Tom Wolfe 1931-2018
| May 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, language |
Tom Wolfe was the author of The Kingdom of Speech, in which he doubted a fully natural origin for human language.
From Deirdre Carmody and William Grimes at the New York Times:
In the end it was his ear — acute and finely tuned — that served him best and enabled him to write with perfect pitch. And then there was his considerable writing talent.
“There is this about Tom,” Mr. Dobell, Mr. Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, told the London newspaper The Independent in 1998. “He has this unique gift of language that sets him apart as Tom Wolfe. It is full of hyperbole; it is brilliant; it is funny, and he has a wonderful ear for how people look and feel. More.
From Ed Driscoll at PJ Media re The Kingdom of Speech:
The Kingdom of Speech generally follows the outline of The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. Here, at age 85, Wolfe is still hunting the biggest of big game—the Bernstein-esque (or even god-like) figures of Noam Chomsky and Charles Darwin himself.
Making a documentary on intelligent design in 2008 slammed many doors shut on economist/pundit Ben Stein’s part-time Hollywood career as a deadpan commercial pitchman and TV guest star. Perhaps as a result, given what sacred cows Darwin and Chomsky are in the intertwined worlds of leftwing academia and pop culture intellectualism, Wolfe knows he needs to walk a fine line.
Or as Wolfe writes in The Kingdom of Speech after comparing Darwin’s The Descent of Man to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, after noticing both men certainly did a lot of anthropomorphizing of primitive animals, “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. 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.” More.
Darwin, unlike Kipling, has career ruin to offer, via his followers, to aspiring scientists who step out of line. Wolfe had the guts to understand that and proceed.
In The Kingdom of Speech, he said,
By now, 2014 [when Chomsky’s critic Everett appeared], Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded in the very anatomy, the very central nervous system of all modern people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier life form—even if you had to go all the way back to Darwin’s “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had evolved… from something. Everett’s notion that speech had not evolved from anything—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was unthinkable to the vast majority of modern people. They had all been so deep-steeped in the Theory that anyone casting doubt upon it obviously had the mentality of a Flat Earther or a Methodist. (pp. 253–54) More.
See also: Tom Wolfe on how speech let humans rule planet: Yet no one has any idea how language started.
Tom Wolfe: What we think we know re evolution wrong
and
Scientific American: Chomsky largely overturned It’s hard not to see this in relation to Tom Wolfe’s recent The Kingdom of Speech, where he sends up Chomsky along with Darwin.
4 Responses to Tom Wolfe 1931-2018
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The Right Stuff is awesome.
Andrew
The study that motivated Wolfe to write “The Kingdom of Speech” was this one:
To which Wolfe remarked,,,
In the introduction of his book, Wolfe lays his argument out as such,,,
In other words, although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as lions, bears, and sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and, more specifically, infuse information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, shelter, in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, for our pleasure, etc…
And although the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, that allowed humans to become ‘masters of the planet’, was rather crude to begin with, (i.e. spears, arrows, and plows etc..), this top down infusion of immaterial information into material substrates has become much more impressive over the last half century or so.
What is more interesting still, besides the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information and have come to dominate the world through the ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
Renowned physicist John Wheeler stated “in short all matter and all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe”.
In the following article, Anton Zeilinger, a leading expert in quantum mechanics, stated that ‘it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows.’
In the following video at the 48:24 mark, Anton Zeilinger states that “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” and he goes on to note, at the 49:45 mark, the Theological significance of “In the Beginning was the Word” John 1:1
Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and who is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states,
Moreover, besides being foundational to physical reality, information, as Intelligent Design advocates are constantly pointing out to Darwinists, is also found to be ‘infused’ into biological life.
It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’ than finding both the universe, and life itself, are both ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and, moreover, have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our unique ability infuse information into material substrates.
Perhaps a more convincing evidence that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was indeed God.
But who has ever heard of such overwhelming evidence as that?
Video and verse:
I was never a big fan of Tom Wolfe, but The Right Stuff was an amazing book. NASA and the government portrayed the Mercury astronauts as all American, clean cut heroes. Wolfe made them human, warts and all. But still people to be admired. The portrayal of John Glenn was amazing. On one hand, a caricature of the Dudley Do-Right Christian who wouldn’t say sh@t if his mouth was full of it. But on the other hand, a man who earned and deserved respect because he lived it every day of his life as opposed to giving it a superficial patina.
The Kingdom of Speech – by Tom Wolfe
1. A brief book that is not so much about Speech as it is about toppling false prophets. We learn a great deal about the sordid intrigue that made Darwin the historic personality he is while keeping the lowly “fly catcher” Wallace in semi-obscurity. One hundred fifty years later, a somewhat parallel story develops between Noam Chomsky, the false prophet of speech evolution and Daniel Everett, the new “fly catcher” that (unlike Wallace) opposes the false prophet and begins the process of toppling him. Chomsky’s dogma captured on tens of thousands of pages or more and his cultural clout still holds as of today due to an army of followers built over decades and dependent on this dogma. But the damage has been done: Everett with one single study on the Piraha people has invalidated Chomsky’s conclusions.
2. Tom Wolfe’s irony cuts merciless into the dearest beliefs of the Evolutionary myth:
a. We learn about the parallels between the evolution myth and Native American Creation myths. Yes, Evolution is nothing more than a Creation myth.
b. “…the littlest creature (or “four or five” of them)…” points out the absurdity of this claim. Why one? Why four or five? Why make this utterly unsupported claim?
c. Evolution is Cosmogony myth and not Science as the theory fails all five tests for scientific hypothesis: Observed? Replicated? Falsifiable? Predictive power? Illuminates other areas of science? “In the case of Evolution…well…no…no…no…no…and no”.
d. Darwin’s “Just So Stories”, and “my dog” argument, especially in “The Descent of Man”.
e. Dobzhansky’s synthesis of moribund Evolution theory with Genetics to revive the former, and his too categorical claim that “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”.
f. Chomsky’s 2014 statement that “The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma” after decades of “knowing” language down to the math.
3. Language is important of course, and perhaps even “the most powerful tool invented by people, not innate and not biologically evolved” as the author concludes, but more important Take-Aways are the doubts cast on the very sacred and very inflexible, and ultimately very unscientific beliefs of the Evolution supporters. Furthermore, the amount of supporting literature and time passage have built an imposing structure around the concept of Evolution, but this structure rests on a very flimsy base at best and will likely come crumbling down sooner or later – the higher the structure, the more spectacular its demise.