How speech helped humans CONQUER the world

Introduction. Every year, since 1972, a public intellectual is invited to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities. Thinkers who can "communicate the knowledge and wisdom of the humanities in a broadly appealing way" are selected. In 2006, the winner was Tom Wolfe👇

Tom Wolfe was a path-breaking reporter credited with kickstarting a new, personal, novelistic style of journalism called Gonzo Journalism. He also wrote best-selling novels like The Bonfire Of Vanities. In his lecture, he digs into the nature of "the human beast."

Wolfe's central idea: we are not homo sapiens but "Homo loquax," that is, "man talking." Natural selection via the natural environment was overrun and overpowered via the "artificial selection" by culture the moment humans developed speech.

Wolfe on Speech: "It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning." Without speech, new ideas and technology couldn't break out of one person's mind or life. Speech allowed ideas and technology to spread, which birthed civilization.

Wolfe: "Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming." Our environment used to shape and select us, now we shape and select our environment.

Speech - and the culture that emerges from it - radically upended not just our evolution, but also "the evolution of animals." We're so powerful that we are "sentimental about predators," and help save wild cats from evolutionary extinction.

Culture takes the raw materials of evolution and refashions them into the drama of life: "To say that evolution explains the nature of modern man is like saying that the Bessemer process of adding carbons to pig iron to make steel explains the nature of the modern skyscraper."

The first verse of the New Testament: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." With speech, we started asking existential questions; that led to religion. Wolfe: "One of Homo loquax's first creations after he learned to talk was religion."

With speech, humans obtained a cultural tool with which they could shape their world faster than their world could shape them. This idea - that culture is the greatest driver of evolution today - is explored in other books such as The Secret Of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich.

Wolfe's strong claim that evolution "has been irrelevant for 11,000 years" may be false. But his central idea that speech sets humans apart rings true. Religion, higher culture, and technology all trace their origin to the unique human ability to transmit information and stories.