A book review by Brian Siano
In Consilience E.O. Wilson, one of our most accomplished scientists, calls for the unification of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. He draws from a variety of disciplines, including population genetics, economics, aesthetics, cognitive science, developmental biology, history and politics. At the core of this program is Wilson’s discipline of sociobiology, which has remained a highly controversial area of theory and research since Wilson unveiled it in the mid-1970s.
Not only does Wilson say this is how science could accomplish this, but he goes so far to say that this is how science should be doing it. The goals of the Enlightenment have been vindicated, largely through the failures of its competitors and successors. It’s high time we returned to those goals, Wilson says. This is an era of tremendous economic and political stresses, widespread destruction of the environment, rapacious industry, and ideological fanaticism that could reduce our civilization to a feudal chaos. And we are entering an era where genetic research will enable us to literally control our own path of evolution.
So, are we with the program or not?
Well, Wilson is a hard man to refuse. He argues that science isn’t just a method: “It is a combination of mental operations that has increasingly become the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived.” The capacities of science are such that– to use a well-worn metaphor– we weave ever-more comprehensive tapestries of understanding that reach from the very great (formations of galaxies, consciousness) to the very small (atoms and neurons). Sometimes we have to get the right “fit” between some very disparate areas of knowledge– say, combining general systems theory and the synthesis of neurotransmitters– so our weaving must be cunning and gradual. But this drive for overall consilience seems to be pretty basic to human beings; Wilson himself might classify it as a “secondary epigenetic rule” in his sociobiology schema. So we’re primed to accept Wilson’s outline of the unification of science and culture.
We’ve also been primed by a recent slew of books that derive from evolutionary biology, and make very similar arguments about human nature. There’s Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal, and Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and most recently, Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. Toss in any number of gene-of-the-month stories from Time or Newsweek, and there’s every reason to think Wilson’s work will find a receptive audience.
Wilson is a fine writer, and despite my disagreements over some of his work, I’ll probably be using quotes of his for some time. (One striking example, on the potential of genetic research: “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.”) I found myself envying Wilson for his job, which enables him to spend his time writing about cutting-edge research in cognition, the development of the brain, the genetics of natural selection, the interaction between genes and society, and why culture derives so much from our physical capacities.
However, there’s a lot to argue about. One can agree with Wilson on the big issues– the value of the Enlightenment, the appeal in unifying the sciences with the humanities, and the imperatives facing civilization– but disagree with him over many of his particulars. And given certain political issues– the debates over sociobiology, the automatic-pilot complaints about the humanities and postmodernism, the presence of Newt Gingrich in the acknowledgements– I read ninety percent of Consilience wondering if Wilson was going to close the book by announcing some bizarre political program buttressed with quasi-science. I’m reasonably satisfied Wilson’s on the side of the angels, but still, one owes him a respectful dissent.
The human brain, shaped by close to 3,200 genes, is “the most complex object known in the universe– known, that is, to itself.” Just how the lumbering method of natural selection has created the brain is a profound mystery, “how to account for calculus and Mozart,” and all the other stuff we didn’t need or couldn’t use in the Olduvai Gorge.
Mind-body dualism is pretty much dead, Wilson says: “Now the issue has been joined where it belongs, at the juncture of biology and psychology.” And although we understand the workings of the brain’s constituent parts (neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones) to a large degree, we are only beginning to develop theories of how these parts operate within what we call “mind.”
Sociobiology, according to Wilson, “offers a key link in the attempt to explain the biological foundation of human nature.” Its method is simple: combine the field observations of anthropologists with the principles of population genetics. As we discover how behaviors contribute to reproductive fitness, we can eventually predict which behaviors will “confer the greatest Darwinian fitness,” i.e., propogation of sets of genes into further generations.
We know there are universals in the development of individual minds, such as the smile reflex and the acquisition of language. Anthropologists have outlined sets of “cultural universals.” In a 1947 survey, George Murdock listed sixty-seven of them, including bodily adornment, cooperative labor, courtship, dancing, faith healing, gift-giving, language, postnatal care, mealtimes, and sexual restrictions. Although some might argue that these aren’t really “genetic,” but merely inevitable as a result of high intelligence, Wilson says this is “easily refuted” by imagining how an intelligent termite society– complete with the eating of feces and communication pheromones– might articulate its own values. (The list also includes such activities as fire-making, marriage, weather control, and weaving– which diminishes the termite analogy a little.)
The core of Consilience is a restatement of the theories regarding “gene-culture interaction,” which Wilson developed with Charles Lumsden. A simple description goes like this: The structure of our sense organs and minds is coded within our genes. These behave according to what Wilson terms as “epigenetic rules.” Some epigenetic rules tend to be almost unaffected by culture, i.e., the way our retinas break light into distinct colors. Others are less restricted by the genes; Wilson cites the “dyadic instinct,” i.e., the tendency to sort the world into two opposing categories, like good and evil, as one of these secondary epigenetic rules. These rules, Wilson says, “animate and channel the acquisition of culture.”
“Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain. Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked. But the linkage is flexible, to a degree still mostly unmeasured. The linkage is also tortuous: Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself… Culture is reconstructed each generation collectively in the minds of individuals… [Culture] can grow infinitely large and it can even skip generations. But the fundamental biasing influence of the epigenetic rules, being genetic and ineradicable, stays constant.”
