Major novelist Tom Wolfe (he wrote the very un-pc “Bonfire of the Vanities”) says human evolution is a crock — that Darwin could never explain our key gift, speech

https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Speech-Tom-Wolfe/dp/1478953160

What is intriguing is that Wolfe (a Southerner from Virginia with a genteel but heavy southern accent, who, IMO is a closet white nationalist — just read Bonfire and see how it portrays blacks) is not, however, any kind of Born-Again Christian or Bible-based Creationist.

I just heard him on National Public Radio saying, in fact, that he was an atheist, but he says that while animals may evolve, humans and their speech are not produced by evolution.

Speech is why we can beat animals many times our size and physical power, because we can discuss the past with others of our species and then discuss plans for the future, including hunting and war strategies.

The Wall Street Journal wrote (http://www.wsj.com/articles/taking-on-chomsky-and-darwin-1472238740):

Tom Wolfe is back, but which Tom Wolfe? The nose-thumbing satirical novelist? The journalistic anatomist of the American id? No: It’s the pop-intellectual historian, the guy who eviscerated modernist art in “The Painted Word,” modernist architecture in “From Bauhaus to Our House” and modernist literature in “The New Journalism.” In a twist, “The Kingdom of Speech” is an Olympic dive into the Rio-murky waters of evolution and language. Is speech a product of evolution, Mr. Wolfe asks, or of the free play of the human mind? The author’s own prose is, as ever, a marvelous mix of gleeful energy and whip-around-the-neck control, and his book is a gas to read. It’s also kind of bonkers.

…My take

If any human evolution even happened, it was before humans came to this earth.