The Kingdom of Speech (6 page)

No, said Wallace, “the agency of some other power” was required. He calls it “a superior intelligence,” “a controlling intelligence.” Only such a power, “a new power of definite character,” can account for “ever-advancing” man.
53
Whatever that power is, it is infinitely more important than mere natural selection.

Now, that
hurt
. Once again, this little flycatcher Wallace had (to use an anachronism, as noted above)
freaked out
Charles Darwin. In a regular frenzy Charlie began scrawling
NO!— NO!— NO!— NO!
in the margins of his copy and then hurling spears in the form of exclamation points.
54
Only a few wound up immediately following the
NO
s. The rest of them hit the page in the form of…take
that,
Wallace!…right through your temporal fossa and your little fifty-cubic-inch brain cavity!…and
this
one!—
riiiippp
—right through your solar plexus!…and
this
one!…right through your bowels!…and
this
one!…a regular crotch crusher!…and
this
one…straight through your ungrateful heart!!!!!! And to think that I went to the trouble of building up your reputation. True, it was out of guilt, but I built it up for you all the same. And don't think that pathetic little disclaimer on page 39 absolves you of any treachery, either.

Finally he pulled himself together and sent Wallace a note saying, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”
55

Oh, but he had. Murdered or, less dramatically, tried to destroy what Wallace had done with the entire Olympian climax of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Darwin was in no mood to be less dramatic, however. Wallace's treachery, coming on top of Max Müller's summary dismissal,
did
qualify as murder, when you got right down to it.

His only relief came when Wallace, bafflingly, began self-destructing as a scientist by becoming a believer in spiritism, which had become something of a vogue among many otherwise intelligent people. Spiritism did not necessarily involve a belief in God. But you did have to assume there was some kind of fourth dimension, the unearthly domain of a force, a spirit, that ordinary mortals couldn't comprehend. This was what Wallace, a confirmed atheist since his early teens, had in mind when he began to go on about “the agency of some other power”…“a new power of a definite character”…“a superior intelligence”…“a controlling intelligence.” One way to commune with the Power was to engage in séances, complete with table rapping, tarot cards, and inexplicable moans and cries. One goal, among several, was to get in touch with dead souls on the Other Side of the river. Wallace managed to get Darwin to attend one. He lasted less than fifteen minutes before walking out, shaking his head.
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In fact, Wallace was attributing to supernatural powers something as natural as breathing to human beings everywhere—and
only
to human beings—namely, speech, language, the Word.

Language in all its forms advanced man far beyond the boundaries of natural selection, allowing him to think abstractly and plan ahead (no animal was capable of it); measure things and record measurements for later (no animal was capable of it); comprehend space and time, God, freedom, and immortality; and remove items from Nature to create artifacts, whether axes or algebra. No animal could even begin to do any such thing. Darwin's doctrine of natural selection couldn't deal with artifacts, which were by definition unnatural, or with the mother of all artifacts, which was the Word. The inexplicable power of the Word—speech, language—was driving him crazy and Wallace across to the Other Side.

But a cosmogonist like Darwin couldn't let it go at that. Speech had to have some animal genealogy…
had to fit
into his Theory of Everything. It was on his mind constantly. It was a threat he couldn't dodge much longer.

It was bad
enough that Max Müller had challenged him directly, flat-out, out loud, in public, before the Royal Institution—and made fun of him—over this accursèd business of language.
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That was eight years ago, 1861, and all this time Darwin had been trying to find something,
anything,
in the sounds, gestures, habits, and facial expressions of animals that he could claim as evidence of language evolving. It
had to be
there somewhere! But if so, not he, not Lyell, Hooker, Huxley, nor any other of the faithful could find it. And then comes the turncoat Wallace piling on with a whole slew of other powers that seemed to have come to
Homo sapiens
from out of the blue, leaving Darwin and his entire theory and all his devotees stuck on the wrong side of the Rubicon.

At first he had been angry. But now he had a headache. What a mess. How could he explain his way out of it? He could give in and concede that, well, yes, he hadn't been right about
every
thing, such as this business of language…that way out lasted about one blink. He was too far gone in his cosmogonist obsession. After all, his Theory of Evolution was a theory of…
every
thing.

In a desultory fashion he had begun writing a sequel to
The Origin of Species.
He thought of it as his “Man Book” because it would bring the formerly missing
Homo
sapiens
into the big picture of Evolution.
a
Wallace had already beaten him to the punch on natural selection, and it had taken every bit of Darwin's influence and slick-slick-slickness as a Gentleman to euchre the naive flycatcher out of his priority. But suppose the flycatcher were to come out with a book murdering “your own and my child” and showing that Evolution couldn't possibly account for the tyke's gift
of abstract thought?
What if he put across the idea that some “new power of a definite character,” some “controlling intelligence”—some force ordinary mortals couldn't comprehend—set man apart from animals?
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As far as Darwin was concerned, the slate on Wallace's roof had come loose…thanks to all this spiritism rubbish. He didn't try to discredit Wallace on those grounds, however. Up to now Darwin's and the Gentlemen's class superiority had intimidated the flycatcher. But if Wallace got good and riled up, he just might open up the matter of priority again and expose the fast one the trio of Gentlemen—Lyell, Hooker, and Darwin—had put over on him when he was 7,200 miles away in Malaysia and oblivious of what they were up to…besides, any disparagement of this “controlling intelligence” Wallace kept talking about might be interpreted as an attack on the Almighty, and Darwin was already in enough trouble on that score. He had to come up with a more subtle rebuttal to Müller and Wallace. And speed was of the essence. Who knew how far or how fast Wallace might try to go with this stuff?