(Here, Wilson seems to miss an argument. In his discussion of Murdock’s cultural universals, Wilson implies that they are genetic. It seems to make better sense within his schema to say that they are results of epigenetic rules, i.e., the behaviors are not programmed in the genes, but are a direct result of the physical abilities and cognitive biases of human beings.)
This gene-culture interaction is what makes Man unique. Culture allows us to make adaptations to our environments, and transmit those adaptations to others of our species, without having to wait for the effects of mutation and natural selection to arrive at their slower-than-glacial pace. Although the connection between genes and culture becomes looser with the increased pace of culture change, the connection is “never completely broken.”
Human nature, Wilson states, has been an elusive concept, and “the pathways from the genes to the traits they prescribe may seem overwhelmingly convoluted. Still, they can be deciphered.” And as our understanding of the epigenetic rules develops, we can begin to get a handle on it. He proposes a feedback loop to describe the co-evolution of genes and culture:
1. Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which shape culture;
2. Culture selects for the survival of certain genes;
3. The genes that survive alter the epigenetic rules;
4. The new epigenetic rules give rise to variations in culture.
Wilson characterizes this last step as “the most crucial and contentious,” because it addresses the explanation of culture’s “exponential trajectory.” Biologically speaking, Homo sapiens hasn’t changed much in the last hundred thousand years or so. But only in the last tenth of that time have we developed agriculture, trade, and ocean navigation. Science itself is a product of our last five hundred years. Comparing the last hundred years to the last ten makes the point obvious: culture now changes at an exponential rate.
Wilson sees the entire field of social science as being “snarled by disunity and a failure of vision.” The specialties have fragmented into academic fiefdoms, with little communication between them, and not even a token effort at a consilient view. Some social scientists think progress is being made; others “enjoy the resulting overall atmosphere of chaos, mistaking it for creative ferment,” “favor partisan political activism, directing theory into the service of their personal political philosophies,” or are simply “easily shackled by tribal loyalty” to the various ideologies of the field’s grand masters.
It’s time for a truce, Wilson says. Once we flitch off the extremes of biological determinism and cultural determinism, and focus on the substantial field-work and careful analysis of the social sciences, we may be able to bring it into the realm of true theory. “This means nothing less than aligning [social science explanations] with those of the natural sciences.” Sociologists see themselves as swimming in culture. Anthropologists take a single step back to look at culture, and see that there are limits on what kinds of cultures humans can have. Primatologists look at humans in the context of other primates, and see where these limits and patterns might arise from. But only sociobiologists take this to a really wide perspective, and look to the biological basis of behavior in all organisms. Wilson’s truce, essentially, is placing sociobiology at the acme of theory and method, and keeping the others in their proper places.
Bringing the lens of sociobiology onto the arts, we find that the creative instinct must speak to the evolutionary-shaped sensibilities of the beholders, and so we find recurring themes, archetypes, and core narratives. Thus, “the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them.” Or, they may fit certain perceptual habits humans have evolved over the eons– our brain waves spike when we see patterns with “20 percent redundancy,” like Chinese pictographs and Mondrian abstracts. But we can understand what catches our eye, and what our brains will find meaningful; “Now, with science and the arts combined, we have it all.”
In the realms of ethics and religion, Wilson finds even more chaos sputtering between the extremes of transcendentalism and empiricism. Either our ethics are transcendent of human invention, or our ethics are our empirical inventions. The noble successes of the transcendent view include the Declaration of Independence, the notion of human rights, and the ideal of Christian charity. Its failures include manifest destiny, slavery, and mass slaughter in the name of God. The empiricist view, by contrast, looks for a moral code by “exploring the biological roots of moral behavior, and explaining their material origins and biases.” (Wilson doesn’t mention any noble successes or failures of empiricism.) As much as Wilson respects the heritage of the transcendentalist view, he is an empiricist– and the empiricist view is clearly winning out, at least as far as the scientific evidence goes.
Wilson suggests that our ethics– derived from epigenetic rules, naturally– derive from a fundamental conflict over whether to Cooperate with others, or to Defect from mutual aid for personal benefit. (He alludes to Robert Alxelrod’s famous game-theory work on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, although he doesn’t explicate it in detail.) Turns out long-term benefits come to those whose genes prescribe cooperation, so we’ve developed honor, patriotism, altruism, justice, and the like. The dark side to tribal allegiance, however, is xenophobia: tribes “are quick to imagine themselves victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and they are prone to dehumanize and murder their rivals during periods of severe conflict.”
Religions are not merely an outgrowth of the same structures that provide ethics. They function as social structures that reward altruism, at least within the religion. They provide charismatic leaders who easily seduce people, “true to their primate heritage.” And religions typically grow into complex systems that provide prayer, consolation, answers, and the “oceanic sense of communion with the larger whole that otherwise surpasses understanding.” Wilson is not looking forward to a future without religion. Fact is, “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”
We have won dominance over the planet through our technology. Because humans are no longer separated by insurmountable distances, environmental variation is unsufficient to drive natural selection. The coming epoch of genetic research will, eventually, enable human beings to direct the evolution of their own species. We’ve started to treat diseases with gene therapy, and it’s not much of a step to enact changes in the genome that are passed into future generations. Wilson suspects that most of us will opt for merely fixing defects: after all, changing those epigenetic rules means, well, changing the human soul. These won’t be easy questions we’ll be facing.
And our dominion over the Earth has placed this generation in crucial time, because we’re beginning to run out of the spoils of our conquest. We are taxing the planet’s capacity to maintain our species, and the effects of our technology and population growth on the planet are such that we aren’t likely to continue on our current path without some radical changes. We can’t simply “return to the land” and dwell in Arcadian simplicity, and we can’t continue the way we’re going. But we have to preserve and maintain as much of this planet’s life as we can.
