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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Science and Status Tom Wolfe highlights the shabby treatment of two underappreciated intellectuals. Charles Darwin. Photo: Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin Tom Wolfe wrote a book ostensibly about science that reads as one on snobbery. The Kingdom of Speech offers not one but two haughty villains in Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. Alfred Russel Wallace and Dan Everett, unheralded but quite accomplished, play the humble heroes. In 1858, Darwin received a manuscript from Wallace detailing the latter’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin maintained that the same idea had occurred to him more than two decades earlier. Wallace, a man who dropped out of school at 14 and sold exotic fly specimens to subsidize his scientific endeavors, lacked the prestige of his correspondent. So, when the English gentleman forwarded his own ideas on evolution, coincidentally similar to Wallace’s, along with his pen pal’s manuscript to London’s Linnean Society, the group read the papers aloud (Darwin first!) and the scientific world gave the established man of letters in London, rather than the “flycatcher” in the Malaysian Archipelago, the credit. “To put the matter in perspective,” Wolfe writes, “one has only to imagine what would have happened had the roles been reversed. Suppose Darwin is the one who has just written a formal twenty-page scientific treatise for publication … and somehow Wallace got his hands on it ahead of time … and announces that he made this same astounding epochal discovery twenty-one years ago but never got around to writing it up and claiming priority … a horse laugh?” Darwin’s private writings predating Wallace’s papers show a similarity in thinking, so perhaps Wolfe acts somewhat uncharitably toward Darwin here. But this does not negate his larger point of history’s ingratitude toward Wallace. As it turned out, Darwin became famous and Wallace a footnote. ♦♦♦ The author draws a parallel between the shabby treatment afforded to Darwin’s rival, on the one hand, and the attacks on Chomsky’s debunker, on the other. Dan Everett came to study language at the Moody Bible Institute, and first encountered the Pirahã tribe that helped to disprove Chomskyan linguistics while working as a missionary. “Everett struck them as a born-again Alfred Wallace, the clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers,” Wolfe observes. “Look at him! Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair. He could have passed for a ranch hand or a West Virginia gas driller. But of course! He was an old-fashioned flycatcher inexplicably here in the midst of modern air-conditioned armchair linguistics with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux- manly open shirts.” The Pirahã language, Everett discovered after years of living among the primitive people, does not conform to the supposedly universal principles Chomsky assigned to language. The Pirahã possessed just three vowels and eight consonants, with no mathematics and no tense beyond the present, and, importantly, no recursion—the phenomenon of theoretically endless additions to a sentence. The simple language spoken by a few hundred people “contained no recursion, none at all, immediately reducing Chomsky’s law to just another feature found mainly in Western languages; and second, it was the Pirahã’s own distinctive culture, their unique ways of living, that shaped the language—not any ‘language organ,’ not any ‘universal grammar’ or ‘deep structure’ or ‘language acquisition device’ that Chomsky said all languages had in common.” Wolfe’s more argued than opened book ignites most of its disputes on this heretofore arcane question of recursion. Whereas Chomsky’s defenders at Current Affairs contend that he “never believed that all languages had recursion,” rather, “that all people had the capacity to acquire languages with recursion,” linguist John McWhorter finds Everett’s indictment “inconclusive,” partially on the grounds that the sentence structure in Pirahã strikes him as a distinction without a difference from recursion. In the case of Darwin, scientists deferred to status. In the case of Everett, linguists deferred to the status quo. They fought vigorously for the science to remain static. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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