By then, 1869, Darwin was sixty years old and more of a hopeless dyspeptic, or hypochondriac, than ever. Vomiting three or four times a day had become the usual. His eyes watered and dripped on his old gray philosopher's beard. The chances of his leaving his desk in Down House and going out into the world looking for evidence, as he had on the
Beagle,
were zero. Instead he chained himself to his desk and forced himself to write, as he had in 1858 and 1859, when he forestalled Wallace with
The Origin of Species
. Now he faced the worst threat ever to his Theory of Everything. So he wound his imagination up to the maximum and herded all the animals together in his head, like some Noah the Naturalist, and inspected them—
hyper
inspected them this time—until he found what he was looking for, namely, embryos of all the Higher Things…language, the moral sense, abstract thought, art, music, religion, self-consciousness…whatever the human mind was capable of, he found early origins of it in animals.
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The upshot was a real tour de force of literary imagination entitled
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,
published in 1871.

Thirty-one years later, in 1902, another British writer published another tour de force of literary imagination concerning the origins of animals and man. The writer was Rudyard Kipling, and the book was called
Just So Stories
. A typical story was “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” It seems Leopard lived in the barren, dirt-tan, sandy-colored upper reaches of a mountain overlooking the jungle. Leopard's hide was the same color as the terrain, a sandy tan with no markings. Smaller animals didn't even see him until he leaped out of the background and had them for lunch. Leopard's hunting pal was an Ethiopian, a man with light yellowish-brown skin. He used a bow and arrow to turn passersby into mouthfuls…until bad luck drove him and Leopard down into the darkness of the jungle below. Down there sandy-tan Leopard suddenly stood out like a nice bright mouthwatering meal himself…for any pair of incisors that happened by. The Ethiopian wasn't too happy about hanging around with him anymore. To save his own too-light hide, the Ethiopian found some blacking and turned himself black from head to toe. That way he could disappear into the shadows. He had a lot of the black gunk left on his fingers, and so he had a go at Leopard's hide, too, leaving fingerprints all over it. With all the black fingerprints, Leopard looked like nothing more than a pile of rocks on the ground in the jungle's dark green gloom. And that was how the leopard got his spots.
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Kipling's intention from the outset was to entertain children. Darwin's intention, on the other hand, was dead serious and absolutely sincere in the name of science and his cosmogony. Neither had any evidence to back up his tale. Kipling, of course, never pretended to. But Darwin did. The first person to refer to Darwin's tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.
61
Orthodox neo-Darwinists never forgave him. Gould was not a heretic and not even an apostate. He was a simple profane sinner. He had called attention to the fact that Darwin's Just So Stories required a feat of fiction writing Kipling couldn't compete with. Darwin's storytelling power
soared
in
The Descent of Man
precisely where it had to, i.e., in accounting for this perplexing business of language.

Language, said Darwin, originated with the songs birds sang during the mating season. Man began imitating the birds, a cappella. By and by he started repeating certain birdsong sounds so often they began to stand for certain things in nature. They became words in embryo, and man began creating a “musical protolanguage.”
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But mating songs are sung by male birds only. What about human females? No problem. The females started mimicking the males, although in a higher register, and the protolanguage became far more pleasing. In no time the females were talking circles around the males. Female protolanguage, said Darwin, persists to this day…in the form of mothers cooing to their babies. The sounds have no dictionary meaning at all. Yet they signal love, protection, coziness, and mealtime.
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Anyway, that was “How the Birds Gave Man His Words.”

And why is it that
Homo sapiens
was descended from hairy apes but wound up naked—as Wallace had gone to some pains to point out? Even in hottest horrid-torrid Africa, animals such as antelopes had fur to protect them from the wind and rain. So did man…way back in that invisible past, where Evolution lives. Starting out, said Darwin, man was as hairy as the hairiest ape. Why no longer?
Blind,
aren't you, Wallace? You didn't get the second half of my title,
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,
did you. Evolution, said Darwin, had turned
Homo sapiens
into a more sensitive animal, which in turn gave him something approaching aesthetic feelings. The male began to admire females who had the least apelike hides because he could see more of their lovely soft skin, which excited him sexually. The more skin he saw, the more he wanted to see. Obviously valued by the males because their hides were much less hairy, the most sought-after females began to look down their noses at the old-fashioned hairy males, one crude step away from the apes themselves. Generation after generation went by, thousands of them, until, thanks to natural selection, males and females became as naked as they are today, with but two clumps of hair, one on the head and the other in the pubic area, plus wispy, scarcely visible little remnants of their formerly hirsute selves on the forearms and lower legs and, in the case of some males, the chest and shoulders.
b
Yes, their backs got cold, terribly cold, as Wallace had argued. But what poor Wallace didn't know was that the heat of passion conquered all…and that was “How Man Lost His Hair Over Love.” (Got
that,
Wallace?)

