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.

“Language, said Darwin, originated with the songs birds sang during the mating season. Man began imitating the birds, a cappella. By and by he started repeating certain birdsong sounds so often they began to stand for certain things in nature. They became words in embryo, and man began creating a ‘musical protolanguage.’ 62 But mating songs are sung by male birds only. What about human females? No problem. The females started mimicking the males, although in a higher register, and the protolanguage became far more pleasing. In no time the females were talking circles around the males. Female protolanguage, said Darwin, persists to this day… in the form of mothers cooing to their babies. The sounds have no dictionary meaning at all. Yet they signal love, protection, coziness, and mealtime. 63 Anyway, that was ‘How the Birds Gave Man His Words.”

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