In 1866, just seven years after Darwin’s book, the French Academy of Sciences was so fed up with the quantity of these unsubstantiated speculations that they banned publications about the origin of human languages. Alfred Wallace, whom many consider one of the cofounders of the theory of evolution, famously conceded that evolution might never be able to explain language and even invoked the notion of God to explain it. So chagrined by Wallace’s retreat, Darwin wrote him a letter, fuming: “I hope that you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”