So where does this leave us? In Wilson’s view, we are admirably poised to reinvigorate the ideals of the Enlightenment. Only this time, we are better equipped. We are beginning to understand the mechanisms of evolution, and how they shaped us. We can begin to sketch out the parameters of human nature. The question we face puts the phrase “kin selection” into a whole new context. What kind of world do we want, and what kind of species do we want to be?
Wilson’s use of the term “epigenetic rule” throughout the book is, well, problematic. He introduces the concept by citing the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, who outlined many examples of what he termed “prepared learning,” i.e., the kind of knowledge that our brains are predisposed to learn. The development of a language is probably the most striking example, and there are hierarchies in the ways we develop vocabularies for colors. Wilson classifies “prepared learning” as a subclass of his “epigenetic rules.”
Wilson also introduces an admittedly subjective distinction between “primary” and “secondary” epigenetic rules. Primary epigenetic rules are “automatic processes that extend from the filtering and coding of stimuli in the sense organs all the way to the perception of the stimuli by the brain.” Secondary epigenetic rules are “regularities in the integration of large amounts of information” which “lead the mind to predisposed decisions through the choice of certain memes and overt responses over others.” The process of reification–“the telescoping of ideas and complex phenomena into simpler concepts, which are then compared with familiar objects and activities”– is also deemed a “secondary epigenetic rule.” Discussing research on the the near-universality of incest avoidance, Wilson describes “the following epigenetic rule: If a boy and a girl are brought together before one or the other is thirty months of age and then raised in close domestic proximity… they are devoid of later sexual interest in each other, and the very thought of it arouses an acute aversion.”
The hierarchy of color vocabularies serves as a really solid good example. Some cultures have fewer terms for colors: for example, the Dani people of New Guinea have only two terms, for light and dark. In English, there are eleven terms for focal points along the spectrum: yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, and orange, as well as black, white, and gray. (And thanks to Crayola, we have a lot more nowadays.)
The color vocabularies follow a hierarchy. Two-word vocabularies, like that of the Dani, have only light and dark. A three-word vocabulary adds red. The fourth or fifth term is usually green or yellow. Six-color-term languages include blue, the seventh is brown, and after that, there’s no real preference between purple, pink, orange or gray. People with smaller color vocabularies learn new color terms according to the same pattern. One has to presume a lot about those memes and choices, but we can see Wilson’s distinction here: the perception of color is a primary epigenetic rule, while the nomenclature has developed through secondary rules.
But then we get another distinction: we’re told that “it makes all the difference in the world whether epigenetic rules are rigid, specialized functions of the brain, and thus resemble animal instinct, or whether they are more generalized rational algorithms that function across a wide range of behavioral categories.” Both kinds exist, of course, although “it will be difficult to account for the wide cultural variation that occurs in a majority of behavioral categories.” Later on, they are variously described as “inate operations in the sensory system and brain,” and also as “rules of thumb” that “predispose individuals to view the world in a particular innate way.” “We avoid mating with a sibling, speak in grammatically coherent sentences, smile at friends, and when alone fear strangers in first encounters.” Epigenetic rules “direct the individual toward those relative quick and accurate responses.” Sometimes, however, “they no longer contribute to health and well-being.” So even if a behavior clearly doesn’t enhance reproductive fitness in our current culture, it can still can be termed an “epigenetic rule” that has been formed through eons of natural selection.
When Wilson and Charles Lumsden first tried to account for culture, they proposed searching for something called a “culturgen.” This hypothetical was to be a single “unit” of culture, much in the same way an “atom” was proposed as a single unit of matter. Critics faulted Wilson for proposing such a hypothetical without explicitly characterizing it, and Wilson’s natural response was that scientists had proposed “atoms” long before we had an adequate idea of what they were. (Fair enough.) At the time, Wilson and Lumsden suggested the following by way of a definition:
“A culturgen is a relatively homogeneous set of artifacts, behaviors, or mentifacts (mental constructs having little or no direct correspondence with reality) that either share without exception one or more attribute states selected for their functional importance or at least share a consistently recurrent range of such attribute states within a given polythetic set.”
As sociobiology critic Philip Kitcher wrote, “This doesn’t help much. With a little ingenuity in the construction of sets of attributes, one can group together just about any behaviors one likes and hail the result as a single culturgen.”
“Culturgen,” as a name, didn’t survive long: in an environment fond of using biological and computer metaphors, the natural selection of nomenclature has given Richard Dawkins’ term “meme” the lead. But drawing an analogy between the spread of ideas, and biological processes, goes back farther. Roger Sperry’s 1965 article “Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values” suggested evolution in ideology, and Jacques Monod’s 1970 book Chance and Necessity closed out with a discussion of the “selection of ideas.” Discussing the “spreading power” of ideas, Monod writes:
“Let us say that it depends upon preexisting structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but also undoubtedly upon certain innate structures which we are hard put to identify. What is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves.”
In the decade and a half since he advanced the culturgen idea, Wilson still hasn’t clarified it very much. He proposes that minds operate by drawing connections between discrete perceptions, called nodes. These connections are of varying complexity. They may be a simple one-to-one association of hounds chasing hares. Or, they might be the complex set of associations summoned when we recall, say, a recent vacation in Bermuda. If a set of connections is especially strong– reinforced through repetition, like the daily “drive to work in the morning”– these connections are thus simplified and reduced to symbols of their own. (Wilson doesn’t say this, but since these symbols may, in turn, be regarded as nodes, this outline has a fractal, worlds-within-worlds quality.)
