![]() ![]() The allusion to Kipling is, of course, to his collection Just-So Stories (1902), which began as bedtime stories told to his first-born child Josephine (who died at the early age of six). He had called attention to the fact that Darwin’s Just So Stories required a feat of fiction writing Kipling couldn’t compete with. Gould was not a heretic and not even an apostate. Orthodox neo-Darwinists never forgave him. ![]() The first person to refer to Darwin’s tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978. Neither had any evidence to back up his tale. Darwin’s intention, on the other hand, was dead serious and absolutely sincere in the name of science and his cosmogony. Kipling’s intention from the outset was to entertain children. But a passage quoted from the book by a reviewer caught my attention: I have to admit that I haven’t read anything, ever, by Tom Wolfe, whose new book The Kingdom of Speech (2016) apparently tries, in the words of the headline to Jerry Coyne’s review for the Washington Post, “to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky.” And, after reading a few critical reviews of The Kingdom of Speech, I’m not feeling inclined to start reading his work it hardly sounds like the right stuff. ![]()
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