful idiots.
And when was Behe not “religiosi”? Behe is a Roman Catholic and argues for creationist “design”, for crying out loud!
Wolfe published a collection of essays under the title “Hooking Up” around 2000. (I’m not at home so don’t have my copy in front of me and am accordingly working from memory.) One of the essays early in the book was Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died. The piece was essentially a hagiography of E.O. Wilson, focusing in part on the “Sociobiology” Wars (and containing the obligatory swipes at S.J. Gould, suggesting that Gould’s objections were motivated mainly by professional jealousy, but reflecting more than anything else Wolfe’s distaste for Gould’s Marxism).
The paragraph “andreschuiteman” quotes above occurs (again, IIRC) near the end of Wolfe’s essay and its import was to stress that the field — evolutionary biology as applied to the study of human behavior — has fostered a “question everything” ethos, not as any kind of implicit or explicit endorsement of ID.
In the essay, Wolfe expresses great admiration for neuroscience, going so far as to suggest that, if he were choosing a career from scratch today, he would forego journalism, and throw in his lot with the neuroscientists.
No doubt Wolfe’s book will contain the type of errors to be expected of an amateur in the field. (Its analysis of the subject may also demonstrate that Wolfe is past his prime, that he’s lost some speed off his intellectual fastball.) But I’d be highly surprised if the book set forth any wholesale assault on mainstream evolutionary biology. Unless Wolfe’s views have changed radically from those expressed in Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, look for him to hew closely to the Wilsonian line — meaning that he may spout some idiosyncratic views: a too-ready acceptance of “group selection,” an overly avid appetite for the “adaptationist agenda” — but otherwise expect him not to deviate too drastically from the Modern Synthesis.
Keep in mind also that in Wolfe’s immediately preceding novel, the parodic campus yarn I am Charlotte Simmons, the only academic cast in a favorable light — the one who gives poor Charlotte a deservedly low grade, and the only character in the novel who dresses well (usually a reliable signal in the Wolfian oeuvre of some deeper moral rectitude — was an evolutionary biologist/neuroscientist of sorts (again, I don’t have the novel with me to fact-check), and a staunch Darwin defender (who laughs off young Charlotte’s callow criticism of Darwin in the first paper she submits in his class, though he’s sufficiently impressed with her style of argumentation to offer her a position as his assistant).
The fears that Wolfe’s upcoming non-fiction book will be some frontal assault on evolutionary theory are unfounded.
I didn’t mean to suggest that Wolfe is an ID-er himself, just that he appeared sufficiently ill-informed to believe that the ‘theories’ of people like Behe are real science.
And I didn’t mean to suggest that you were claiming that Wolfe is an ID-er, andreschuiteman; I meant only to point out that concerns that Wolfe was going to diss mainstream evolutionary biology were misplaced. The title of his evolutionary psychology/neuroscience piece itself — Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died — is indicative of his outright rejection of dualism. That essay also sets out a refutation of libertarian “free will” that could have been plucked from what Jerry has propounded here.
I do not doubt that there will be grounds for valid criticism of Wolfe’s take on evolution in his upcoming book — there almost always is with Wolfe, not in the least because, like many a story-teller, he’s prone to trim the facts to fit a good tale — but his wholesale acceptance of pseudo-science isn’t likely to be among them. (Wolfe is a professed non-believer in all things supernatural, if I recall correctly — though the bizarre ending of his essay, about something dolphin-like swimming through the primordial muck to rescue Man, does make me wonder.)
Wolfe’s citations to Behe and Berlinski were plainly wrongheaded. But the point he was trying to make was that the field was so full of intellectual energy that nothing was safe from challenge, including mainstream, well-settled science like Darwinian evolution (and Big-bang Cosmology, and General Relativity, among others). He exaggerates the specifics, but his central thesis isn’t all that wide of the mark.
How is it non-fiction if he’s just making shit up?
I don’t need to recommend that Wolfe stick to his strengths as a fiction writer, it seems he’s still doing that.
Good point. Similarly, this makes you wonder why the Christian top seller, the bible, isn’t prominent here: http://www.christianbook.com/fiction
Wolfe’s dating may be 2 orders of magnitude off. In a simplest possible model (not accounting for all food sources and qualities), our ancestral hominids were using cooking at the time brain expansion took off in them: “An ape can’t evolve a brain as big as a human’s [in number of neurons], while still eating like an ape. Their energy budget simply wouldn’t balance.”
