EO: Some scientists suggest that music is an accidental spin-off of
rhythmicity and speech. But I feel music has a very important role in
ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along
with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human
culture. It probably served then, as it does today, to bind the society
together, especially during rites of passage and reaffirmation of tribal
communion.
PT: Could both accounts be true? What if it was initially an
accidental spin-off, and then the system found a use for it?
EO: That's entirely possible. We don't know where rhythm comes
from, but we do know it has great meaning for us.
PT: What was the big evolutionary trigger that produced the human
brain?
EO: That's the mother of all questions. The paleoanthropologists
put a lot of emphasis on climate change. I don't believe that for a
minute, because geological history is full of vast climatic changes and
large numbers of animal species that lived through them unchanged. I
think evolution came up with a fairly big animal, the primate, with a
fairly big brain, and then this animal somehow got on its hind legs. Once
it was erect, it had the freedom of hands. It could carry things. It
could try out tools. This was the takeoff point. Nothing like that had
ever happened before. Climatic change could have speeded the process, but
it was not critical.
PT: What about dinosaurs? They had hands.
EO: We don't know why they didn't go the distance. There was one
line of dinosaurs that were big-bodied and big-brained, though not as
neurally well-endowed as primates, and they had free hands, but they
didn't take off the way humans did.
PT: Can you talk about taking big risks in science? You've called
it steering through the blue waters and abandoning sight of land.
EO: You either hug the coast or you head for blue water.
PT: Did you start out hugging the coast?
EO: Very much.
PT: When did you shift?
EO: It started in my twenties. I wrote a very controversial paper
showing that it's almost impossible to define a geographic race. If you
define a race on skin color, you can do that neatly. Red people here and
white people there. But if you throw in noses, you've got white people
with short noses and long noses, and then you throw in another trait and
pretty soon you've got chaos.
I published that when I was twentyfour. At that point, I tasted
genuine controversy and I liked it. Then when I wrote Sociobiology, I
knew what it was like to be in blue water during a typhoon!
PT: Did you develop your biggest ideas gradually, or did they hit
all at once?
EO: Each time, the whole thing came within minutes. You've got..the
beginnings of a pattern in your mind and at first it doesn't seem much
out of the ordinary. Then you start expanding the implications, and
during the few minutes of expanding, you sense that the: idea may be
important. Those moments don't happen very often in a career, but they're
climactic and exhilarating.
PT: In Consilience, you say that our essential spiritual dilemma is
that we evolved to accept one truth--God-and discovered
another--evolution.
EO: And the struggle for men's souls in the 21st century will be to
choose between the two. The transcendentalist view was so powerfully
advantageous in early paleolithic and agricultural societies. If there's
anything disagreeable about secular humanism, it's that it's bloodless.
Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity,
but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass. I
used a phrase-"evolutionary epic"--back in 1978 to try and convey the
grandeur of biology, and it's beginning to catch on. A colleague of mine
speaks of "the sacred depths of nature" to evoke that same
reverence.
PT: Scientists are trying to capture the awe that religion has,
while theologians have had to move a long way from the communities that
they're supposed to represent to make theology consistent with
science.
EO: Theology today is really two separate worlds. There's the world
of the fundamentalists who have a set of absolute beliefs that do not
need to be justified. They're armored against any logical argument or
evidence. If logic seems compelling, it's the voice of the devil.
Then there is the theology of the searchers, the thinkers about the
meaning of human existence. They're trying to accommodate pretty
wellrounded views of how the real world works without surrendering the
mystery of the Almighty and the need for communal liturgy.
PT: You've said that the brain is really a kind of ever-shifting
network, a republic of responses to information. Yet we walk around with
a sense of a core self. Isn't that peculiar?
EO: I'm aware of you, you're aware of me. There's a sense of self.
But there is no transcendental center of the brain somewhere that is in
control of the machinery, pulling the levers and possessed of the
capacity to float free of our mortal coil when that moment comes.
PT: How does the brain create that sense of self?
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
