Top Highlights

• In 1986, in the Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index, which tracks how often authors are mentioned in other authors’ work, Chomsky came in eighth … in very fast company … the first seven were Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud.
• I had never heard of a group of experts coming together to announce what abject failures they were
• One of the pillars of the Faith was the doctrine that Man had descended from Heaven, definitely not from monkeys in trees. Among the divines, the most ferocious attack was the Reverend Adam Sedgwick’s in the Edinburgh Review.7 Sedgwick was an Anglican priest and prominent geologist at Cambridge. If words were flames, Sedgwick’s would have burned th...
• As a dedicated naturalist he had an even bigger problem: a huge gap in evidence when it came to language, which set humans far apart from any animal ancestors. It gnawed at him. He could explain man’s opposable thumb, upright stature, and huge cranium, but he couldn’t find one shred of solid evidence that human speech had evolved from animals. Spee...
• Ahura! That old Malthusian magic’s got me in its spell! It lights up Darwin’s brainpan precisely the way it would Wallace’s twenty years later—It!—the solution to what naturalists, including Darwin himself until that very moment, called “the mystery of mysteries”: how the littlest creature (or “four or five” of them), smaller even than the smallest...