The Theory of Everything
In his 1755
Dictionary , Samuel Johnson derided the idea that a dictionary "can
embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his
power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly,
vanity, and affectation." Few people today know what he meant by the lovely
word sublunary . Literally, it means "beneath the moon," and Johnson was
alluding to an ancient, widespread belief that there was an unbreachable
division between the cosmos, thought to be pristine, lawful, and unchanging,
and our grubby, chaotic Earth below. The division was already obsolete by
Johnson's time: Newton had shown that a single set of laws pulled the apple
toward the ground and kept the moon in its orbit around Earth.
E.O.
Wilson has chosen another lovely but little-known word, consilience , as
the title and theme of his new book. Literally "jumping together," consilience
means the linking of facts and theory across disciplines into a single coherent
system of explanation. That sounds innocuous, but it has a radical implication:
that the divisions between nature and society, matter and mind, biology and
culture, and the sciences and the humanities, arts, and social sciences are as
obsolete as the division between the sublunary and supralunary spheres.
For centuries, the progress of science has been a story of
increasing consilience. The collapse of the wall between the terrestrial and
celestial was followed by a collapse of the once equally firm (and now equally
forgotten) wall between the past, when divine cataclysms were supposed to have
shaped the earth, and the present, with its seemingly permanent mountains and
oceans. Less than a century after Johnson, the geologist Sir Charles Lyell
showed that today's Earth could have been sculpted by everyday erosion,
earthquakes, and volcanoes acting in the past over immense spans of time. The
living and nonliving, too, no longer occupy different realms. Two centuries
before Lyell, physician William Harvey showed the human body to be a machine
that uses hydraulics and other mechanical principles. Lyell's contemporary, the
German chemist Friedrich Wöhler, showed with his synthesis of urea that the
stuff of life is not a magical gel but ordinary compounds following the laws of
chemistry. Charles Darwin showed how the astonishing diversity of life and its
ubiquitous signs of design could arise from the physical process of the natural
selection of replicators. Gregor Mendel, and then James D. Watson and Francis
Crick, showed how replication itself could be understood in physical terms.
For
Wilson, the final chasm that separates biology from the humanities will be
bridged by an understanding of human nature that comes from neuroscience,
psychology, and evolutionary biology. Human thoughts and feelings are patterns
of activity of the brain, whose design is a product of natural selection. The
brain was "engineered" as a dynamic neural computer that calculated the
strategies of survival and reproduction needed by our evolutionary ancestors.
As humans discovered things about their world and each other and shared these
discoveries, and as they instituted conventions and rules to coordinate their
desires, the phenomenon called "culture" arose.
Culture and society, then, are not autonomous
forces but products of minds interacting with one another, and culture evolved
along with the brain. Sociology and anthropology are the study of the products
of the human tendency to form clans, partnerships, and coalitions. Economics
ideally would be based on real human preferences and decision-making strategies
(rather than the idealized "rational agent" assumed by economists today).
Literature comes from people's obsession with universal life-and-death themes
such as kinship, danger, and rivalry. Art depends on an innate eye for optimal
habitats and forms, and on the biases of our visual systems. Morality comes
from the sense of empathy and the internalized standards that allow people to
live harmoniously in groups.
Science
students often experience the exhilarating realization that the laws of the
whole world fit together. Wilson refers to that blessed state as the Ionian
Enchantment, after the 6 th century B.C. founder of the physical
sciences, Thales of Ionia. Like many scientists, Wilson had an Ionian
Enchantment as a student, but Consilience comes from a second
enchantment he experienced in the 1970s, when he was already an esteemed
entomologist. (Click to see how he uses entomology--the ultimate multicultural
curriculum--to open his readers' eyes to the dependence of human culture on
human nature.) Evolutionary biologists had recently worked out the implications
of Darwin's theory for the social lives of organisms. Former paradoxes of
animal behavior such as cooperation, sexuality, aggression, pacifism, and
communication were being increasingly understood in terms of the natural
selection of genes. Wilson wrote a famous book in 1975 called Sociobiology:
The New Synthesis , and he later extended it with bits of psychology and
mathematical modeling to yield a theory he called "gene-culture
coevolution."
Not everyone was enchanted. Angry critics charged that if
the mind had an innate structure, different people (or classes, sexes, and
races) could have different innate structures, justifying discrimination. They
said that if obnoxious behaviors such as aggression and clannishness were
innate, that would make them "natural" and hence good; or, even if bad, they
would be "in the genes" and hence unchangeable, subverting hopes for social
reform. They said that if behavior were caused mainly by the genes, individuals
could not be held responsible for their actions. Some of these scholars
expressed their disagreement by dousing Wilson with a pitcher of water at a
scientific convention, yelling for his dismissal over bullhorns, urging people
to bring noisemakers to his lectures, and publishing righteous manifestoes and
sarcastic, book-length denunciations.
In fact,
many of the accusations--for example, that he was really trying to justify male
philandering--were simply preposterous, and others could be countered easily.
Innate similarities do not imply innate differences. Genetically influenced
behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations
of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do
explanations that appeal to upbringing.
Life has been kinder to Wilson since then. He
won two Pulitzers (for On Human Nature , 1978, and The Ants ,
1990). His articulate advocacy of biodiversity and his graceful autobiography
( Naturalist , 1994) changed his image in the popular press from bad guy
to good guy. His insights on sociobiology, minus the inflammatory connotations,
have become widely accepted in new fields such as behavioral ecology and
evolutionary psychology.
The tide
has turned so much that one might wonder whether Wilson needs to make such a
fuss about the unity of knowledge. I can confirm he does, for I have tried to
convey the same Ionian Enchantment in my recent book How the Mind Works. Anyone
who thinks that consilience is banal or obvious is invited to read my debates with the
sociologist Alan Wolfe in
Slate
and with the biologist Steven
Rose in Edge. (Or click to read my summary of Wolfe's and Rose's
positions.)
Even readers who share Wilson's worldview will find much to
provoke them. I felt Wilson was sometimes too complacent in seeing human
foibles (such as irrational spiritual beliefs) as evolutionarily adaptive. I
was not persuaded that moral statements can be reduced to psychology, as if the
disapproval of murder were just another human taste like the preference for
sweet over bitter foods. (Even a die-hard Ionian might think that our moral
sense evolved to grasp a logic of morality that is outside our minds in the
same sense that our number sense evolved to grasp mathematical truths that are
outside our minds.) I was unconvinced that a case for preserving species
diversity can rest on our innate love of a species-rich, savanna-like ancestral
environment. I fear that, if it meant avoiding widespread economic
dislocations, most people would be happy to consummate their desire to commune
with plants and animals with a visit to a golf course stocked with a few pandas
and eagles. For this reason, the concluding chapter, which urges urgent
intervention to stop environmental degradation, felt out of place--though it is
the most thoughtful and persuasive such argument I have seen.
Consilience is, in any
case, an excellent book. Wilson provides superb overviews of Western
intellectual history and of the current state of understanding in many academic
disciplines. Though he forcefully presses his case toward a conclusion many
will find radical, the tone is calm and respectful and the writing style gentle
and inviting.
If you
missed the links within this review, click 1) to how E.O. Wilson uses his
knowledge of insects to explain human culture and 2) for excerpts from and
information about Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works . You can also read
Pinker's dialogue on "Evolution and the Brain" with sociologist Alan Wolfe in
Slate , his debate with biologist Steven Rose in Edge , or a .
