Crying Wolfe

He might be 85 but Tom Wolfe is going strong with a new book and a dustjacket photo that still sees him working the suit and hat look. And although the new book may be small, it’s got big ambitions: first, to take down an establishment icon, and, second, to reveal the secret behind humanity’s progress.

The establishment icon first. He is that infamous scoundrel, Charles Darwin — ‘Charlie’, as Wolfe often calls him, and not in a friendly way. Wolfe’s Darwin is a pampered, privileged product of a duplicitous and ruthless British elite, a man who never had to do a day’s work in his life, who spent 20 years not publishing his thoughts about evolution and then wrote his book in a panic only after he realised that some oik called Alfred Russel Wallace was about to beat him to it, and whose drawling pals suavely elbowed Wallace out of posterity’s picture. Even when Darwin seemed to behave honourably, Wolfe spots nefarious intent. Charlie may have seemed to help his rival but only because he was so haunted by guilt after making sure he won and Wallace came second.

In any case, that theory of evolution of Charlie’s: is it really that great? Wolfe doesn’t think so — not because he believes it’s all God’s work. He belittles it as a vague notion, one that might apply to the biological world but not elsewhere. Far from being a theory of everything, as Darwinians have claimed, says Wolfe, evolutionary theory most notably fails to apply to the most fundamental human skill: language.

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How on earth could language have evolved? Darwin’s risible best guess was that we’d started off chirruping in imitation of birdsong. His failure to explain language bequeathed an aeon of medieval ignorance — that is Darwin’s real legacy, according to Wolfe — a period longer than the Dark Ages in which the origin of human language was a non-topic, erased from intellectual history.