The Kingdom of Speech Read online

  How very naive of him! The British Gentleman was not merely rich, powerful, and refined. He was also a slick operator…smooth…smooth…smooth and then some. It was said that a British Gentleman could steal your underwear, your smalls and skivvies and knickers, and leave you staring straight at him asking if he didn’t think it had turned rather chilly all of a sudden.

  When he received the manuscript and the letter, in June of 1858—and please forgive an anachronism, namely, a verb from almost exactly one century later—Mr. Charles Darwin freaked out. He delivered the manuscript to his good friend Lyell, all right…along with a bleating yelp for help. In twenty pages this man Wallace had forestalled his life’s work—his entire life’s work! “Forestalled” was the 1858 word for “scooped.”

  Darwin had achieved a solid reputation among naturalists with a series of monographs about coral reefs, volcanic islands, fossils, barnacles, the habits of mammals…he had written an engaging and highly praised book, Journal of Researches, about his five-year (1831–36) voyage aboard His Majesty’s Ship Beagle, one of England’s many government-sponsored worldwide explorations in the nineteenth century. He had been elected not only to the Geological Society but also to the most prestigious scientific body in England, the Royal Society of London, whose membership was restricted to eight hundred, namely, the eight hundred leading scientists in the world. Fine: and all that meant nothing to him in light of his Theory of Evolution, his very much secret life’s work.

  He had started thinking about evolution—“transmutation” was the term for it at the time—when he was on the Beagle. By 1837, a year after the expedition had ended, he was convinced that all plant and animal life on earth was the result of the transmutation, i.e., evolution, of all the various species over millions of years. And not just plants and animals…the Beagle explorers spent long intervals on land, and Darwin kept coming upon natives so primitive they struck a British Gentleman like himself as closer to apes than to humans…particularly the Fuegians. The Fuegians (pronounced “Fwaygians”) were natives of Tierra del Fuego, an Argentine and Chilean province so far south that the tip at the bottom is part of Antarctica. The Fuegians were brown and sun-wrinkled and hairy. The hair on their heads was as wild as a howling…a howling…well, as a howling hairy ape’s. Their hairy legs were too short and their hairy arms too long for their hairy torsos. In Darwin’s eyes, the only thing that distinguished the Fuegians from the higher apes was the power of speech, if you could call theirs a power. The Fuegian vocabulary was so small, and their grunt-sunken grammar was so simple and simpleminded, it was a rather lame distinction, to Darwin’s way of thinking.22 He had no idea yet that speech, whether grunted by brutes in the middle of nowhere or intoned by toffs in London, was by far—very far—the greatest power possessed by any creature on earth.

  It was after laying eyes on these and other hairy apes below the equator that a blasphemous, mortally sinful, absolutely exciting, fame-flirting, glory-glistening notion stole into Darwin’s head. What if people like the Fuegians weren’t really people but rather an intermediate stage in the transmutation, the evolution, of the ape into…Homo sapiens? That God created man in his own image was a centerpiece of Christian belief. In 1809, when Lamarck had dared to suggest (in Philosophie Zoologique) that apes had evolved into man, it was widely assumed that only his legendary heroism during the Seven Years’ War saved him from serious grief at the hands of the Church and its powerful allies. (Artillery fire had killed more than half of a French infantry company’s men and all its officers. A short, skinny, seventeen-year-old enlisted man, a Private Lamarck, stepped forward and through sheer force of personality assumed command and held the company’s position until reinforcements arrived…)

  Darwin was petrified by the prospect of condemnation but aflame with ambition. Seven years later, in 1844, the author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation felt the same way: so he hid behind the byline Anonymous and never came out. Not even the prospect of fame was enough to overcome his fear. His name was not revealed until the twelfth edition of Vestiges was published in 1884, the book’s fortieth anniversary…thirteen years after the author’s death. Then, at last, the title page bore a byline: Robert Chambers. For all their snobbery, the Gentlemen naturalists proved to have been right. Chambers was not a Gentleman but a journalist, cofounder with his brother, William, of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and Chambers’s Encyclopaedia…and an amateur one-shot naturalist.

  Darwin turned out to be every bit as gun-shy as Chambers, but more than that held him back. As a dedicated naturalist he had an even bigger problem: a huge gap in evidence when it came to language, which set humans far apart from any animal ancestors. It gnawed at him. He could explain man’s opposable thumb, upright stature, and huge cranium, but he couldn’t find one shred of solid evidence that human speech had evolved from animals. Speech seemed to have just popped up into the mouths of human beings from out of nowhere. He thought and thought. And thought…

  Wait a minute. What was speech? Vocal communication, right? Well, animals had their forms of vocal communication, too, and some were fairly complex. Vervet monkeys had different cries to warn the troop of the presence of the most dangerous predators. They had one cry for leopards, another for eagles, another for baboons, another for pythons, plus variations of the python cry to indicate a mamba or a cobra. They used certain intonations to indicate that a particular fellow vervet’s reports weren’t altogether reliable. There you had it: monkey semantics. If that wasn’t the equivalent of speech, what was? All right, there was no direct evidence to point to…but it was self-evident, wasn’t it? Animal speech like the vervet’s had evolved into human speech…somehow…and if there was no clear evidence…well, it just meant nobody had looked hard enough, because it had to be there somewhere.

