The Kingdom of Speech (5 page)

It turned out that Leifchild, the unknown
Athenaeum
reviewer who had jumped the gun, was merely the first to assume that Darwin's real subject was the evolution of man—as, of course, it was. Even Darwin's closest allies, Huxley and Lyell, stopped pretending otherwise. In February of 1863, Lyell, who had for so long doubted Evolution, cast his lot with Darwin in a book called
The Antiquity of Man
. The full title was
The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation
. It obliterated the religious distinction between man (made in God's own image) and animal. A few weeks later Huxley published
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
. Here was Huxley at his snarling, pugnacious best. He came right out and asserted, in different words, precisely what Nietzsche would be saying eleven years later: there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal. Man descended from animals, and only fools and too-far-gone clergymen could deny it.

It gradually dawned on Darwin that the attacks by Leifchild in the
Athenaeum
and Owen in the
Edinburgh Review
had been godsends. As Sigmund Freud would put it thirty-five years later in similar circumstances, “Many enemies, much honor.” Darwin's critics had turned him into a controversial figure, and a very famous one. For years his friends had been fond of him in a good-old-Charlie fashion. But their demeanor and the very expressions on their faces had changed. Suddenly good old Charlie had become a celebrity. No matter what side of the controversy people came down on, no matter how well they knew him, their involuntary smiles in his presence radiated a certain…mousy awe. And oh, yes, Celebrated Old Charlie picked that up every time. Not even his longtime friendly mentor, elder, protector, and superior when it came to social and intellectual status and public recognition, namely, Lyell—not even Lyell could hold back a certain deference. Without a word, both were aware that their rankings had reversed on every score. Darwin was famous. Life was delightful—

—until his next jolt.

Max Müller had been born and educated (at Leipzig University) in Germany but for years had been a professor of modern languages at Oxford and by now, 1861, was the best-known and most distinguished linguist in Britain. He gave two highly publicized lectures at the Royal Institution that year in which he said, apropos of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, “Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.”
44
During the dustup that ensued, he added: “The Science of Language will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of evolutionists and to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute.”
45

In
The Origin of Species,
Darwin had dealt only with the Evolution of animals. But his real dream was of being the genius who showed the world that man was just an animal himself, evolved from other animals—and that his mighty mental abilities had evolved the same way. And now, just two years after its publication, an already
certified
genius, Max Müller, was saying man possessed a supreme power—language—that no animal had ever possessed or ever would. They might as well have come from different planets—man, with his power of speech…and animals, with nothing even remotely comparable.

And the accurséd Max Müller just wouldn't let up. He seldom mentioned Darwin by name, but the
world
knew immediately who the target of his mockery was.
l
Darwin's notion that language had somehow evolved from imitation of animal sounds…Müller called that the
bow-wow
theory. The notion that speech began with instinctive cries such as “Ouch!” for pain and “Oh!” for surprise…Müller called that the
pooh-pooh
theory. The notion that words…“whisper,” “wind,” “crack,” “hack,” “belch,” and “squash”…came from the sounds things made… Müller called that the
ding-dong
theory. Many Darwinists, such as the highly regarded Sir Richard Paget and George Romanes, didn't seem to realize that Müller was merely making fun of their Prophet with all this baby-talk terminology. So they pitched in and amplified Müller's laugh in their own long faces. Soon there was the
mama
theory, referring to the coos and other nonverbal cues mothers use with infants, later known as “motherese”…the
tata
theory, later known as the “gestural theory,” the notion that humans first communicated via hand signals and body language and—somehow—began to substitute the voice for all the motions…plus the
yo-he-ho
theory…the
sing-song
theory…the
hey, you
theory…there was no end to it…and no end to Max Müller's delight in the Darwinists' wooden noggins.

