by Tom Wolfe
48 Ibid., 334–36.
49 Ibid., 344.
50 Ibid., 344–49.
51 Ibid., 334.
52 Ibid., 352.
53 Ibid., 359–60.
54 Shermer, In Darwin’s Shadow, 161.
55 Darwin to Alfred Russel Wallace, March 27, 1869. Available from the Darwin Correspondence Project database at https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-6684.
56 For more on how spiritism emerged in Darwin’s circle, see James Lander, Lincoln and Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science, and Religion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 243–44.
Chapter III: The Dark Ages
57 Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language.
58 Wallace, “The Limits of Natural Selection,” 335, 359.
59 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871).
60 Rudyard Kipling, “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” in Just So Stories (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1912).
61 Stephen Jay Gould, “Sociobiology: The Art of Storytelling,” New Scientist, November 16, 1978.
62 This is how W. Tecumseh Fitch describes Darwin’s theory in “Musical Protolanguage: Darwin’s Theory of Language Evolution Revisited,” Language Log (of the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania), February 12, 2009, available at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1136. Darwin makes the comparison himself in The Descent of Man, 55.
63 See Darwin, The Descent of Man, 54.
64 Ibid., 83. This was an addition to the second edition.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 68.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 10. The earwigs were also an addition to the second edition.
69 Ibid., 77–78.
70 Ibid.
71 Max Müller, “Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language,” Nature 1 (January 6, 1870), 256–59.
72 “Retrospect of Literature, Art, and Science in 1871: Science,” The Annual Register (1871), 368. The name of the reviewer was never revealed.
73 For examples, see note 26. See also “Review of Descent of Man,” Athenaeum 3 (April 1871), and “Review of The Descent of Man,” Edinburgh Review (July–October 1871).
74 For more information about the Philological Society, see Fiona Marshall, “History of the Philological Society: The Early Years,” available from www.philsoc.org.uk/history.asp.
75 Société de Linguistique de Paris. “Statuts de 1866, Art. 2.” Available at: http://www.slp-paris.com/spip.php?article5.
76 See Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps.’”
77 Quoted in Paul C. Mangelsdorf, foreword to Experiments in Plant Hybridisation by Gregor Mendel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). This note was kept by one of Mendel’s fellow monks, Franz Barina.
78 Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” The American Biology Teacher 35, no. 3 (March 1973), 125–29.
79 See Morris Swadesh, “Sociologic Notes on Obsolescent Languages,” International Journal of American Linguistics 14, no. 4 (October 1948), 226–35, and Stanley Newman, “Morris Swadesh (1909–1967),” Language 43, no. 4 (December 1967), 948–57.
80 Roger Hilsman, American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 143.
81 Morris Swadesh, “Towards Greater Accuracy in Lexicostatistical Dating,” International Journal of American Linguistics 21, no. 2 (April 1955), 121–37.
82 Edwin G. Pulleyblank, “The Meaning of Duality of Patterning and Its Importance in Language Evolution,” in Studies in Language Origins (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989), 1:53–65.
83 See “Celebrating the History of Building 20” on the MIT Libraries Archives, available at http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/building20/index.html.
84 See Florence Harris, with James Harris, “The Development of the Linguistics Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology” (1974), on the website 50 Years of Linguistics at MIT: A Scientific Reunion, December 9–11, 2011, available at http://ling50.mit.edu/harris-development.
Chapter IV: Noam Charisma
85 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1957), v.
86 Ibid.
87 Daniel Yergin, “The Chomskyan Revolution,” Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, ed. Carlos Peregrín Otero (London: Routledge, 1994), 42.
88 John R. Searle, “A Special Supplement: Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics,” New York Review of Books (June 29, 1972).
89 Noam Chomsky, “The Case Against B. F. Skinner,” New York Review of Books (December 30, 1971).
90 B. F. Skinner, “A Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories,” Cumulative Record, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972), 238–48. In the same article he claims that Freud lets psychoanalysis “steal the show” from behavioral and environmental factors.
