Introduction

Two years after the monumental publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the eminent Sanskrit scholar and comparative mythologist F. Max Müller raised a fascinating and perplexing challenge to the theory of species transformation through natural selection in the crowded London premises of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Here, in a widely attended lecture series, he attacked Darwin’s model of monogenetic evolution for its inability to account for the development of that most unique of human abilities – language.1 In his characteristically hyperbolic style, Müller declared:

Müller’s deployment of language as weapon against the seeming erasure of human species distinction is notable, not for its novelty, but for its vehemence and innate contradictions.2 After all, if language truly was a naturally unsurpassable obstacle between humans and animals, one should hardly refer to it as a ‘Rubicon’ – a term historically associated with the inevitability rather than the impossibility of transgression. More puzzling is the, perhaps unintentional, suggestion implicit in Müller’s peculiar diction that intention rather than capability underwrites language. Animals are mute, not because they lack the intellectual or anatomical mechanisms of language, but because they dare not speak. Should the brute ever work up the requisite courage to make an utterance, Müller’s statement implies, human hegemony would come to an end.