Brain researchers have found evidence of spreading activation of specific ranges of cells during mental tasks. Wilson believes that the consilience of this evidence indicates that actual “memes,” discrete elements of culture, may be identified as “the node of semantic memory and its correlates in brain activity.” It’s a fascinating prospect, and it has the virtue of drawing more from evidence than from hypothetical models or the hypothesized capacities of genes.
But given that we know almost nothing about how genes translate into actual physical organs– as Wilson says, “Because human behavioral genetics is still in its infancy, there is a near-absence of direct links between particular genes and behavior underlying the universal culture traits”– it’s no fault of Wilson’s that he must present the relationship through analogies and thought-experiments. At first, he provides a caution against a certain popular kind of biological reductionism: “How can anyone presume to speak of a gene that prescribes culture? The answer is that no serious scientist ever has,” and “All biologists speak of the interaction between heredity and environment. They do not, except in laboratory shorthand, speak of a gene ‘causing’ a particular behavior, and they never mean it literally.”
In one sense, this is true. When geneticists talk of genes for traits, what they really mean is that they’ve found specific segments of a strand of DNA that appear to be associated with later expressions in the phenotype. Few scientists will speak among their peers of finding a single gene causing a single behavior. (It should be noted that Richard Dawkins asserts, in The Selfish Gene, that “It can be perfectly proper to speak of ‘a gene for behavior so-and-so’ even if we haven’t the faintest idea of the chemical chain of embryonic causes leading from gene to behavior.” Can’t say I agree with him.) So, if Wilson’s remarks on single-gene claims are meant as a caution over reductionism, it’s valuable but so narrow that no one need worry about it– just don’t specify a single gene, and you’re safe.
The fact is that scientists are always claiming to have found distinct genes that relate to distinct physical expressions, like cystic fibrosis or schizophrenia. Wilson certainly knows this: “Over 1,200 physical and psychological disorders have been tied to single genes. They range (alphabetically from Aarskog-Scott syndrome to Zellweger syndrome. The result is the OGOD principle: One Gene, One Disease…. And so pervasive is the evidence of the origin of pathologies in single and multiple gene deviations– even cigarette smoking has a discernable heritability– that biomedical scientists like to quote the maxim that ‘all disease is genetic.’” [Italics added]
The search for a golden gene for behavior X (alcoholism, homosexuality, etc.) is a staple of science journalism. And scientists have no trouble talking of genes in the plural, to associate with particular traits: thus, the New England Journal of Medicine can run articles debating the importance of chromosome 11 on dopamine receptors, and one author can try to link this with alcoholism, drug addiction, and Tourette syndrome. And shortly after mentioning the OGOD principle, Wilson tells us about a gene on the short arm of chromosome 6, which seems to be responsible for schizophrenia. Citing the delusions of despots and religious cults, Wilson asserts that “although the behavior can in no way be called normal, it affects the evolution of culture.”
Wilson does attempt to describe some concepts from biology to help us understand the nature of gene-culture interaction. The first concept is the norm of reaction, which is, basically, how widely a trait can vary depending on the environment. The example Wilson cites is the arrowleaf. In deep water, its leaves form cilia-like ribbons, but in shallow water, it forms lilypad-like shapes On land, it develops an arrowhead shape. In humans, Wilson suggests that Frank Sulloway’s theories about first- and second-born children, and their relationships with their parents, are examples of human norms of reaction.
But when Wilson discusses heritability, things get a little murky. He stresses that it’s a measure used for populations, not individuals. He also notes its flexibility: traits of similar organisms in different environments have different heritabilities. He also appears to be critical of The Bell Curve’s reliance on heritability estimates. But he closes his discussion by saying that heritability “is invaluable for establishing the presence of the genes in the first place,” citing heritability studies on schizophrenia as an illustration of this power, but heritabilities are “at best risky predictors of personal capacity in existing and future environments.”
And about ten pages later, we learn that behavioral genetics is “an infant field of study and still vulnerable to ideologues who would be unkind to it in pursuit of their personal agendas.” The estimation of heritability is probably its only only scientific discipline: geneticists have found mapped the genetic contributions to “sensory physiology, brain function, personality, and intelligence.” The conclusion? “Variation in virtually every aspect of human behavior is heritable to some degree, and thus in some manner influenced by differences in genes among people.”
When we draw all of this back to the concept of epigenetic rules, we find that we are asked to believe– depending on our place in the text– that a) no reputable scientist says that a gene causes a behavior, but b) reputable scientists are always finding single or multiple genes for diseases, including behavioral or cognitive disorders like schizophrenia. Since c) one can apply the tools of genetics to find heritabilities and norms of reaction, epigenetic rules are virtually certain to be detected and quantified by science. Thus, d) behaviors are shaped by multiple genes in an as-yet-unquantified manner, which we term “epigenetic rules.” It hardly to helps to add that e) “the more successful epigenetic rules have spread through the population along with the genes that prescribe the rules” or that f) “The quicker the pace of cultural evolution, the looser the connection between genes and culture, although the connection is never completely broken.”
