Biologist
Edward O. Wilson’s new book is called ‘The Social Conquest of Earth.’ It’s largely provides a biological perspective
on 3 grand philo-cultural questions (famous questions, inscribed by Paul Gauguin in his
giant Tahitian painting of 1897):
· “Where do we come from?
- What are we?
- Where are we going?”
Unlike traditional philosophy or religion
Wilson wants to incrementally advance on these from scientific understanding
and theory. He speaks in terms of the relatively rare, eusocial nature of humans and how this might have develop as
part of pre-adaption. (Eu-Social means the highest level of organization of animal sociality, and is defined by 3 characteristics: cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups).
While it takes a while to make a scientific case Wilson argues for this approach as better than what we are handed by religion approaches. It’s of no real help at all he argues aside from making us feel like we know:
While it takes a while to make a scientific case Wilson argues for this approach as better than what we are handed by religion approaches. It’s of no real help at all he argues aside from making us feel like we know:
“mythmaking
could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity”
Contemporary philosophy also comes up with a backhand irrelevant,
having as Wilson argues
“long
ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.”
Well maybe and maybe at Harvard, but there are
relevant, contemporary folks in philosophy I think.
I largely agree that the most likely approach to
answering the 2 above foundational questions is to follow the scientific method
as applied by the proper and emerging disciplines. So we
have Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology along with
newer disciplines like neuroscience, epigenetics and evolutionary biology. It’s a wonderful matrix of expanding
understanding and especially nice when a master of one or two of these spends
the time to synthesize a view understandable to non-experts. Others in this senior synthesis of ideas worth
reading and listening to are Jared
Diamond whose last 3 or 4 books are enlightened warning that touches on our eroding environment in an historical context. They are wake up calls such as we have heard too from Richard Dawkins, of course, whose latest book An Appetite for Wonder: The
Making of a Scientist is
autobiographical.
Wilson draws on all these sources to explore the development
of human society and some objective self-awareness needed to understand our
collective selves. The path has bounced from ancient art, primitive religion, the
founding of philosophy, and finally an integrated science perspective. As a
Biologist Wilson sees a tipping point in these various views of human nature
and such with Charles Darwin's 19th century theory of evolution by
natural selection. Together with other sciences this theory can be applied to
understand human behavior and deal with some age old controversies.
"an unavoidable and perpetual war ...
between honor, virtue, and duty ... and selfishness,
cowardice, and hypocrisy..."
A payoff
is the later section of the book called “A New
Enlightenment.” In a sequence of chapters he covers the topics of language
(pre-adapted cognition evolved into the ability to create abstractions, and later to use
arbitrary symbols for communication, thus leading to the evolution of language)., culture, morality ("The
naturalistic understanding of morality does not lead to absolute precepts and
sure judgments, but instead warns against basing them blindly on religious and
ideological dogmas," p. 252)., religion
and art. These provide a much different and nuanced view to approach an answer to
the earlier question - “What are we?”,
His warning about the tribal aspects of religion
are a meme that one hopes is widely heard. Organized religion, Wilson argues, is a
simple expression of an evolution favored tribalism. So the "illogic"
of religious belief is not a weakness in traditional human cultures, since it
serves a social role of binding a group's members together to the exclusion of
outsiders. You may get to be part of a
group by abandoning your differences and converting to the group’s core
beliefs. In pre-scientific days creation- genesis stories & myths employed
by the early Big religions are all explainable as cultural relics. Wilson does
a back hand refutation of "phantasmagoric elements" as the result of
hallucinogenic drugs. This natural
explanation, he argues, is a much more plausible as the basis for things like John's
“visions” recorded in the Book of Revelation than the idea that god
intervention actually happened. The same goes for nomads wandering in the desert.
“.. you can see this especially in the difficulty of
harmonizing different religions. We ought to recognize that religious strife is
not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between
creation stories. We have bizarre creation myths and each is characterized by
assuring believers that theirs is the correct story, and that therefore they
are superior in every sense to people who belong to other religions. This feeds
into our tribalistic tendencies to form groups, occupy territories and react
fiercely to any intrusion or threat to ourselves, our tribe and our special
creation story. Such intense instincts could arise in evolution only by group
selection—tribe competing against tribe. For me, the peculiar qualities of
faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.”
Yes, it is a good
explanation and a warning too.
For a good interview with
Wilson on this see the Slate
article.
For a video interview see BookTV’s Social Conquest of
the Earth.