91 B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (Cambridge, MA: B. F. Skinner Foundation, 2014), chapter 1 (e-book edition).
92 Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” in Leon A. Jakobovits and Murray S. Miron (eds.), Readings in the Psychology of Language (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 142–143, available at https://chomsky.info/1967/.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid.
97 The interview was originally published in Omni magazine’s November 1983 issue. An online transcript is available at https://chomsky.info/interviews/.
98 Ibid.
99 Chomsly, “The Case Against B. F. Skinner.”
100 Per Chomsky’s March 10, 1984, letter to Lou Rollins, available at http://www.countercontempt.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/IMG.pdf.
101 Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel (New York: The New Press, 2002), 231.
102 Ibid, 245.
103 Noam Chomsky, “Comments on Dershowitz” (August 17, 2006), available at www.chomsky.info/letters/20060817.htm.
104 Noam Chomsky, “Reply to Hitchens’s Rejoinder,” The Nation, October 15, 2001.
105 Noam Chomsky, “Reply to Werner Cohn,” Outlook, June 1, 1989.
106 Noam Chomsky, interview with Vince Emanuele for Veterans Unplugged, “Virtual Town Hall,” December 2012. An archive of this interview is available at chomsky.globl.org.
107 Quoted in Tom Bartlett, “Angry Words,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2012. The original quotation was from an interview in Portuguese: Da Redação, “Ele virou um charlatão,” Folha de S.Paulo, September 1, 2009. (The title refers to Everett and translates as “He became a charlatan.”)
108 Noam Chomsky, “A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1967/feb/23/a-special-supplement-the-responsibility-of-intelle/.
109 Chomsky writes about this (and the others in “the prison dormitory”) in “On Resistance,” New York Review of Books, December 7, 1967.
110 See Harriet Feinberg, Elsie Chomsky: A Life in Jewish Education (Waltham, MA: Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, 1999).
111 For more on this history, see William I. Brustein, Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website at www.ushmm.org.
112 Jose Pierats, “The Revolution on the Land,” in The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939, ed. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974). Pierats cites Augustin Souchy Bauer as the primary source for these numbers. See also Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
113 From an interview in Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 5. “Noam Chomsky,” Britannica.com.
114 Paul Robinson, “The Chomsky Problem,” New York Times B
ook Review, February 25, 1979 (a review of Chomsky’s Language and Responsibility).
115 Eugene Garfield, “The 250 Most-Cited Authors in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1976–1983,” Current Contents 48 (December 1, 1986), 3–10.
116 Robin Blackburn, “For and Against Chomsky,” Prospect, November 2005.
117 Jason Cowley, “Heroes of Our Time—The Top 50,” New Statesman, May 22, 2006.
118 Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Devil’s Accountant,” New Yorker, March 31, 2003.
119 “Noam Chomsky,” in Brian Duignan, ed., The 100 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time (New York: Britannica Educational Publishing, 2010), 314–16.
120 Counts come from Chomsky’s website, www.chomsky.info/books.htm.
121 See Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science 298, no. 5598 (November 22, 2002), 1569–79.
Chapter V: What the Flycatcher Caught
122 Daniel L. Everett, “Pirahã,” in Handbook of Amazonian Languages, ed. Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum (Berlin: Mouton DeGruyter, 1986), 1:200–326. For an example of Everett’s academic adulation of Chomsky, see pages 256–57.
123 Daniel Everett, “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language,” Current Anthropology 46, no. 4 (August–October 2005).
124 For more on Everett’s personal history, see his interview in the Telegraph (“Daniel Everett: Lost in Translation” by William Leith, April 10, 2012) and a profile in the New Yorker (“The Interpreter” by John Colapinto, April 16, 2007).
125 Learn more about the Pirahã language and Everett’s initial experience with the tribe in Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008). In the book, Everett also recounts the experiences of earlier missionaries who were unsuccessful.
126 Everett addresses this in Handbook of Amazonian Languages.
127 Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, 132.