Cooking at the level required (not only adding taste but utilizing previously bounded nutrients) should be a fairly complex technology. As you can’t easily follow the cooking process, maybe “monkey see, monkey do” doesn’t cut it. [Thorough bake by cladding the food and leave it under or near a fire for a less constrained time wouldn’t be the first cooking technology, I think.] In that case I don’t see how you can propagate it without some form of language capability.
I don’t quite follow the reasoning, haven’t read the paper, but it seems to me cooking as a nutrient factor can have kicked in between habilis and erectus. The authors place it within erectus. In any case, we are talking millions of years.
Purely speculative from my side, but it does qualify as “an interesting quess” (IMHO).
I’ve read the paper and wondered when it would be discussed here, since it’s got some media exposure recently. It looks like a very rough, seat-of-the-pants estimate. Not entirely unplausible.
I’d take the objections of Karin Isler seriously, though. She’s known for the quality of her statistical work.
Re Wolfe, he is a journalist at heart, i.e., not unduly given to fact-checking. He may have picked up references to the much-mediatised Gray & Anderson 2003 paper in Nature, on the alleged initial Indo-European language-tree divergence, 7800-9800 BP (way too late IMHO), correlated with the spreading of farming from Anatolia. Hence his confusion between the beginnings of farming and of speech.
Seems like every few years some celeb notices there is a big audience for anti-Darwin material. Ben Stein’s “Expelled” comes to mind. I’m not a celeb. As a working biochemist and bioinformatics scientist, I spent some time trying to understand why ID isn’t dead yet. Research is not a task well suited for lazy thinkers like Behe. It requires some effort. Last week I drove another critical nail in the ID coffin. Seems like history reveals the mousetrap is reducible. You can read about it here.
http://bioimplement.blogspot.sg/2012/10/the-mouse-trap-redux.html
There are more examples to come, and some new critical blows to deliver to ID. If Wolfe wants to enter the ring with old arguments, there is no shortage of scientists now willing to stand beside Dawkins and Coyne, and indeed it was Hitchens that called us into service.
As entertaining as he is, methinks Wolfe just passed the The Electric Kool-aid Asshat Test with swirling colors.
Wolfe may be adrift on evolution but he’s spot on on politics if his comments on BBC’s world Service this morning are anything to go by.
“No evolutionist has come up with even an interesting guess as to when speech began, but it was at least 11,000 years ago, which is to say, 9000 B.C. It seems to be the consensus . . . in the notoriously capricious field of evolutionary chronology . . . that 9000 B.C. was about when the human beast began farming, and the beast couldn’t have farmed without speech”
To show how stupid this is, let me parody this argument:
“Humans invented cars in the 1880s. It’s impossible to drive a car without being able to walk upright, therefore humans started to walk upright in the 1880s.”
According to evolutionists research, speech might be older than 200,000 years.
The discovery in 2007 of a Neanderthal hyoid bone suggests that Neanderthals may have been anatomically capable of producing sounds similar to modern humans. The hypoglossal nerve, which passes through the canal, controls the movements of the tongue and its size is said to reflect speech abilities. Hominids who lived earlier than 300,000 years ago had hypoglossal canals more akin to those of chimpanzees than of humans.[128][129][130]
Fontes:
[128]Jungers, William L. et al. (August 2003). “Hypoglossal Canal Size in Living Hominoids and the Evolution of Human Speech”. Archived from the original on 2007-06-12. Retrieved 2007-09-10.
[129] DeGusta, David et al. (1999). “Hypoglossal Canal Size and Hominid Speech”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96 (4): “Hypoglossal canal size has previously been used to date the origin of human-like speech capabilities to at least 400,000 years ago and to assign modern human vocal abilities to Neandertals. These conclusions are based on the hypothesis that the size of the hypoglossal canal is indicative of speech capabilities.”
[130] Johansson, Sverker (April 2006). “Constraining the Time When Language Evolved” (PDF). Evolution of Language: Sixth International Conference, Rome: Retrieved 2007-09-10. “Hyoid bones are very rare as fossils, as they are not attached to the rest of the skeleton, but one Neanderthal hyoid has been found (Arensburg et al., 1989), very similar to the hyoid of modern Homo sapiens, leading to the conclusion that Neanderthals had a vocal tract similar to ours (Houghton, 1993; Bo¨e, Maeda, & Heim, 1999).”