As nasty as it sounds, Nietzsche is right. An ethics or politics based on natural selection is likely to lead to “wars such as never have been fought before.” (It certainly did in the early 1900s.) What do you expect if you believe all life is is a struggle for power, and “biological fitness” dominates your worldview? This isn't to say that natural selection necessarily leads to fascism; it’s just to say that if you take natural selection as the “theory of everything” or as the be-all and end-all of understanding human life, you’re in dangerous political territory. For Wolfe, humans have a special capability—language—that allows us to operate higher than natural selection, and here Wolfe turns to the fact that Darwin had the most difficult time explaining the origin of speech. Wolfe mocks Darwin’s origin story, explaining it more as a children's story than a scientific paper.
The Kingdom of Speech
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