The father of SOCIOBIOLOGY and grandfather of
EVOLUTIONARYpsychology sounds off on LIFE, death, faith, FREE WILL, the
"self"--and his beloved ANTS.
Einstein and relativity. Edison and the light bulb. Newton and that
ripe red apple--falling, it seems, from the tree of knowledge itself. If
anyone can change the way we live, scientists can. One such scientist is
Edward O: Wilson,.the man whose name is wedded forever to the word
sociobiology, the study of nature's role in determining human behavior.
Wilson, a professor of biology at Harvard University, launched a
revolution with his monumental 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis. There were 26 chapters covering the biology and behavior of
animals and insects--Wilson is the world's leading authority on the 9,500
species of ants--but it was the 27th, arguing that genes plays a central
role in human behavior, that ignited a public fire and remapped our
world.
Like Galileo, who was put under house arrest for saying the earth
moves around the sun, Wilson was ostracized before being canonized.
Colleagues at Harvard excoriated him as a racist and 15 top scientists
damned him in a letter printed in the New York Review of Books for
subscribing to the same genetic determinism that led to "the
establishment of gas chambers in Nazi. Germany." The two decades since
have seen a remarkable turnaround. Wilson has won two Pulitzers, for On
Human Nature and The Ants. He's been named to one of the most prestigious
professorships at Harvard and elected to the National Academy of
Sciences. Today, he is lauded as the world's most eloquent biologist and
the grandfather of evolutionary psychology, a field that explores the
links between genetic and cultural evolution and that helps explain what
makes us what we are.
In his newest book, Consilience (Knopf), Wilson looks up from the
ants once again and argues for the unity of all knowledge. He suggests
that a small number of natural laws underlie far-flung disciplines--from
the arts and religion to biology, anthropology, and psychology--and that
it's time for cross-fertilization. PT's Jill Neimark caught up with the
69-year-old scientist recently at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in New York City
for a lively discussion of life, death, the universe, ants, faith, free
will, and whether there is even such a thing as the "self."
PT: Back in 1978, you gave a talk at the Association for the
Advancement of Science and were picketed with placards bearing swastikas.
An angry young woman even poured a pitcher of water over your head.
Twenty years later, you write a cover story for the Atlantic called "The
Biology of Morality," and nobody blinks. What's changed in two
decades?
EO: The entire political climate of the world has changed. Twenty
years ago, leftist activists in particular felt science was being used to
justify the policies of colonialist governments. There was a moral
outrage that has now passed almost completely. The fall of the Berlin
wall had something to do with that. There's also the mounting evidence
from genetics and neurobiology
PT: Your theory has actually become mainstream.
EO: It's very respectable now. I was reading a complaint not long
ago by an anthropologist who said, "If you want to get a grant, you'd
better put some biology in your anthropology." Twenty years ago if you
wanted not to get a grant, you put it in.
PT: You've said that ants have given you everything, and it's to
them you always return. What have they taught you?
EO: One thing is that natural selection is brutal. It is "brutal to
see strong, beautiful ant queens and males go forth and to realize that
they're all going to be devastated, that one out of 10,000 queens will
make it into the ground to start a new colony. Every little advantage
that an organism has can make an enormous difference.
The other thing is that natural selection grinds exceedingly small.
It doesn't allow for foul-ups in an ant colony any more than in a
hunter-gatherer society. Real biologists who actually do the research
will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd
or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to
serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of
evolution.
Ants are very good for telling us about chemical communication. For
instance, one ant may use a heptanone and another a methylheptanone as an
alarm substance. What's fascinating is that different species will not
intermingle, even though they are so closely related that all that
separates them is one isomer of one organic substance. Their gene pools
are isolated.
PT: Are there ever accidental spinoffs of evolution? Could there be
some traits that really don't seem to serve an obvious function, but
persist anyway?
EO: There are no accidental spinoffs, and there is very little
probability that inferior traits will survive.
If you told an armchair theorist about the tiny differences in
chemical communication in ants, his inclination would be to say, "Well,
it's an accident, a spin-off. Evolution is full of accidents." Not when
you get down to the nitty-gritty and find that these tiny differences
have a major function in separating species.
PT: But what if one particular variation had such a huge benefit
that it generated a huge number of spin-offs and those survived? Like the
human brain. The benefit you get from a brain like ours is so large that
maybe it can pay for all the spin-offs because of the gain. For instance,
is the capacity to make music a spin-off?
Tags:
behavior,
edward o wilson,
Edward Wilson,
evolutionary psychology,
gas chambers,
genetic,
genetic determinism,
Harvard University,
house arrest,
leading authority,
life death,
national academy of sciences,
nazi germany,
new york review of books,
professorships,
public fire,
pulitzers,
red apple,
remarkable turnaround,
sociobiology,
species of ants,
tree of knowledge