Soon the biggest butt of Müller's jokes, Darwin himself, with his family and household staff in tow, retreated to the spa, this time in Malvern, for a protracted stay. He was fifty-four. When he emerged two years later, he was an old man, the old man most commonly portrayed in photographs. His dome had gone bald…his hair had turned gray…and he had cultivated a so-called philosopher's beard of the sort that had been the philosopher's status symbol since the days of Roman glory. Darwin was forever pictured sitting slightly slumped in an easy chair…his philosopher's beard lying on his chest all the way from his jaws to his sternum…like a big old hairy gray bib.

In the meantime, Wallace knew nothing about this entire set-to. He had remained in the Malay Archipelago, flycatching for all he was worth. He didn't return to England until 1862, when Max Müller's lectures were published. From the very first, he bowed to make way for Darwin. He referred to
It
as Darwin's Theory of Evolution. He even went so far as to say it was a good thing the theory hadn't been attributed to somebody like himself, Alfred Wallace. It might never have been noticed, whereas it couldn't be ignored once it carried the imprimatur of a Gentleman like Mr. Darwin.
m
That may have sounded like a queasy form of groveling, but in fact he was absolutely correct.

After his return, the Gentlemen inflated Wallace's reputation for their own purposes—especially Darwin, to assuage his feeling of guilt. Wallace never felt comfortable with any of them except Lyell, who was the old man of the naturalists and had first noticed his talent back in 1855. The others, including Lyell's wife, Mary Horner Lyell, intimidated him. She found Wallace's table manners common, bordering on crude. She and the rest of the Linnean crowd struck him as terribly class-conscious. They were the real thing. They had upper-class drawls—
far
became
fahh,
extraordinary
(six syllables and thirteen letters) became
ex-strawwwd-nry
(thirteen letters and three syllables). They excelled at the sort of ironically clever conversation they had picked up and polished at Oxbridge. Even their blandest comments piped out UPPER CLASS! UPPER CLASS! without bringing up the subject of class at all. You could have a conversation with these people and not realize until two weeks later that they had slipped the finest ivory needles between your ribs and insulted you to the core.

Wallace was rendered quiet to the point of vanishing when he was around them…whereas previously, among others, such as the eccentric Englishman James Brooke, who was the rajah—the actual rajah—of Sarawak, in Borneo, no one had ever been more confident or adept at entertaining a whole roomful of people than Wallace. “The Rajah was pleased to have so clever a man with him,” said the rajah's secretary, “and if he could not convince us that our ugly neighbors, the orangutans, were our ancestors, he pleased, delighted and instructed us by his clever and inexhaustible flows of talk—really good talk.”
46

Darwin displayed many symptoms of guilt over nipping Wallace's underwear the way he had. Whenever the discussion, in print or in person, got around to “Mr. Darwin's Theory of Evolution,” Darwin always made a point of mentioning that Mr. Wallace had also done important work in this area, so important, in fact, that in 1858 their original papers on the subject had been presented jointly before the Linnean Society. All these references came across as the great master pat pat patting his little protégé on his little head head head again.

Yes, over and over, until the day he died, Darwin sent up flares signaling his guilt. There is a difference, however, between guilt and regret. Of regret the man never betrayed one twitch. Either way, Wallace's reflected light grew brighter and brighter. The accumulation of Darwin's praise (only Lyell and Hooker knew it was guilt-driven) lent Wallace a certain heft, nonetheless…and his constant deferring to Darwin as
the
discoverer of natural selection kept him in the good graces of the Gentlemen.

So Wallace became a celebrity lit up by indirect light. By now that didn't seem to trouble him in the slightest…for it was a
lovely
light. From there on out, nothing he wrote could be ignored. And write he did. He had a wonderfully clear, direct style and seemingly endless energy and originality. He went on to turn out an astonishing seven hundred articles and twenty-two books…he popularized the theory of natural selection—in fact, he wrote a book entitled
Darwinism
—but also branched out into anthropology, geography, geology, and public policy…and he never left Britain to go flycatching again. He was on his way to international renown and enough gold medals from learned societies and Queen Victoria to make his white tie and tails
blaze
with a chestful of honors.

