Wolfe Misses in 2016 Language Rumination

From Wikimedia Commons, White House Photo by Susan Sterner.March 22 2004. American writer Tom Wolfe. I'm in general, a fan.

Tom Wolfe is an entertaining spinner of stories, although I tire, sometimes, of his typographic trickery and long, rambling sentences. Nonetheless, in a series of nonfiction works and novels stretching back to the 1960s, he’s an enchanting, worthwhile American writer, a unique, acerbic jester of words.

Late last December, the weather was not all that good and we were looking for something indoors to do with a grandson, so we took him to the main Cedar Rapid Library. I am a slow reader in a house full of books, so I have been a very infrequent library visitor—my card was so old I had to get a new one in order to use it.

But there I saw Wolfe’s 2016 book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” and obtained a new library card so that I could check it out. I think I've read most of his books and liked most of them, so why not?

And I was disappointed. Wolfe attempts to discredit the Theory of Evolution, on his way to arguing that human language is not connected to our biological history, but instead a unique human creation, a tool.

In a sense, he’s right when he culminates by declaring language to be an artifact, like a Buick, and thus not something that comes from our evolution. He’s correct, as far as I can tell, in pointing out that language is artificial, constructed, invented, not something we’re born with.

As for Evolution, Wolfe seem to distrust that as a tale no less fanciful than any other creation story. He's deeply wrong about that. And the fact that language is artificial doesn’t meant that it’s not connected to our evolution as a species.

His attack on Evolution let me disenchanted. It seemed to be that the one who is mistaken here isn't Darwin, but Wolfe.

“There are five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis,” Wofle writes. They are, he states:

1. Has anyone else observed and recorded the phenomenon?
2. Could other scientists replicate it?
3. Could any come up with facts that contradict the theory?
4. Can scientists make predictions based on it?
5. Does it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas?

“In the case of Evolution … well … no … no … no … no … and no,” Wolfe declared.

And that was where I stumble. I’m not a scientist, so my understanding here is based on casual reading, yet in four of five points, I think he’s wrong.

Has anyone observed and recorded the phenomenon? Well, sure. There’s an extensive fossil record of many species, including ours, changing over time. Our fossil record isn’t complete—converting bone to rock is rare—but in the two centuries that Evolution has been an idea, the ancient bones seem to bear it out. And we even see it occurring in real time—the quick shifts in the virus that caused our recent pandemic, for instance. I think part of the issue here is that, even when it’s acting quickly, Evolution in complex species occurs at a time scale a human mind struggles to grasp. We as a species haven’t reached a million years yet, but even hundreds of thousands of years of modern humans walking the Earth is far beyond a single lifetime. We struggle to fully understand that time frame. And yet our modern knowledge of genetics confirms it—we not only know Evolution is real, we can track it; for example, we know the percent of the Neanderthal genome that is left in modern humans. So his first “no” is fully bogus. Lots of scientists have seen and continue to see the phenomenon.

Can other scientists replicate it? That’s a question asked when a testable hypothesis is being experimentally proved or disproved. Evolution is more of a framework incorporating lots of disparate evidence—but yes, serious biologists and paleontologists have all “replicated” this large hypothesis by replicating many of the small pieces that add up to the big idea. Wolfe’s "no" is a bit of sleight of hand, Evolution is not a hypothesis testable by a single experiment, but despite that, it’s been “replicated” repeatedly and reliably.

Can anyone come up with facts to discredit the theory? Although Wofle recounts several creation myths and seems to put them on equal footing with Evolution, he answers this one “no,” which seems like a win for Evolution, the one positive he concedes to the idea he’s attacking. You can come up with lots of alternative stories of how the world came to be, but none other that has the history of scientific observations that Evolution has.

Can scientists make predictions based on it? Sure. We get a new flu shot every year in response to a virus that is constantly evolving. The Theory of Evolution alone doesn’t help us concoct next year’s shot, but I think pretty much 100 percent of the scientists who are working on the 2024 flu shot are making projections based on genetic shift, on natural selection—Darwin’s machinery at work. It’s not exactly a “yes,” because, again, the phenomenon is not one observed in short-term human terms, but Evolution very much shapes what biologists conjecture about what comes next. The word “prediction” is a bit tricky here, since Evolution is messy and random, but sure, we expect constant change due to Natural Selection, and we correctly act on that understanding.

The final “no” is, to me, one of the weirdest. It seems to be that this big theory clearly illuminates a mystery. Evolution didn’t spring into Charles Darwin’s (or Alfred Wallace’s) brains from nothing, but were part of the burgeoning 19th century exploration of the world. The idea of inherited traits was barely being understood. The variety of plants and animals found that matched their sites yet were similar to related species nearby—the increasing catalog of life was providing hints. The question was, where did life come from? Darwin’s conception and understanding of Evolution is not the same as ours—scientists today understand DNA and genes and fossils much more than they did in his day—but he fundamentally was right. We can see at a molecular level that species did come from other species, we can trace how related different plants and animals are to each other based on their molecular fingerprints, we know so much more today about an origin story that was being explored but not understood in Darwin’s time. So, yes, Evolution illuminates. Why does Wolfe say "no" here? I do not understand.

