---
product_id: 175540809
title: "The Kingdom of Speech Paperback – December 5, 2017"
brand: "tom wolfe"
price: "€ 21.21"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.nl/products/175540809-the-kingdom-of-speech-paperback-december-5-2017
store_origin: NL
region: Netherlands
---

# The Kingdom of Speech Paperback – December 5, 2017

**Brand:** tom wolfe
**Price:** € 21.21
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** The Kingdom of Speech Paperback – December 5, 2017 by tom wolfe
- **How much does it cost?** € 21.21 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Brilliant
  

*by A***R on Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2019*

Tom Wolfe has always been able to spin out a yarn.  Wolfe uses conflict and characterizing some as good guys and others as bad guys to create a narrative structure that tells a story.  In this case, two stories tied together by a deeper problem.  What is humanity?  The book starts with the publication of the papers at the Royal Society by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.  These were presented simultaneously, but it turns out that Wallace had sent his paper for Darwin's review and Darwin responded by creating an abstract of his own work so as not to be left in the dustbin of history.  Wolf uses this story to discuss the tactics of Thomas Henry Huxley who was instrumental in advancing Darwin's views and priority over Wallace and using the whole as cudgel against Creationism and the Church.  However, Wolfe smashes into the problems of Darwin's thesis that became apparent in that day and waited for Genetics to give these ideas a second wind.  But, Wolfe examines this interchange in the frame of the next step, is man a truly descendent of the apes? The problem being that human behavior is wildly different than any other animal.  This difference seems to be because of the presence of language.  And, language has emerged within an eye-blink of "evolutionary time."  Then, Wolfe brings forward a similar story of Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett in the pursuit of what is the nature of Human Speech.  More intellectual conflict over the proposed existence of Universal Language is discussed, but in the end, Wolfe proposes that speech is an artifact, a creation of humanity that transcends evolutionary forces.The book is incredibly well researched.  But, it deals with living people and wades into the most contentious debates of our time, so the reviews contain much bomb throwing and strident language motivated by a number of sources from political to professional to simply irrational.  The Kingdom of Speech is not a journal paper but a mass market book intended to open these questions for the general public's enlightenment.  Both Huxley's in his day and now Chomsky's forces use tactics of smear, threat and professional ruin to exclude any contrary opinions and thereby create a consensus of fear rather than allow the chips to fall as they may.  But, Wolfe also over simplifies for dramatic effect and this has to be accepted in this type of book.What struck me most about this book is that the conflict that Wolfe characterizes between these two sets of men is more about personality than good vs. bad.  Wolfe's baddies are INTP personalities.  His knights are INTJ.  It is a dispute between theorists and experimentalists.  Darwin's work long preceded Wallace's but Darwin was pursuing perfection which is often an INTP issue, and only the presence of Wallace's paper kicked him into gear.  Wallace as characterized by Wolfe was a fly catcher.  He went to remote regions and documented what he found.  Wolfe doesn't provide the background for folks to understand the terms "natural selection."  Artificial selection is called Breeding.  Wolfe correctly points out that "selection" is not a mechanism for generating new species.  Artificial selection has odds in its favor because of being able to control place and time, but even with these advantages, breeding cannot propagate a new viable species based on sexual reproduction.  Natural selection depends on populations reproducing in isolation and slowly drifting apart so much that they cannot interbreed with the prior separated population.  Fruit fly experiments simulating millions of years of evolution have not so far managed to produce populations dissimilar enough not to create viable offspring.  Something else is happening.  Genetic sequencing shows evidence  and ultimately this question will probably be solved in time by these methods.  But, that isn't the point.  The point is that both Darwin's "Origin of the Species" and Noam Chompsky's "Universal Language facility" were theoretical speculations that have become objects of faith rather than science.  Neuroscience and computational science will very likely ultimately answer the questions of the nature of speech as explored by Ray Kurzweil, but the nature of the people who investigate will always be with us.  INTP theorists see into patterns and speculate what "could" explain the reality as they understand it.  Intuition spans the gaps of observation with rules.  Even simple rules like F=ma require intuitive leaps to get beyond experimental variation and other factors such as friction.  INTJ experimentalists attempt to discern if the meaning of what they see or can construct.  This method can fail to see the forrest for the trees, but at least it does see the trees.  Both use theory and intuition to make meaning, but often this meaning can seem oppositional.  INTJ's are often better communicators and are more interested in providing hard examples that others can see, touch and accept.  But, Wolfe more than anything is warning against the errors of Politics and Pseudo-Religious thought holding itself out as science.  Science itself evolves out of conflict and competition, but mostly it is judged by the same criteria as true prophets, does the predictions it makes work?  This is why Quantum Mechanics based solutions are used when scientists can't at all understand really important things beyond the mathematical models which make accurate predictions.  Einstein just hated Bohr's pragmatism on this but Bohr was found to be right in the end, but that took almost 50 years.  Science takes time.  However, Einstein and Bohr never resorted to politics and threats to assert their views.  Physics advanced much faster for this choice.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Wolfe takes on Darwin and Chomsky in an entertaining and informative essay
  