By 1870 Wallace's heft had turned into real gravitas—to Darwin's sudden dismay. Darwin had screwed up his courage and begun working on
The Descent of Man,
his sequel to
The Origin of Species,
formally pronouncing man a descendant of the apes and monkeys and a product of natural selection, when Wallace published “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” the end piece of a collection of his articles entitled
Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection
.

On the thirty-ninth page of this forty-page essay, he gets off a line that lives on in the annals of annihilation by anesthesia. There is nothing in the pages you have just read, says Wallace, that “in any degree affects the truth or the generality of Mr. Darwin's great discovery.”
47
No, nothing except for the fact that in the preceding thirty-eight pages he has systematically disassembled and demolished what was dearest to Darwin's heart, the central point of his entire theory from the beginning, namely, that human beings are animals themselves, merely the most highly evolved species of animal, to which Wallace replies, in effect: I'm sorry, but there
is
a cardinal distinction between man and animal.

Once he gets started, Wallace wastes no time moving in for the kill. He goes straight after three of Darwinism's central assumptions. One, natural selection can expand a creature's powers only to the point where it has an advantage over the competition in the struggle for existence—and no further. Two, natural selection can't produce any changes that are bad for the creature. And three, natural selection can't produce any “specially developed organ” that is useless to a creature…or of so little use that it is not until thousands and thousands of years down the line that the creature can take advantage of the organ's full power.

The creature is man, and the “specially developed organ” is the brain. Wallace goes to some pains to demonstrate that among mammals the size of the brain has an “intimate connection” to intelligence. For example, “whenever an adult male European has a skull less than nineteen inches in circumference or has less than sixty-five cubic inches of brain, he is invariably idiotic.”
48
The Neanderthals and all other prehistoric human beings dating back to the Stone Age had brains bigger than that and nearly as big as modern man's, as do the most untutored peoples of the present…while the brains of the most intelligent apes, such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, are scarcely one-third the size of man's. That means, says Wallace, that prehistoric man had a “specially developed organ” with far more power than he needed to survive…and it was literally ages before modern man began to make full use of it. So here he is, equipped with “an organ that seems prepared in advance, only to be fully utilized as he progresses in civilization.”
49

In no way, said Wallace, can natural selection account for such a thing. But neither can natural selection account for man's hairless body, especially his bare back, which makes him highly vulnerable to wind, cold, and rain. All other primates, even in Africa and the tropics, grow hides or coats of hair that protect them to the point of making them waterproof. The hair of the coats is layered at a downward angle. Rain rolls right off. Does man miss that? All the time, said Wallace. In fact, since time immemorial, men have been using animal hides and anything else they could think of to keep their backs covered.
50
There you had it—an obvious case of what Darwin said couldn't happen: injurious evolution. “A single case of this kind,” Darwin himself had said, tempting Fate, “would be fatal to [the] theory.”
51

But there was
fatal
…and there was
smashed
to death, to use Darwin's own word. Smashed to death came in the form of the highest achievement of the human brain: abstract thought. Without that, said Wallace, no man could have conceived of numbers, arithmetic, and geometric forms…he would never have experienced pleasure in music and art…he would have no conscience and therefore no moral codes…he would have no “ideal conceptions of space and time, of eternity and infinity”
52
…no sense of the past or the future…no consciousness of man's place in the world…no capacity for recording the here and now so that he could draw upon accurate memories in making plans for the long term or even five minutes ahead. None of these, mankind's highest and most refined abilities, had anything to do with natural selection. Natural selection could only make a species fit enough to survive, physically, in the struggle for life.
Survival?
Absolute domination is the name for it in man's case. Man's brain “has led to his conquest of the world”…as Wallace put it nineteen years later in his book
Darwinism
. The power of the human brain was so far beyond the boundaries of natural selection that the term became meaningless in explaining the origins of man.