The truth was, Kipling didn't rate an “ism” at the end of his name. Darwin did. When it came to making up stories, Kipling lacked Darwin's great resource, “my dog.” For example, how did man obtain the power of abstract thought? Obvious, all too obvious. How can anybody dispute the fact, said Darwin, that even small mammals far below the status of ape have it? “When a dog sees another dog at a distance, it is often clear that he perceives that it is a dog in the abstract, for when he gets nearer his whole manner changes, if the other dog be a friend.”
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Was that his, Darwin's, dog? He doesn't say, but often in
The Descent of Man,
“my dog” steps forth as major evidence. “When I say to my terrier, in an eager voice…and I have made the trial many times”—the “trial” suggesting a controlled scientific experiment—“‘Hi, hi, where is it?' she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all around, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scent for any game, but finding nothing, she looks up any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly shew that she had in her mind a general idea or concept that some animal is to be discovered and hunted?”
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Religion? You have but to observe
my dog
. “The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, gratitude, hope for the future…” We see “this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear and perhaps other feelings.”
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He once noticed
my dog
lying on the lawn on a hot, still day. Not far away “a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol,” and
my dog
growled fiercely and started barking every time. “He must, I think, have reasoned to himself…that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent…The belief in spiritual agencies would easily pass into the belief in the existence of one or more gods…A dog looks upon its master as on a god.”
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And there you have it. This reverence moves up the great chain of Evolution until it reaches man.

Parental affection? That begins very low in the animal hierarchy, with starfish, spiders, and
Forficula auricularia
.
Forficula auricularia
are earwigs in biology-lingo Latin. The moral sense? Parental affection, including the earwigs', is the moral sense in embryo, says Darwin.
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It has evolved into the sympathy that mammals feel not only for their own kind but also for creatures from other species entirely—even to the point of risking their lives for them. Sympathy “leads a courageous dog to fly at any one who strikes his master…I have myself seen a dog”—
my dog?
—“who never passed a cat who lay sick in a basket without giving her a few licks with his tongue, the surest sign of kind feeling in a dog.” He goes on to say, “I saw a person pretending to beat a lady, who had a little timid dog on her lap, and the trial had never been made before”—another scientific trial—and the little creature instantly “jumped away, but after the pretended beating was over it was really pathetic to see how perseveringly he tried to lick his mistress's face and comfort her.”
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Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with social instincts, which in man would be called moral. “Dogs,” he says, “possess something very like a conscience.” Dogs seem to be able to restrain themselves in deference to their master's rules, and “this does not appear to be wholly the result of fear.” For example, they will “refrain from stealing food in the absence of their master.”
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Doggedly, doggedly, Darwin hauls down all Wallace's signs of “a new power of a definite sort” and returns them to the barking, whining, itching, scratching animal life of his Theory of Evolution.

But his great overarching goal was to drain Max Müller's damnable Rubicon dry. If Müller was right or even seemed to be right, that was the end of Darwin's being known as the genius who showed the world that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal. Language was the crux of it all. If language sealed off man from animal, then the Theory of Evolution applied only to animal studies and reached no higher than the hairy apes. Müller was eminent and arrogant—and made fun of him!
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The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
was not nearly the sensation that Darwin alternately hoped and feared it would be.
c
His naturalist colleagues, notably Lyell and Huxley, and by then much of the reading public, took it for granted that the real subject of
The Origin of Species
twelve years earlier had been the descent of man from out of the trees, where the monkeys lived. This new book was just filling in the details. By then the Theory of Evolution had won the intellectual status battle, even within the ranks of the Anglican Church's young clergymen. They were turning from clergy into the clerisy themselves. The reviews approached Darwin as an already Great Man. The
Annual Register,
a yearly survey of British intellectual life, compared him to Isaac Newton, discoverer of the law of gravity and creator of the fields of physics, mechanics, modern astronomy, and the Rules of Scientific Reasoning in the 1600s.
The Register
's anonymous reviewer said everyone knew “how profound was the influence of the Newtonian philosophy over the next two or three generations.” Darwin's theory will have a comparable impact, he predicts. “One comes across traces of its influence in the most remote and unexpected quarters, in historical, social, and even artistic questions…We are everywhere meeting with that series of ideas to which Mr. Darwin has done more than any other man to give prominence.”
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