People know American author Tom Wolfe best for Bonfire of the Vanities and Radical Chic. He coined phrases for people who sense that something is wrong with the decades-long descent.
Many probably don’t know that he doubted Darwin’s hegemony would last ages before the Royal Society began to wonder. He gave it forty years.
A trend spotter, he has a nose for that kind of thing.
From his forthcoming book promo, The Kingdom of Speech:
The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong.
Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech–not evolution–is responsible for humanity’s complex societies and achievements.
From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech. More.
So he was not forced to recant; he is still allowed to say those things? It would be nice to have serious conversations again.
See also: Rethinking evolution
Sorry, your soul just came back to life, is filing suit
and
Tom Wolfe at Socrates lecture where Steve Meyer spoke?
Follow UD News at Twitter!