Just been rereading Tom Wolfe’s wonderful book The Kingdom of Speech (2016). Read it if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed. It’s all about why and how human beings developed the ability to speak and whether there are rules which apply across different languages.

Wolfe entertainingly covers the debate between naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently discovered the phenomenon of natural selection. And the debate between linguists Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett. Everett, initially as a missionary, lived among the Pirahã tribe in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest for a time stretching over thirty years. This very small insular tribe had a language which contained no words for the past or future; for yesterday or tomorrow. No complex sentences; only simple single-idea sentences. This upset Chomsky by breaking language rules which he had posited were universal. You gotta read it to get the full gist.

On natural selection, Darwin took the phenomenon all the way to man’s descent from an ape-like creature. Wallace wanted to keep man as a special category, distinct from animals; arguing that only a “superior intelligence” a “controlling intelligence” could account for man. Personally, I find evolutionary theory fascinating. But basically I don’t buy it.

When reading the book The Language of God (2007) by geneticist Francis Collins I was struck by the prime example he gave to back up natural selection. It was that stickle back fish in salt water had more pronounced spines to ward off predators, which were more prevalent in salt water, and less in fresh water where there were fewer predators and manoeuvrability aided in catching food. Makes perfect sense.

Fish with more pronounced spines would have a higher survival rate in salt water. Those with less pronounced spines a higher survival rate in fresh water. Voila! Overtime, the result would be evident. What it doesn’t explain is how stickleback fish turn into anything other than stickleback fish. We can see how dogs can be bred to make different looking dogs. But dogs can’t be made into cats. So far as I know.

Wallace reminded Darwin of three central assumption of natural selection. Powers expand only up until a survival advantage is attained. Nothing will be sustained which disadvantages a creature. And, natural selection can’t develop an attribute or organ which is either useless or will only become useful in the future.

And the queries followed. Why is man hairless, when all other animals have protective coats of hair to ward off the rain and cold? That is surely a disadvantage which natural selection cannot possibly explain. And it can’t. Humans didn’t lose hair because they knew they would invent clothes and warm fires. That’s not the way it works. Darwin had to go to sexual selection. Men started fancying women with less hair as did women start fancying less hairy males. Sexual congress became skewed towards the less hirsute and the rest is history. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. But there it is.

Another query, why did man develop brains capable of abstract thinking when there was little advantage to it in rude and primitive stone-age living? Why did man’s brain develop with far more power than he needed to survive, and when it was literally ages before he could and did make fuller use of it?

Questions, questions and no definitive answers. Equally no conclusive theory emerges from Wolfe’s book as to exactly how speech developed. From copying and eventually developing bird songs was one theory. As I understand it, speech seems to be an artifact invented by man and passed down from generation to generation rather than being the outcome of some biological natural selection.

Language it is suggested is a form of mnemonic; a code to assist memory. Words are codes representing something like, say, a tree or a thought like, say, feeling sad. But how it all began, who knows? However, without language nothing would have happened. We’d be still running around in the jungles and fields grunting. And we’d have to be hairy otherwise we’d freeze to death on cold wet nights. When you think about it, in those circumstances, the more hirsute the sexier.

Of course, if you want to be a radical you could bring God into the picture and Adam and Eve. Then we humans wouldn’t have to start out like hairy apes. Up to you.