*by U***N on Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2017*

The author, Tom Wolfe, is already accepted as one of the great writers of the last part of the 20th and first part of the 21st Century because of classic works like "The Right Stuff" and "Bonfire of the Vanities", etc.  But he's still writing and as sharp as ever in this short (169 pages) exposition on Evolution, Charles Darwin, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Everett, social Darwinism and the origin of speech.For readers unfamiliar with Wolfe, he's old-school paleo-conservative and loves to tweak (well, more like loves to punch in the nose) the noses of liberals and does so with erudition and wit.  It seems that Wolfe worked backwards from linguistic theories rejecting liberal icon Chomsky's opus claiming that speech (and every other human convention) is a product of evolutionary genetics.  Connecting the dots, the first part of the book notes that Charles Darwin piggy-backed his ideas of natural selection on to the originator of natural selection as the modus operandi of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace.  Many others have noted with increasing frequency that Darwin was rather underhanded in getting credit for evolution when he really came in second.  Books like David Quammen's "Song of the Dodo", 
  
The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction







  
  
    , and multiple others have come to much the same conclusion.  But there are a large number of Biologists and Evolution boosters (Evolution with a capital "E" because this is a religion to them)  who have turned Darwin into a demi--God for liberals - for a variety of reasons mostly rejecting Religion.And so Wolfe shoots down Darwin and his enthusiasts as only Wolfe can.  Wolfe actually quotes Darwin's works.  And lots of these works like "On the Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" are full of half-crazy Victorian suppositions.  Wolfe calls them "Just So Stories" (after Kipling's stories like "How the Leopard Got His Spots") and this part of the book is laugh-out-loud funny as Darwin muses that his dog must see him as  God just like humans look up to a Deity.  Then there is Darwin spending time looking closely at the face of a dressed-up orangutan in various moods.  God only knows what that was supposed to have shown.  And then Darwin claims speech came from horny male birds.  (Yes, that's direct from the demi-God's book in so many words.)  And then we get the further extension of evolution that human behavior, institutions, beliefs, and, well everything are simply the genetically derived products of evolution - an idea called Social Darwinism.  And Wolfe rightly attacks this idea with a vengeance.The next dot that Wolfe connects is linguist's Noam Chomsky's contention that speech is a result of an evolutionary "language organ" that no one has ever seen or identified.  Then along comes a researcher, Daniel Everett, who fires the first shot in a backlash that has become general.  Turns out that speech is probably a tool, invented by humans just like a club and a hammer, to better exist in the world and that speech has no evolutionary basis whatsoever.I think Wolfe was really just having a ball insulting Darwin, his worshipers, and Chomsky, who is better known for his political screeds than his science these days.  All in all, I found this to be greatly entertaining and I even read multiple sources cited by Wolfe.This is NOT a scientific rebuttal and quite incomplete, but I still found it informative in addition to the high comedy of Wolfe making fun of liberal icons Darwin and Chomsky.  Being the recipient of advanced degrees in Biology myself,  I was indoctrinated with Darwin worship and the general liberalism in the American University system and found much of it ridiculous, so I had already come to Wolfe's world view.The book is choppy and incomplete so I wouldn't rate it a 5 star work.  And if you're a) liberal, b)Evolutionist (with a capital "E" and not just a run-of-the-mill biologist like most of us who use the principles of evolution and natural selection to explain all kinds of things but not speech and much of human behavior) c) a lover of Noam Chomsky and liberal screeds,  you probably won't like this book.  4 stars and an easy read.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
    divertente e molto saggio
  
  

*by E***I on Reviewed in Italy on May 11, 2023*

godibilissimo, acuto e profondo

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*Last updated: 2026-01-23*