I don’t mind Wolfe’s mocking of British social classes, nor even his attacks on modern academics. And I’ll concede that, like a Buick, language is something we create. But I think he’s missing an important point. Our capacity to create language (or Buicks) is not coincidental to understanding us.

A Buick is possible because we have among the largest and most complex brains in our mammal clan, combined with deft, opposable thumbs. Over the ages, we have used those evolving features of our biology to create and change the world. And Wolfe is not only correct that language is a created artifact, he’s on target that we use language as our most valuable human attribute, as the main artifact that gives us the world dominating (and world threatening) position we occupy today.

And yet, remember that the Buick has evolved. The Buick of 2024 isn’t the one of 1954. Before Buicks, there were wagons and chariots and the wheel. The Buick is an artifact, and thus did not biologically evolve, but artifacts are selected by us and I think there is a parallel in the changes in the stuff we make and in the critters we observe in that, over time, change seems unavoidable. Change is driven by selection, natural or human, and is a constantly seen reality.

Language? We made it. But when? Were the first speakers humans of our species or somewhere along that hominid path that diverged from the apes millions of years ago? Did Neanderthals sing and tell stories and chant prayers at funerals? Probably. Homo Erectus? Probably not. But when was the change? We don't know, but that doesn't mean our language ability didn't evolve.

Our faces, our jaws, our lips, our vocal chords—they give us an incredible ability to mimic a wide range of sounds, to hum and whistle and sing. And speak. One reason we’re unique is not just that we have a big brain that helps us to to craft the artifacts of Buicks and of language, we also have the vocal apparatus for vowels and constants and clicks and whistles. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives (see genetics, and no, we didn’t descend from them, their body rebuild since the time of our common ancestor has been more radical than ours—it’s accurate to say, from a chimp’s point of view, that they descended from humans) have an impressive variety of vocalizations.

They, too, can plan and coordinate actions. They make wars in groups. They even craft tools and use primitive spears for hunting (so much for Wolfe’s false assertion that only humans make artifacts). But their lack of language stunts their capacity to build a Buick—partly because their throats and sinus cavities and vocal chords can’t do the kind of subtle sound trickery as Home Sapiens can. To speak, we gave up, over eons, a large jaw and impressive canines—but we gained our ability to make and share words and shout and whisper in words our more complicated plans, to record our knowledge, to have a weird and marvelous bipedal body built, by natural selection to create our special brands of sound.

Our bodies’ aren’t revolutionary, they are similar to our cousins who went extinct, and to our ancestors. It is worth asking: When did we start talking? And were we even Homo Sapiens yet when our chimp-like wide variety of vocalizations began to grow so complex, thanks to our changing mouths and heads, that they became something we would call a language?

It’s a question hard for us answer. Spoken words leave no fossils. So linguists struggle and don't have an answer, now. But, (Taylor Swift, via Anne Reburn) what is Wolfe being when he dismisses the whole field of linguistics? "You, with your words like knives ..."

We known that we write and other species don’t, but it took us most of our existence on this planet before we mastered that trick of converting what we say into what we can read--before our created languages “evolved” to the point where setting them down in stone and clay and later, paper, occurred to us. Was it just a cultural shift or maybe a subtle evolution in our brains and hands? Both, maybe?

I’m not in Tom Wolfe’s league as a wordsmith. But I am a reader and a writer. And I can see that language is so embedded in the nature of us that it seems impossible it’s not embedded in our biology—a product of Natural Selection. Just as a Buick is (indirectly, because, again, we are evolved so that we can make Buicks, which no other species can. Yes, raccoons have opposable thumbs, but they don’t have poetry or owner’s manuals, and that makes all the difference).

“The Kingdom of Speech” was an interesting book—almost any Tom Wolfe book is interesting. To me, however, it is also deeply misleading. In the end, it is not fragile, unhealthy, selfish, and jealous Darwin who seems discredited, but a modern human master of language who seems to think that the notion we came from the same muck as worms and birds and lizards is icky.

It is not. “We were from the sewer, but so was everyone else” (lyric from “Your Light” by The Big Moon). Evolution is just how and who we are, thumbs, limbs, brains, verbs, nouns, verb tenses—all of us, arising slowly over thousands and millions and billions of years of change—with our evolving languages that do give us mastery of the planet, but aren’t separate from the evolutionary history that makes us, well, human. We may feel that way sometimes (again, Big Moon) but our words are not foreign objects in our mouths--they belong there, they are naturally there.

So OK, Tom. You’re right. There seems to be no “natural” language, at least not as far as we know now The history of language has a lot yet to be discovered and who knows what me might still find despite years of dead ends?.

But you’re deeply wrong, Tom, too. We have the language organ, or multiple language organs, and we ought not be offended by the fact that we evolved that way.

Humans Don’t Always Look Good in “Arirval”

Amy Adams as linguist Louise Banks in "Arrival." That's no human vehicle parked in the background. All images on this post appeared in online news stories or reviews and are credited as Paramount Pictures PR images.