Something needs to be clarified here. The nature-versus-nurture “debate” is, and always has been, an intellectual red herring. An organism is the result of a complex interaction between its innate capabilities and the surrounding environment. The debate has always been over the nature of this interaction. This much is agreed upon by both defenders and critics of sociobiology. But somewhere between the words, one can actually feel the sociobiology camp pulling for the supremacy of the genes and the relative irrelevance of culture, and their opposites stressing the power and complexity of culture over the merely baseline capabilities of the genes.
This may be the time to ask a simple question. Is there such a thing as a human behavior, or aspect of culture, that could not be counted as some kind of “epigenetic rule?” I tried hard to think of one, and drew a complete blank. Every time I considered a behavior that seems strongly shaped by society– road rage, cheek-piercing, recovered memories, industrial music, reading Skeptic magazine– all I needed was a moment of imagination in order to thread it back to the genes. And merely imagining why something could be so doesn’t prove that it is so.
I really wonder if I’ve missed something profound. After all, since scientists must try to trace the thread between the genotype and the eventual phenotype, the term “epigenetic rules” isn’t a bad name for these as-yet-unquantified relationships. (Neither is “linkage map.”) But Wilson stretches the thread to run from the genes through proteins, cells, organs, brains, minds, ideas, perceptions, cultures, family structures, morals, ethics, the arts, and politics. And the thinner the thread stretches, the less weight it can bear.
Still, our urge to a unitary view of the world demands drawing such thread, between different levels of organization and complexity, between quarks and atoms, molecules and genes, and cells and organs. These can all be examined as discrete parts of discrete wholes. Wilson has been accused of excessive reductionism in the past, and he replies– correctly, I think, and with justifiable impatience– that science couldn’t progress without reductionism. But he does recognize that it can go a bit far, and in one fine passage, he writes:
“Biologists, it has been said, suffer from physics envy. They build physics-like models that lead from the microcopic to the macroscopic, but find it difficult to match them with the messy systems they experience in the real world. Theoretical biologists are nevertheless easily seduced. (I confess to being one, and having been responsible for more than my share of failures.)”
There’s been some philosophical debate as to whether physics really should be regarded as the measure of all sciences. After all, most sciences deal with phenomena that require less definite methods, like heritability estimates, statistical correlations, and idealized models whose predictive value is never 100% certain. Still, “Physics envy” is hard to avoid: how often have we tried to understand some complex aspect of life by visualizing it as some analogy of objects moving in relation to one another in space? Or exerting forces upon one another, and imagining the resulting shifts of influence? (I do this a lot: when I talk, my hands are fluttering around, forming shapes, illustrating movements of “objects.”) If science really is an intrinsic outgrowth of the human mind– and I believe it is– then “physics envy” is always going to be with us.
But Wilson regards it as necessary to characterize discrete units of culture, and I think that this causes some of the problems. The difficulty in doing this, and the rapid rate of cultural change may indicate that culture isn’t consilient with natural selection. When we categorize culture into wholes, or hairsplit it into units, it’s not as empirically clear as categorizing molecules or elements. Culture is transmitted, considered, and then acted upon, so it’s difficult to trace chains of causality. An element of culture, however defined, may wax and wane as circumstances demand. And unlike biology, culture follows the theories of Lysenko, in that it does transmit acquired traits to future generations– and jettisons its various heritages very quickly. (For all of his complaints about the vagueness, discord and factionalism of social theorists, Wilson doesn’t seem to wonder if, maybe, it might just come with the territory.)
But, whether culture is reducible or not, the rapid change of culture undermines Wilson’s feedback loop of genes and culture. Since culture is part of our environment, it will be a factor in natural selection– so Wilson says that culture selects for genes that will propogate, and thus affect future culture.
Reading Consilience, it’s very easy to get the impression that culture, changing at an MTV-like rate, is producing adaptive mutants every generation or so. For a good example of Wilson’s enthusiasm running loose, there’s his discussion of how brains evolved. “Working in a chaotic flood of environmental stimuli,” Wilson writes, “[the brain] sees and listens, learns, plans its own future. By that means the brain determines the fate of the genes that prescribed it.” Thus, “Brains that choose wisely possess superior Darwinian fitness, meaning that statistically they survive longer and leave more offspring than brains that choose badly.” So rather than selfish genes, we now have selfish brains.
This is the sort of anthropomorphism that brought sociobiology low. If we’re explaining the evolution of a species with complex brains, then Wilson’s talk about “wise choices” is misleading. Wise choice implies conscious decision, and in the sense of evolution, it’s like saying the liver wisely “chooses” to start growing a bladder to trap unwanted gall.
However, if we’re talking about the decisions made by the consciousnesses manifested by the brains, suddenly we’re not talking about the emergence of brains under evolution anymore. We’re talking about decisions made by individuals, and the impact these decisions have had on their reproductive success. Here, what constitutes a “wise choice” has little to do with the genes: it has a lot to do with the current environment, the options open to an individual, and the fluctuations of fortune. If the choices were directly and unmistakably shaped by the genes, then natural selection might be said to have a role– but not even Wilson argues for this degree of genetic control over conscious decision-making.
Still, such passages provoke an important question. If culture selects for genes, and if culture’s rate of change has increased exponentially, why hasn’t the human genome changed all that much over the past 10,000 years of exponential cultural changeBecause we can invent new tools, or “prosthetics,” to insulate us from the environment, we don’t have to rely on the laboriously slow process of biological change in order to adapt and survive. ? Even Wilson admits, in his closing chapter, that “no evidence exists that the human genome is changing in any overall new direction.”
In other words; we already have decommissioned natural selection.