  But why had to be? Because at that moment, in 1837, Darwin had fallen, without realizing it, into the trap of cosmogonism, the compulsion to find the ever-elusive Theory of Everything, an idea or narrative that reveals everything in the world to be part of a single and suddenly clear pattern. The first savant to set such a goal seems to have lived during the third century BCE, although the term itself, Theory of Everything, wasn’t coined until half a century ago by a science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem, in order to make fun of it. By the end of the last century, it had started appearing in scientific journals with a serious face on. To Darwin it had been serious business a century before that, no matter what it was called. Proving that speech evolved from sounds uttered by lower animals became Darwin’s obsession. After all, his was a Theory of Everything. No matter what verbal acrobatics and leaps of logic it might require, speech, language, had to fit into his flawless cosmogony. Speak, beasts.

  “Cosmogony” literally means “world-birth.” In its pure form, a cosmogony is an account, like the one in the Bible’s book of Genesis, of the creation of the universe and all forms of life, culminating in man. In the beginning, nothing material exists, only a spirit and a force called God. God creates the material world in six days and rests on the seventh. He creates man in his own image and puts him in charge. Very few other cosmogonies feature any such almighty god or great invisible force as the creator. Quite the opposite.

  The vast majority of cosmogonies involve an animal, and the animal is never one noted for its size, physical power, or ferocity. Not at all. The trend is not toward bigger and bigger but smaller and smaller. One version of the North American Apache cosmogony opens with a great void. Way up in the void arrives a disk. Curled up inside the disk is a little old man with a long white beard. He sticks his head out and finds himself utterly alone. So he creates another little man, much like himself. (Kindly refrain from mundane technical questions.) Somehow, up in the void, they take to playing with a ball of dirt. A scorpion appears from nowhere and starts pulling at it. He pulls whole strands of dirt out of the ball. Longer and longer he pulls them, farther farther farther they extend, until he has created earth, sun, moon, and all the stars.23 This is
, of course, the original version of 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. What this, like virtually every other contemporary retread of an ancient cosmogony, lacks is the original’s cast of colorful characters. The big bang theory desperately needs someone like the scorpion or the little man with a long white beard curled up inside a disk. Or like Michabo the Great Hare. Michabo is the creator in the Algonquin Indians’ cosmogony. In the beginning, the Algonquins believed, the earth’s surface was entirely under water. There was no visible land at all. One day Michabo the Great Hare is out on a raft with a crew of other animals. He tells three of them to dive to the bottom of the sea and bring up some earth. They manage to find a single grain of sand…out of which the Great Hare creates a huge island, apparently North America. He transmutes the bodies of dead animals into men, namely, the Algonquins.f

  Compared to the animals who star as creators in other cosmogonies, however, a full-grown hare is an enormous creature. Many are mere birds. The Tlingit natives of the American Northwest believed they originated with Yehlh the Raven. Yehlh creates the world and populates it with man—but there’s no light! Everything is pitch dark. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. The problem is, Yehlh has a Good-versus-Evil, God-versus-Devil relationship with a dark-feathered uncle who has stolen the sun, the moon, and the stars. So Yehlh turns himself into a hemlock needle that gestates into a boy. Just a boy, he looks like, and the uncle thinks nothing of it. The boy discovers the sun, the moon, and the stars hidden in a box, runs away with them, then turns himself back into Yehlh the Raven and flies them to the heavens and lights up the world.24 The Cherokee Indians’ cosmogony resembled the Algonquins’ but starred an animal that makes a raven look gigantic, namely, a water beetle. It is Beetle who dives to the bottom of the primal sea and comes up carrying the bottommost mud, which he will use to create the earth.25 Yet another so-called “earth diver” cosmogony, the Assiniboine Indians’, stars an insect smaller than Beetle, namely, Inktomi the Spider. Inktomi makes the dives, creates earth, and populates it with human beings…plus horses for them to ride.26 In an Egyptian cosmogony a dung beetle called Khepri takes on the persona of Atum-Re, god of the morning sun. He resurrects himself every morning, rising from the underworld. He could use a new persona. Dung beetles live by rolling other animals’ offal into balls and eating them or hiding them in the ground for later. The Egyptians gave the dung beetle a name that wasn’t exactly music to the ears, but you could at least say it in front of company, viz., the scarab.27 Among the Khoisan peoples in Africa, the great cosmogonic creator is Cagn, a praying mantis, an insect that looks positively anorexic next to a svelte, fat dung beetle. Cagn created not only all animals and all people but also language…and the moon. The moon was an afterthought. One night some hunters kill an animal Cagn has created. So Cagn takes its gallbladder out and hurls it into the sky and lights it up…to give animals—and people—a fighting chance of seeing what’s coming at night.28

