To be fair, the full NY Times headline reads, “In Defense of a Gift, Darwinism Be Damned,” and it’s a review of Tom Wolfe’s new book, The Kingdom of Speech. Quite a positive one too, and — right in your face — on the front page of the Arts section. (The online version of the article has a more anodyne heading.)

The “gift” is man’s unique endowment with language. The gist of the review:

Mr. Wolfe does not complain about evolution on religious grounds; in fact, he is an atheist. He begins by declaring the notion of the big bang to be vaguely ridiculous, and likens it to a mythopoetic bedtime story. Everything came from nothing?

Most essentially, Mr. Wolfe employs new research from the controversial anthropologist Daniel Everett to argue that the power of speech — man’s signal attribute — is not the product of evolution at all but rather a tool that man created. “Bango!” Mr. Wolfe writes. “There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal.” He wonders how airtight the theory of evolution can be if it does not account for such a thing. “What is it,” he asks, “that has left endless generations of academics, certified geniuses, utterly baffled when it comes to speech?”

Wolfe is an atheist? A quick search seems to show the links from Google that give evidence for that are broken, outdated, or second-hand. But if he is, so much the better, in a sense. He has forced the New York Times to admit, “Mr. Wolfe does not complain about evolution on religious grounds,” nor does he offer his “Bango!” realization — the “cardinal distinction between man and animal,” the truth of human exceptionalism — because the Bible says so.

Right! Doubts about evolutionary theory do not turn upon religious beliefs.

Reviewer Dwight Garner wonders what “scientists” would say in response to Wolfe’s critique of Darwinism:

Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms of sussing out speech, through the combined use of anatomy and physiology and biochemistry. The structures that support language don’t fossilize, so evidence is simply harder to come by. This is not something we will lose sleep over, no matter how much you pogo and spit in the Sid Vicious manner.

In other words, “The check is in the mail.”

Or rather — for younger readers, unable to recall a time when checks were routinely put in the mail: “We’ll get back to you. Whenever.” Evolutionary scientists will shrug, eloquently, because there is no prospect of explaining speech in evolutionary terms. That is the essential point of Wolfe’s book.

A friend, impressed by the placement and attitude of the Times review, asks, “The door it opens is this: If it is acceptable to challenge Darwin on language, why not on the whole Darwin syndrome?”

Correct, even in the New York Times, it may be acceptable. But it’s all in the “who” and the “how.” Wolfe gets away with it because he’s an icon, perhaps an atheist, and because he writes like a dream.

It all has to do with the sociology of opinions. In espousing views, people are often motivated by non-rational, emotional considerations — prestige, self-image, group-membership being prominent among them. This is one of Wolfe’s longtime insights, and it’s a major theme of The Kingdom of Speech. Thus not just anyone can successfully get an argument across. There must be a match between speaker and hearer that turns a key. It takes a special personality to open the lock that holds minds in prison.

To switch metaphors, intellectual engagements aren’t won just by an exchange of colorless data launched from canons arranged on opposite sides of a battlefield. Wolfe’s book, joyously brief, will be read by a lot of people. And yes his exuberant gifts as a writer, his celebrity, even those white suits, perhaps his atheism too, all these are important.

Make no mistake, his book is a big, big deal in the evolution debate. And not just anyone could have written it.

Photo: Tom Wolfe at the White House, via Wikicommons.

I’m on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.