Towards his conclusion, Wilson writes that “What really matters to humanity… are sex, family, work, security, personal expression, entertainment, and spiritual fulfillment– in no particular order.” And this is probably the most frustrating thing about Consilience. I’m sure the same question popped into your mind, too: don’t we know this already? We know humans can be cooperative and competitive, sympathetic and ruthless, spiritual and fanatical, doctrinaire and creative, rational and inchoate, anxious and arrogant, confident and terrified. We are a pretty versatile species. For all of Wilson’s appeals to scientific rigor, for all of the calculations of kinship values, I’m still wondering if sociobiology isn’t just a kind of folk psychology, only with field work and more decimal places.
This may be somewhat unfair, because Consilience is not intended to be a full explication of Wilson’s science. It’s a very personal work, and its task is to convey Wilson’s appreciation of how humans have been shaped over time. So, it’s not going to be as equation-laden as Genes, Minds and Culture, and one can allow for some looseness. But it does succeed in capturing Wilson’s considerable enthusiasm.
The second chapter of Consilience, outlining intellectual history and calling for a return to the Enlightenment, has already attracted its share of attention. In essence, Wilson presents the Enlightenment as civilization’s last great shining moment; after millions of years of evolution, the human brain could suddenly imagine how the power of the mind could unite with the demands of the soul. In reaction, Wilson writes, came a slew of movements acting out of resentment and spiritual fear. First there was romanticism, which provided an “escape to a higher realm through art.” Then transcendentalism, then modernism, born of the “fragmentation of expertise” in the sciences and reflected in the arts, where modernists “identified the constraining bonds of tradition and self-consciously broke them.” Thus, the hope of unified knowledge was “all but erased.”
Now we have “ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment.” The postmodernists, “a rebel crew milling beneath the black flag of anarchy, challenge the very foundations of science and traditional philosophy” merely promote solipsism, and their doctrines of metatheories and “root metaphors” have “seeped by now into the mainstream of the social sciences and humanities.”
(This was the low point of the book. Can’t we have a moratorium on this tired routine? When I’ve heard opinion-makers promote evil social policies, they’re more often to turn to religion, rump Darwinism or pseudoscience than to the hyperpedantry of French literary theory. I know of no politicians in America who refer to Derrida or Lacan when cutting public-school funding, and Foucault’s observations on Bentham’s Panopticon don’t turn up in debates over the death penalty.)
Yet two pages after this Fu Manchu terror, Wilson reverses himself and describes postmodernists as amusing gadflies swirling about the otherwise serious-minded scholars, good only for token dissent to keep us rationalists on the shining path. “I suggest there have always been two kinds of original thinkers, those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward.”
But back to the Enlightenment. Early on, Wilson outlines the fate of Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, whose life as a scientist, philosopher, and nobleman came to an end in a jail cell in revolutionary France. Condorcet was, in Wilson’s words, “the last of the French philsophes, the eighteenth-century public philosophers who immersed themselves in the political and social issues of their times.” Condorcet attempted to apply mathematics to the social sciences; although he was elected to the Academie des Sciences at a young age, Wilson characterizes his work as “not impressive,” although he does regard it as a forerunner to decision theory. In other realms, Condorcet was a very much the enlightened progressive. He opposed France’s colonial policies, founded an anti-slavery society, and co-founded the revolutionary journal Le Republicain with Thomas Paine.
Condorcet was active in the Revolution as well, and all was going well until the Terror– and the National Convention ordered his arrest. He went into hiding, where for eight months he wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which Wilson describes as “an intellectual and social history of humanity.” Condorcet was eventually found, arrested, and thrown into prison, where he died in 1794.
Condorcet, optimistic to the end, outlined a process of continuing progress:
“He assures the reader that the glorious process is underway: All will be well. His vision for human progress makes little concession to the stubbornly negative qualities of human nature. When all humanity has attained a higher level of civilization, we are told, nations will be equal, and within each nation citizens will also be equal. Science will flourish and lead the way. Art will be freed to grow in power and beauty, Crime, poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination will decline. The human life span, through scientifically based medicine, will lengthen indefinitely.”
Condorcet wasn’t exactly a butterfly broken upon a wheel. But there’s a strong echo of Anne Frank here, even down to the belief that mankind is basically good.
It’s not much of a leap to suggest that Wilson identifies with Condorcet, and I suspect that his own experiences during the sociobiology debates of the mid-1970s are a factor. The debates over sociobiology really haven’t ended, mainly because they were about a lot more than just the science. In the view of his supporters, E.O. Wilson was attempting, bravely but perhaps innocently, to outline human nature using the most powerful insights available after Darwin. He was then set upon by a group of unscrupulous radicals who shouted down this challenge to their alleged “radical environmentalist” and “egalitarian” views, by using their easy access to the New York Review of Books and accusing Wilson of resurrecting both Herbert Spencer and Adolf Hitler.
Reading the original indictments against Wilson– specifically, those of Boston’s Science for the People group, which included Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould– one is struck by the strong polemic style employed. The Science for the People group waste little time in warning readers of the parallels to Third Reich bio-politics before getting to the task of discussing Wilson’s sociobiology.
Still, Lewontin and Gould knew Wilson fairly well: according to John Casti, Wilson had championed bringing Lewontin to Harvard, despite the faculty’s political opposition. One would’ve expected a more personal touch in the articles, giving him the benefit of the doubt. But the essays by Science for the People treated Wilson as a remote figure who might be camoflaging unsavory ideas.
