E. O. Wilson
From Philosopedia
Wilson, E(dward) O(sborne) (10 June 1929 - )
Wilson, who was the undersized only child of Southern Baptist parents who divorced when he was seven years old, had a father who drank, gambled, and was a peripatetic accountant. The father, who changed “his job and location of his home every year or two,” took him and a second wife to a variety of places before committing suicide in 1951 at the age of forty-eight.
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His Writings
In Naturalist (1994), Wilson describes having started his formal education at the age of seven in a military boarding school, then going to a succession of fourteen schools in and out of Alabama, at that time known as one of the most racist and segregated parts of America. Wilson suffered from impaired hearing and, while fishing and having the spine of a pinfish pierce the pupil of his right eye, became virtually blind in that eye. Admittedly poor at mathematics and memorization, he compensated by collecting lizards, snakes, butterflies, cave insects, bats, and ants. At sixteen, he became intent upon studying Alabama ants, and his zeal eventually led him to become a Junior Fellow of Harvard’s Society of Fellows as well as a science researcher in Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere.
In 1994 with Bert Holldobbler, he wrote Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration, which was an updating of the definitive 1990 reference book on myrmecology which won them a 1991 Pulitzer Prize. (Fellow humanist and non-believer Julian Huxley also was a leading authority on ants.) Wilson admits that he finds the theists’ appeal of supernaturalistic religion understandable:
- On religion I lean toward deism but consider its proof largely a problem in astrophysics. . . . [T]he existence of a biological God, one who directs organic evolution and intervenes in human affairs [as envisioned by theism] is increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences. . . . Religions are analogous to superorganisms. They have a life cycle. They are born, they grow, they compete, they reproduce, and, in the fullness of time, most die.
A professor emeritus of Harvard University, and a leading proponent of sociobiology, Wilson spends part of his time defending the controversial views he expressed in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1977), views which concern the genetic factors in human behavior. Among other works, he wrote Insect Societies (1971), Of Human Nature (1978), Biophilia (1984), The Diversity of Life (1992), and an essay, “Scientific Humanism and Religion,” in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994).
Naturalist revives the controversy caused by the 1977 work on sociobiology. In 1978, for example, during a speech at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he was assaulted for his views. Anti-sociobiologists actually seized the dais and dumped a pitcher of ice water on his head, chanting, “Wilson, you’re all wet!” To which Wilson later observed, the episode “may be the only occasion in recent American history on which a scientist was physically attacked, however, mildly, simply for the expression of an idea,” adding “I had been blind-sided by the attack.”
In Naturalist, Wilson wrote that
- Human beings inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structures, a propensity that is shared by enough people to be called human nature. Although people have free will and the choice to turn in many directions, the channels of their psychological development are nevertheless - however much we might wish otherwise - cut more deeply by the genes in certain directions than in others.
He added,
- History did not begin 10,000 years ago in the villages of Antolia and Jordan. It spans the two million years of the life of the genus Homo. Deep history - by which I mean biological history - made us what we are, no less than culture.
His emphasis is that the architecture and physiology of the brain both evolve together, that the brain is like a vast road map of interconnecting nerve cells and that the brain learns in patterns determined by one’s genes.
His most recent book, The Creation (2006), is written in the form of an argument to a fictional Southern Baptist minister. "Pastor, we need your help," he starts. "At the present rate of destructive human activity, ""half the species of plants and animals on Earth could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century." His approach is that of getting Christians to see that by joining with scientists all God's creation can be protected from further damage.
Consilience
In a provocative article, “Back From Chaos” (The Atlantic Monthly, March 1998), Wilson detailed his views about how the Enlightenment thinkers knew a lot about everything whereas today’s specialists know a lot about a little. Although postmodernists doubt that we can know anything at all, he claims that we can know what we need to know and that we will discover underlying all forms of knowledge a fundamental unity. He focuses on the ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Condorcet, explains the attraction of deism and the weaknesses of postmodernism, then introduces the idea of “consilience”:
- The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and the resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The key to unification is consilience. I prefer this word to “coherence,” because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas “coherence” has several possible meanings.
- William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience - literally a “jumping together” of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He wrote, “The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.”
- Consilience can be established or refuted only by methods developed in the natural sciences - in an effort, I hasten to add, not led by scientists, or frozen in mathematical abstraction, but consistent with the habits of thought that have worked so well in exploring the material universe. . . . If contemporary scholars work to encourage the consilience of knowledge, I believe, the enterprises of culture will eventually devolve into science—by which I mean the natural sciences—and the humanities, particularly the creative arts. These domains will continue to be the two great branches of learning in the twenty-first century.
A way exists out of the chaos of all the information we have at hand, he says. It involves understanding that a balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but, rather, “the consilience among them must be pursued.” What has been achieved in the natural sciences needs, in short, to be extended to the humanities and the social sciences. Wilson argues that an empiricist ethic is needed, mindful as he is that because of the divorce between ethics and empirical knowledge, ethicists contend that one cannot go from “is” to “ought”:
- Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or it will shift toward science-based material analysis. . . . Because the success of an ethical code depends on how wisely it interprets the moral sentiments, those who frame it should know how the brain works, and how the mind develops. The success of ethics also depends on the accurate prediction of the consequence of particular actions as opposed to others, especially in cases of moral ambiguity.
Such an ethic, Peter B. Denison has noted, must be based on science, knowledge of our biology and brain functioning, and also an understanding of evolution.
Ants
"To reach Edward O. Wilson's office on the Harvard campus," wrote Nicholas Wade in the New York Times (15 July 2008),
- one must first push through a door with a sign warning the public not to enter. Then, enter a creaky old elevator and press two buttons simultaneously. This counterintuitive procedure transports one into a strange realm. It is a space that holds the world's largest collection of ants, some 14,000 species. Curators are checking the drawers, dominated by the tall figure of Dr. Wilson, who is trying to contain his excitement: the 14,001st ant species has just been discovered in the soils of a Brazilian forest.
Wade details how Wilson's Consilience proposed
- that many human activities, from economics to morality, needed to be temporarily removed from the hands of the reigning specialists and given to biologists to work out a proper evolutionary foundation. The book Wilson in 2008 is working on (in addition to a novel, Anthill) notes that morality and religion are traits based on group selection: "Groups with men of quality -of brave, strong, innovative, smart, and altruisitic - would tend to prevail, as Darwin said, over those groups that do not have those qualities so well developed."
"It is an astonishing circumstance that the study of ethics has advanced to little since the 19th century," Wilson told Wade, dismissing a century of work by moral philosophers.
Television Appearances
Wilson speaks widely at conferences and has been interviewed widely on radio and on television. Speaking to MSNBC on 20 September 2006 about his latest book, The Creation (2006), he told of his concern that Christians and other religionists must work with scientists "in preserving all God's creation," deliberately choosing words that he knew would appeal to believers. He carried a similar message when he spoke at the Washington National Cathedral.
Critics
At Harvard, two who have been vehemently opposed to his ideas are Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould.
Scientific Humanism
Wilson, whose love of life led him to coin the word biophilia, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, a member of the Humanist Association of Massachusetts, and a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000. He has gone on record as preferring scientific humanist to humanist or secular humanist as a label for his views.
(For Richard Rorty’s critique of Wilson’s ideas, see entry for Consilience.)