  The Navajo Indians’ creator was an insect that seems to have been identical to what is known today as the biting midge (colloquially, the no-see-um bug). Biting midges are so small you can’t see them. But you can’t mistake them when they bite your ankle. For all practical purposes they are invisible. But the Navajo biting-midge creator was smaller than small and invisibler than invisible, because it came into this world without its two wings. Yet it is the creator in probably the most sophisticated cosmogony ever believed in, a story of full-scale, gradual evolution from next to nothing to modern man. In the beginning, the biting midges lived in the First World, down deep deep deep beneath the earth’s surface. As evolution began, they grew back their missing wings, and one species evolved all the way into a full-blown insect, a locust. Locust led the hives up into the Second World, where they began to evolve into animals of every species. Then Locust led the whole burgeoning menagerie up into the Third World, where the most advanced species evolved into men. Then Locust led all the men and all the animals up into the Fourth World, which was right below the crust of the earth. In an Inktomi-like show of energy and dedication, the menagerie’s spiders built rope ladders out of their webbing so that everybody could climb up onto the earth’s surface.g

  A later cosmogony was a dead ringer for the Navajos’, dead and unfortunately duller, except for one thing. The creator in this cosmogony was a creature even smaller, even less visible to the naked eye, than a biting midge, namely, a single, undifferentiated cell—or “four or five” of them. “Undifferentiated” means it could evolve into any living thing, vegetable or animal. This cosmogony was the only one recent enough for people to know the chief storyteller by name: Charles Darwin. “Four or five” is from a scrap of conversation he had with a group of students not long after he told the story publicly. The students had the sort of naive, unbridled, free-floating curiosity most youths unfortunately rein in far too early in life. They wanted to know some small but fundamental details about the moment Evolution got under way and how exactly, physically, it started up—and from what?

  Darwin had apparently never thought of it quite that way before. Long pause…and finally, “Ohhh,” he said, “probably from four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere.”h One student pressed him further. He wanted to know where the cells came from. Who or what put them in the pool? An exasperated Darwin said, in effect, “Well, I don’t know…look, isn’t it enough that I’ve brought you man and all the animals and plants in the world?”

  In this respect, Darwinism was typical of the more primitive cosmogonies. They avoided the question of how the world developed ex nihilo. Darwin often thought about it, but it made his head hurt. The world was just…here. All cosmogonies, whether the Apaches’ or Charles Darwin’s, faced the same problem. They were histories or, better said, stories of things that had occurred in a primordial past, long before there existed anyone capable of recording them. The Apaches’ scorpion and Darwin’s cells in that warm pool somewhere were by definition educated guesses. Darwin, a Cambridge man, after all, was highly educated by the standards of his time, but so, no doubt, was the Apache medicine man who came up with the little old man with the long beard in the disk. The difference in Darwin’s case was that he put together his story in an increasingly rational age. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to present his cosmogony as anything other than a scientific hypothesis. In the Navajo cosmogony the agent of change (as distinct from the creator) was alive. It was Locust. In Darwin’s cosmogony it had to be scientifically inanimate. Locust was renamed Evolution.

  There were five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Had anyone observed the phenomenon—in this case, Evolution—as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory (Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” test)? Could scientists make predictions based on it? Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science? In the case of Evolution…well…no…no…no…no…and no.

  In other words, there was no scientific way to test it. Like every other cosmogony, it was a serious and sincere story meant to satisfy man’s endless curiosity about where he came from and how he came to be so different from the animals around him. But it was still a story. It was not evidence. In short, it was sincere, but sheer, literature.

  It certainly wasn’t scientific experimentation or observation that finally convinced Darwin that man had no special place in the universe. It was a visit to the London Zoo in the spring of 1838, two years after the voyage of the Beagle. One of the zoo’s most popular attractions was an orangutan named Jenny. Jenny had become so used to being around people that many of her reactions had become absolutely human in nature. Sometimes she wore clothes. Her gestures, her facial expressions, the sounds she made, the way she acted out frustration, mockery, anger, guileless glee, or I-love-you, Help-me! Help-me!, I-want I-want…th
is last with a whine that made one see how hard she was struggling to put it all into words—it was clear as day! Now Darwin was certain! Jenny was a human being behind the flimsiest of veils. He used his clout as a Gentleman and a leading naturalist to enter Jenny’s cage and study her expressions up close.29

  Certain he was…and so what? That left him as stumped as everybody else who was so sure about it, including his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus couldn’t figure out exactly how transmutationi—Evolution—occurred, and neither could his grandson.

  In October of 1838, Charles happened to pick up a copy of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population…“for amusement,” as he put it, apparently assuming that no deep thinker could possibly find a book as old and popular as Principle of Population profound.30 He started reading it, and—

  Ahura! That old Malthusian magic’s got me in its spell! It lights up Darwin’s brainpan precisely the way it would Wallace’s twenty years later—It!—the solution to what naturalists, including Darwin himself until that very moment, called “the mystery of mysteries”: how the littlest creature (or “four or five” of them), smaller even than the smallest invisible biting midge—namely, a cell; never mind those great bulky hares and scorpions and dung-eating beetles—a cell, or a cell and a few brethren, grew up into the most highly developed creature of all, one with a certified Latin name, Homo sapiens.