There’s one sense in which the tone is understandable. Arthur Jensen’s claims of the lower intellectual capacities of black Americans had recently had its nine days of wonder, and there is always an audience recepetive to scientific proofs against social change. Wilson’s critics found their wariness vindicated when early sociobiologists would trumpet glib and tasteless observations as cast-iron fact. There was Randy Thornhill, whose pronouncements on human rape were drawn from scorpion flies and mallard ducks, and David Barash, who asserted “an evolutionary tendency for racism,” all the while making how-regrettable-we-have-to-face-this-unpleasant-truth noises. Pierre van den Berghe, all the while claiming the purest empiricism, loaded his sociobiological pronouncements like “neither the National Organization for Women nor the Equal Rights Amendment will change the biological bedrock of asymmetrical parental investment.” In another paper, he and Barash offered the following pronouncement on child-rearing:
“For a woman, the successful raising of a single infant is essentially close to a full-time occupation cor a couple of years, and continues to claim much attention and energy for several more years. For a man, it often means only a minor additional burden. To a limited extent, sexual roles can be modified in the direction of equalization of parental load, but even the most ‘liberated’ husband cannot share pregnancy with his wife. In any case, most societies make no attempt to equalize parental care; they leave women holding the babies.”
So, if you’re a single father who wants child custody, forget it; you’re working against your own natures.
Frequently, sociobiology theorizing had an odd, non-falsifiable feel. If a behavior could be said to increase an individual’s reproductive success, fine. But if a behavior seemed to work against reproductive success, a mechanism like kin selection was invoked to make the individual’s sacrifice more valuable to others with similar genomes. Behaviors analogous to this that didn’t benefit actual genetic relatives– like patriotism, service in the army, charity and social work– were just culture-colored variations on the innate drive. Far too often, sociobiology really did consist of “just so” stories, which “explained” behavioral traits by imagining plausible Darwinian histories for them.
Behaviors of animals were routinely anthropomorphized. Aggression against unfamiliar animals was labelled “xenophobia,” “coyness” was attributed to females of all species, and sterile insects were deemed “altruistic.” It’s worth remembering that these terms mean very different things when applied to humans– once we talk about coy wasps and generous dung beetles, we’ve left science for Disneyland. Toss this into the usual slew of gee-whiz journalism we’ve wearily come to expect on such questions, and yeah, the Science for the People group had good reason to put up their guard. But to this day, there are people who seem to think that the attacks on sociobiology were done solely on the basis of politics.
Either way, the experience clearly unsettled Wilson. Having angry students gate-crash an AAAS conference to dump ice water on your head is bound to give you the heebie-jeebies about political debate. So, once introduced at the beginning of Consilience, the specter of Condorcet, and the downhill slide since his death, stand over the subsequent passages as a reminder of high stakes and dramatic tension. At times it sounded like the patter of a good escape-trick. E. O. Wilson, once the target of angry mobs, will now attempt the dangerous feat of scientifically characterizing human nature. Other men have died trying to bring this wisdom to the public.
But the only substantial opposition Wilson even mentions in this book is postmodernism. His main critics from the sociobiology wars aren’t even mentioned, and Philip Kitcher’s scrupulous critical study of sociobiology, Vaulting Ambition, is dismissed as “bleak” in a footnote. The failure of most scientists to engage themselves in the adventure of consilience is blamed on a failure of energy, nerve, financial support and professional overspecialization. So, between the pomo guttersnipes and the plodding bottle-washers, a new Enightenment doesn’t seem like it has much of a chance.
In his final chapter, Wilson the naturalist stands beside Wilson the social theorist, and presents humanity at the close of the millennium– with stewardship of the planet in its hands, and the code of life very nearly in its grasp. Within the next few decades, the Human Genome Project will have mapped all 3.6 billion letters in our DNA. Repair of minor developmental defects will be overtaken by the prospect of technologies that can provide any “improvements” we might imagine. Humans, as a species, are also “the greatest destroyer of like since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago.” Without intending it, we’ve become a “geophysical force, altering Earth’s climate.”
And Wilson provides a terrific thumbnail sketch of what we’re really facing, as a species, we who would be as gods. We’re breeding too quickly. The quality of life has improved, for many, but our ecosystem is taxed more and more. Every year, between 13 to 18 million people around the world die from poverty-related causes. Our agricultural systems are operating at their current limits: growth yields have levelled off, and have started to drop. Harvesting the sea won’t help much, either: the major fisheries are harvested beyond capacity. Global warming, encouraged by carbon dioxide pollution, will lead to greater temperature variances, the breakup of the major ice shelves, and widespread flooding.
“To summarize the future of resources and climate, the wall toward which humanity is evidently rushing is a shortage not of minerals and energy, but of food and water. The time of arrival at the wall is being shortened by a physical climate growing less congenial. Humankind is like a household living giddily off vanishing capital. Exemptionalists are risking a lot when they advise us, in effect, that ‘Life is good and getting better, because look around you, we are still expanding and spending faster. Don’t worry about next year. We’re such a smart bunch something will turn up. It always has.”
Wilson’s position is that, if anything’s likely to turn up, it’s not going to be good. Civilizations collapse mainly because the populations reach their carrying capacity– and then step beyond it. Wilson cites the massacres in Rwanda (usually reported as “ethnic rivalry run amok”) as a micrososm of the rest of the world, an example of how overpopulation and overtaxing of natural resources can tip a civilization into ruin. Yes, we might develop new technologies, new “prostheses” to protect us from the collapses. But each prosthesis but it makes our environment that much more delicate, more rickety, more susceptible to collapse.