In case you didn’t catch the Amy Adams movie “Arrival” when it came out five years ago, I’ll try to avoid spoilers in this essay about the film. Which seems a bit ironic when writing about this movie, which plays with and twists notions of both time and language. My wife and I noticed the DVD at a sale price, and took a chance on it, and Friday I watched it for the first time. Amy Adams, don't you know. I can watch her read the phone book, I think. She's a bit like Sarah Michelle Geller--in that her eyes to a lot of the acting, too.

What we think are memories aren’t that at all. And what did the word “weapon” actually mean in that pretty ink blot alien tongue? Having just watched the movie for the first time, I feel that I missed a key plot twist that hinges on that word, which, after all, comes close to igniting a world war.

And why did the heptapods (the aliens sure do have feet) come to Earth and give us a language that opens what sounds like a cool super power but that turns out to involve a lot of complexity in choice, fate and pain? Well, that question is partly answered when Abbott (one of the two aliens the Amy Adams character converses with, the other is named, by her future or past love interest, “Costello”) tells her that they will need human help in a few thousand years, but that again raises a whole bunch of questions.

We don’t ever know where the heptapods came from. Did they travel faster than light, or is theirs a different way of viewing reality mean a journey of thousands of years at sub light speed seems undaunting? And that foggy, misty environment that they live in—what is their reality like?

The movie is clever. It plays with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in an interesting way, seeming to suggest that we experience time in a conceptual way that is tied to language, which shapes how we think. That hypothesis, by the way, is useful for understanding language, but not always all that useful for understanding all of human experience. It’s the notion that the nature of our language shapes the nature of our perception. What follows is my opinion (although most of what preceded is also my opinion, a fact you probably remembered)—but sometimes I think people take that useful hypothesis too seriously. For example, I’ve seen people make a big deal out of the supposed fact (I don’t know the language, so I don’t know if it’s actually true) that Arabic has no equivalent for the word “compromise.” Or that Inuit people have a gabagillion words to say “snow.” Or that some color labels don’t exist in some languages.

Sure, those are ideas worth exploring. They shape perception. But they don’t dictate it. If I don’t have a label for “teal,” for instance, it doesn’t mean that my eyes won’t see the color (my visual organs and optic nerves are still very similar to the equivalent organs in most other not-color-blind humans), and thus I may notice the hue even if I cannot name it. I think people from a linguistic tradition that doesn’t label “compromise” probably can, and probably do, grasp the idea anyway. I may not have individual words that differentiate between wet or powdery snow, or snow in the air or on the ground, or snow that has blown—but I can still see and appreciate nuances of snow.

As a writer, I believe in the power of the word. I loved the way Amy’s character Louise quickly concocted a lie about “kangaroo” to explain a truth. As humans, our words are inexact attempts for us to capture and share our experiences, but I also think experience can be “real” when it’s not bound up in a word.

That’s a long way of saying that the time-bending nature of “Arrival” was interesting, but didn’t completely work for me. And the foreboding tone of the movie made it sometimes too heavy—Louise Banks seems disturbed and fearful in her contact with the heptapods, and I wanted a bit more wonder and whimsy. The movie was clever, but sometimes too clever (that Hannah is a palindrome seemed to be emphasized way too much—so is dud).

Will I watch “Arrival” again? Yes, I think I will, if existence and time and my life cooperate. It’s not my favorite movie but it was a worthwhile and interesting one, and I’m pretty sure I’ll see details in the next watching that I missed in the first one. I also loved the idea of aliens whose written language has nothing to do with their speech, which made me wonder if there was any meaning at all in their vocalizations, yet again one of those many unanswered questions in the film.

And I respect a movie, especially a science fiction adventure, that doesn’t feel it has to answer all questions and that defies some norms of the genre. It doesn’t rely on too many car chases or breathtaking action scenes—it builds great tension with more subtlety. It has a heroine who never smacks anyone and never fires any weapon, at least as I understand the word even if I still wonder if a heptapod would agree. It’s an alien war drama where war fails to break out out—and where it was the humans and their poor choices and inability to function without clarity that caused the real danger.

Our hero uses her mind and language to save the world. No light saber, just enlightened thought.

Seems human to me. In my life, the most important problems are caused either by mindless microbes or by other hairless apes who irk me—and right now, irksome humans who respond mindlessly to certain microbes.

Obligatory pandemic side rant: I don’t care what “omicron variant” can be rearranged to spell. Potential overlords aren’t dumb enough to leave an obvious clue like that, but silly humans are prone to misinterpret words and forget that the variant wasn’t named omicron for the sake of a sick joke or some secret code; it was just the next letter in an old alphabet. We should respect words, but we can read way too much into them, too. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also means that we can construct reality with language, and we’re sometimes shoddy builders.

Back to this interesting movie. I kind of wish Amy could smile or laugh a bit more. She has a few seconds of “oh gee” facial expressions when she meets the aliens, and I kind of wanted a bit of emphasis on that. It seemed to me that wonder was among the reactions that would be worth exploring.

It was a thoughtful, but perhaps too heavy, movie. “Arrival,” how many stars should I give you? I was thinking three, but that seems too few. You're too interesting for that. How about four? And did you remember beforehand that was what I was going to write?