The Kingdom of Speech (2 page)

Charles Darwin's father, Robert Darwin, was a doctor—like
his
father, Erasmus Darwin. His true passion however, was investing, lending, brokering, betting, and otherwise dealing in the Industrial Revolution's money markets. He made an absolute fortune…then multiplied it by marrying a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, one of the early giants of industry. Wedgwood was a potter, a craftsman, who had created factories that produced chinaware finer than any plain potter ever dreamed of. Robert Darwin's arena was London and its financial district, the City. But like most great British Industrial Revolutionaries, he chose to live in the countryside on a large and largely irrelevant estate—his, in Shropshire, was called the Mount—to show that he was as grand as the landed gentry of yore.
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He paid for his son Charles to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh (the boy dropped out), then sent him to Christ's College at Cambridge to become a clergyman (the boy dropped out), then had to settle for the boy dropping down to the bottom at Cambridge and barely getting a bachelor of arts degree (without honors or the vaguest idea of what to do with his life), and then begrudgingly paid for the boy to enjoy a five-year voyage of exploration, or sightseeing, or something, aboard a boat named for a dog, His Majesty's Ship
Beagle,
to prepare him for a career in the field of—as far as Dr. Darwin could tell—nothing. Once the boy was finished with that nonsense, Dr. Darwin, who himself had married a Wedgwood relative, nudged the boy, who was twenty-nine, into marrying in 1839 his perfectly nice, if plain, thirty-year-old spinster first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and in 1842 bought them a country place, Down House, southeast of London, and settled enough money on him for the boy to live well forever and ever. Living well included eight or nine servants—a butler, a cook, a manservant or two, a parlor maid, a lady's maid, and at least one nanny and a governess—from day one.
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Where did this, the eternally Daddy-paid-for life of a British Gentleman, leave someone like Alfred Russel Wallace? His father, a lawyer, had undertaken a legal career and a business career—and a family and a half, namely, a wife and nine children (Alfred was the eighth)—and wound up swindled and bankrupt, utterly wiped out. The Wallaces were the very picture of what is known today as a downwardly mobile family. They didn't have the money for Alfred's education beyond grade school. Years later, to pay for his explorations in the Amazon and Malay, Wallace had to ship stupendous loads of (dead) snakes, mammals, shells, birds, beetles, butterflies—lots of flamboyant butterflies—moths, gnats, and no-see-um bugs to an agent in England…who sold them to scientists, amateur naturalists, collectors, butterfly lovers, and anyone else intrigued by exotic oddments from the underbellies of the earth. A single shipment might contain thousands of items. The kind of mortal willing or forced by Fate to go out into ankle-sucking muck, brain-frying heat, clouds of mosquitoes, ague-ghastly nightscapes…on terrains slithering with poisonous snakes…to harvest hundreds of curiosities at a time
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…was called a flycatcher. Gentlemen like Lyell and Darwin didn't think of flycatchers as fellow naturalists but as suppliers on the order of farmers or cottage weavers.

There you had Alfred Wallace…a flycatcher. The very thought of
having to
make a living
at all, much less as a Malaysian bugmonger, was enough to set any gentleman to itching and scratching all over…and in the mid-nineteenth century, the Gentlemen ran every major area of British life: politics, religion, the military, the arts and sciences. Wallace was well aware that he was about to get in touch with a social stratum far above his own. But he wasn't writing Lyell, via Darwin, seeking social acceptance. All he sought was professional recognition by some eminent fellow naturalists.

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 “
Fway
gians”) 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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