Here Wilson sees two competing human self-images in re the environment. The first, which he terms “naturalistic,” sees humans as existing within a narrow range of natural possibilities. We’ve adapted to what this world was before we started messing with it, and our future will be a matter of preserving as much of our natural environment as possible. The second, which Wilson sees as the guiding theme of Western Civilization, is a sort of technological hubris. He characterizes it as “exemptionalist,” in the sense that humans see themselves as exempt from nature, and are thus fit to exert dominion over it. Yes, it’s regrettable that we might lose a few rain forests, but the stars beckon us ever forward, and that’s the price of progress.
I’m sure we’ve all heard echoes of such distinctions before; about fifteen years ago, Ben Bova boosted the space program in a book called The High Road, where he cast the debate as a matter of resentful “Luddites” versus heroic “Prometheans.” The PR industry has churned out lots of variations on the theme, like “tree-huggers” or “Chicken Littles.” Questioning our technological might is portrayed as a sickness of the soul, or a failure of nerve, or a kind of irrational terror that interferes with the bold, masculine initiatives of those who Get Things Done. Even the sociobiology debates had a touch of this; if Wilson’s critics won’t face up to the “inevitable” conclusions of Darwin’s dangerous idea, they’re just “special creationists” a particularly pernicious sort.
What’s wonderful here is that Wilson, naturalist that he is, comes down solidly on the side of the preservationists. “In its neglect of the fragility of life, exemptionalism fails definitively,” he writes. “To move ahead as though scientific and entrepreneurial genius will solve each crisis arising in turn implies that the decline of the global biosphere can be simiarly managed… No biological homeostat is known that can be worked by humanity. To believe otherwise is to risk reducing earth to a wasteland, and humanity a threatened species.” And when Wilson denounces that “pietistic and selfish libertarianism into which much of the American conservative movement has lately descended,” I had a warm little buzz of glee in my tummy.
(This isn’t so say that I didn’t have some quarrels with this chapter. Wilson criticizes economists for leaving the environment out of their theoretical models– and it sounds like it’s no more serious than misplacing a decimal point. He spends more time denouncing postmodern philosophy than he does on, say, the coal industry, whose public-relations juggernaut has probably done more harm to biodiversity than Jacques Derrida has.)
The model Wilson supports is that proposed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio; Agenda 21, an ethic of sustainable development. We must improve the life of all, but we must do it with “minimal prosthetic dependence.” We must exploit the trend of what Buckinster Fuller termed “ephemeralization,” a reduction in the bulk of hardware and the energy it needs. We must move from burning coal and petroleum for fuel, and move to such sources as solar and nuclear power. [This reviewer has misgivings about the latter.]
And Wilson pleads for a strong conservation ethic to be made part of this program. Species are vanishing at rates not seen since, well, before Homo sapiens came along. We can’t even begin to perserve the millions of species of plant, insect, and animal life that are in danger of extinction, let alone re-establish their environments once they’re destroyed. And given that it took nearly ten million years for evolution to regain the level of biodiversity that existed before end of the Mesozoic era, sanguine claims that “Evolution always replaces extinct species with new ones” are cargo-cult nonsense. We’ve caused more than enough harm, Wilson says.
Like I said, this concluding chapter is comprehensive, vivid, and bracing– and I wonder how it might’ve read if he’d spoken less often to Newt Gingrich and more to, say, Earth First!s Dave Foreman or Judi Bari. (He’s written papers with Paul Ehrlich, so maybe he has, for all I know.) But overall, I think Wilson would agree with Arthur C. Clarke’s witty self-appraisal: “I’m an optimist. We have a 51 percent chance of survival.”
However, I don’t regard Wilson’s theories of gene-culture evolution as being consilient with his heroic efforts as a conservationist. They’re just not related to one another. One doesn’t need lengthy discussions of kin-selection to know what makes people suffer. Hunger, oppression, disease and terror are things which we don’t like and shouldn’t tolerate for our species. It might be an interesting intellectual exercise to wonder where we got this sense of altruism, but it won’t feed the hungry or clothe the poor.
Let’s recall that Condorcet, in addition to his faith in reason and science, was also an activist in the French Revolution. E.O. Wilson is a great scientist, and his efforts on behalf of nature conservation are well-known and honorable. He writes that “The legacy of the Enlightenment is the belief that entirely on our own we can know, and in knowing, understand, and in understanding, choose wisely.” It’s a wonderful close to a fascinating book, but stuff like this makes me wish Wilson was a lot less preoccupied with disentangling genes and culture.
Works Consulted for this Article:
Wilson, E.O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Knopf, New York, 1998.
Caplan, Arthur L. The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on the Ethical and Scientific Issues Concerning Sociobiology. Harper and Row, New York, 1978.
Casti, John L. Paradigms Lost: Tackling the Unanswered Mysteries of Modern Science. Avon Books, New York, 1989.
Kitcher, Philip. Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. MIT Press, Boston, 1987.
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca and Cavalli-Sfora, Francesco. The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution. Addison-Wesley, New York, 1995.
Lewontin, R.C., Rose, Stephen, and Kamin, Leon. Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature. Pantheon Books, New York, 1984.
Hubbard, Ruth and Wald, Elijah. Exploding the Gene Myth. Beacon Press, Boston, 1993.
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. The Woman That Never Evolved. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981.
Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1985.