128 Ibid.
129 Ibid.
130 Jennifer M. D. Yoon, Nathan Witthoft, Jonathan Winawer, Michael C. Frank, Daniel L. Everett, and Edward Gibson, “Cultural Differences in Perceptual Reorganization in US and Pirahã Adults,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 11 (November 20, 2014).
131 Ibid.
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid.
134 Rafaela von Bredow, “Brazil’s Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time,” Der Spiegel, May 3, 2006.
135 Elizabeth Davies, “Unlocking the Secret Sounds of Language: Life Without Time or Numbers,” Independent, May 6, 2006.
136 Liz Else and Lucy Middleton, “Interview: Out on a Limb over Language,” New Scientist, January 16, 2008.
137 Quoted in Geoffrey K. Pullum, “Fear and Loathing on Massachusetts Avenue,” Language Log (of the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania), November 29, 2006, available at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003837.html. Archives of the complete message, which was dated November 28, 2006, are available online, including on the Boston Area Neuroscience Talks group on Yahoo (http://yhoo.it/1SdpILf).
138 Bartlett, “Angry Words.”
139 The 2007 article is still available on LingBuzz at http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000411.
140 “Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Pirahã Don’t Have Numbers,” Edge, June 11, 2007, available at https://edge.org/conversation/daniel_l_everett-recursion-and-human-thought. In the “Reality Club” follow-up discussion, Pesetsky takes issue with Everett’s claims that Pesetsky and his coauthors have ties to MIT: “We are all experienced researchers, and we are not all from MIT.”
141 MIT keeps track of all dissertations and advisers in a public online database called DSpace@MIT (dspace.mit.edu).
142 Ibid.
143 Colapinto, “The Interpreter.”
144 Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues, “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment,” Language 85, no. 2 (June 2009), 355–404.
Chapter VI: The Firewall
147 Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.
148“Excerpt: ‘Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,’” from the series Best Books 2009, December 23, 2009, available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121515579.
149 Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.
150 Quoted in Bartlett, “Angry Words.”
151 Quoted in Claudio Angelo, “O Iconoclasta” (“The Iconoclast”), Folha de S.Paulo, February 1, 2009.
152 Michael Tomasello, “Universal Grammar Is Dead,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32, no. 5 (October 2009), 470–71. From the article’s abstract: “To make progress in understanding human linguistic competence, cognitive scientists must abandon the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead try to build theories that explain both linguistic universals and diversity and how they emerge.”
153 Vyvyan Evans, The Language Myth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), i.
154 Larry Trask, quoted in Andrew Brown, “A Way with Words,” the Guardian, June 25, 2003. Trask died in 2004, a year before Everett’s paper “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã” was published.
155 Author’s phone interview with Noam Chomsky on May 3, 2016.
156 Noam Chomsky, “What Is Language and Why Does It Matter?” Lecture given at 2013 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute at the University of Michigan, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-72JNZZBoVw.
157 Rachel Feltman, “Birdsong and Human Speech Turn Out to Be Controlled by the Same Genes,” Washington Post, December 11, 2014.
158 Marc Hauser, et al., “The Mystery of Language Evolution,” Frontiers in Psychology, May 7, 2014.
159 Chris Sinha, “Language and Other Artifacts: Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Niche Construction,” Frontiers in Psychology, October 20, 2015.
160 Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 193.
About the Author
Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his BA at Washington and Lee University and a PhD in American Studies at Yale. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York City.
Also by Tom Wolfe
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
The Pump House Gang
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
The Painted Word
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
The Right Stuff
In Our Time
From Bauhaus to Our House
The Purple Decades
The Bonfire of the Vanities
A Man in Full
Hooking Up
I Am Charlotte Simmons
Back to Blood
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Chapter I The Beast Who Talked
Chapter II Gentlemen and Old Pals
Chapter III The Dark Ages
Chapter IV Noam Charisma
Chapter V What the Flycatcher Caught
Chapter VI The Firewall
Notes
About the Author
Also by Tom Wolfe
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Tom Wolfe
Cover design by Keith Hayes
C
over copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photograph by Mark Seliger
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ISBN 978-0-316-40464-8
E3-20160719-DA-NF