Three Science Archetypes from E. O. Wilson

I recently read E. O. Wilson’s new book, Letters to a Young Scientist. Those of us who value everything that Wilson writes have read this book with eagerness. However, if I were a young scientist just getting started, or a student considering whether to become a scientist, this book would not give me clear guidance or inspiration. One of the best parts was the part quoted on the back cover: his advice to new scientists, “The world needs you—badly.”

But I did very much appreciate the three “archetypes” that Wilson presented: the stories or images by which scientific research resembles those that inspire people in all walks of life. Science is an adventure, and Wilson gives us three specific ways in which this is the case.

His first is “the journey to an unexplored land.” The same feeling that makes adventurers climb mountains, explore rivers, search for uncontacted tribes, even to look for Shangri-La also makes scientists look for new species, study the sea floor, search for life on other planets, and look for the fossil remains of our pre-human ancestors. I must testify that Wilson’s first archetype is true, for me, every day of my life.

His second is the “search for the Grail.” The same feeling that made people in earlier centuries look for the Holy Grail, the philosopher’s stone, or the fountain of youth also makes scientists look for the origin of life, try to create artificial life, try to create controlled hydrogen fusion, or try to explain dark matter and energy. This is the search for unity of explanation, as opposed to diversity of discoveries.

His third is “good against evil.” Heroes, champions, and martyrs of the past are reflected in the scientific world of the war against cancer, the conquest of hunger, the campaign against global warming, and the development of better forms of forensic DNA sequencing.

As I have frequently written, science is not just something that scientists do, but is a compelling adventure. And there are a few pages in the middle of Wilson’s small book that resonate strongly with this understanding.

A Convergence of Readings on Human Evolution

Purely by chance, I happened to read from four different sources last night about human nature and human evolution. They illustrate that we have been confused about human nature for centuries, but that we are making progress in understanding it.

First, I read an article by Ann Gibbons from the August 2 issue of Science: “How a fickle climate made us human.” She reviewed the history of scientific thought about the relationship between climate and human nature. As far back as Raymond Dart, many scientists have noted that hominin evolution began when Africa experienced droughts, starting about five million years ago (at which time the Mediterranean dried up into a salt flat). More recently, this viewpoint is expressed in Steven Stanley’s Children of the Ice Age. Human ancestors had to come down from the trees and start running around on the savanna, perhaps carrying food and babies with them in their hands, rather than having to use their hands as front paws. Even a dog can walk on two legs, but try to get it to carry something in its front paws while doing so. Sounds like a great theory to me. I put the carrying-babies theory into my encyclopedia; I called it the “Let go of my hair! Okay, I’ll carry you” theory. I especially liked it because it gave women an important role in human evolution.

The problem is that the stages of human evolution do not neatly line up with African drought. In 2009, researchers published evidence that Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”) lived in trees and ate fruits and nuts from forests about four million years ago—they walked upright (sort of; they still grasped branches with their big toes) but did not live in the savanna. Also, just because Earth’s tropical and subtropical climate was becoming drier, in general, does not mean that it was doing so in East Africa. Recently, scientists have begun drilling cores in ancient African lake beds to determine what the climate was like in the past near the actual localities where human fossils were discovered. (They can tell that a lake had water if the sediments contained diatom shells, for example.)

What scientists such as Richard Potts found was that rapid evolution in hominins occurred not during long droughts, or during long wet periods, but during periods in which the climate changed back and forth every thousand years or so. That is, when the climate was, as Gibbons put it, fickle. Biological evolution could not keep up with such rapid changes; cultural evolution was necessary, and this put a premium on the capacity for intelligence.

Second, I continued reading E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. An expert on ant societies and an informed writer about human societies, Wilson wondered what ants and humans had in common that promoted the evolution of advanced societies in each. The answer: very little, other than forming a defensible home site (ant nest, tribal campground). Aside from this, ants and humans became social for different reasons. In the case of humans, the increase in intelligence was made possible by adding meat to a herbivorous diet, and later cooking the meat (an idea recently promoted by Richard Wrangham). For a gracile animal to go hunting, intense social cooperation was necessary. Therefore hunting made us an intensely social species, according to Wilson. He takes it further: this is why we have always been and will always be warlike, a view disputed in a recent book by John Horgan.

Third, I read a Jack London short story, “In a distant country.” In this story, two would-be gold miners during the Yukon gold rush gave up the pursuit halfway, and had to spend the winter in an abandoned cabin with two graves outside of it. During the long winter, they became first uncooperative with and then intensely suspicious of one another. Eventually, they would become two more graves outside of the cabin.

London’s story begins, “When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods…” London was not thinking about human evolution, I suspect, but he could have been talking about the hominins watching their way of life dry up or get flooded in Africa during periods of “fickle” climate. And to London, human nature was based on conflict.

Fourth, I tried reading a little bit of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516. It is slow going. More invented the word utopia, from the Greek topos (place) and a prefix; More deliberately confused the prefixes eu- (good) and ou- (no), implying that this good place can really be found in no place. In this book, More speculates about what a utopia might be like. He criticizes the practice, common in England at the time, in which landowners would drive poor families into desperate poverty, which practically forced them to become thieves, and then the government would arrest the thieves and hang them. European governments were creating their own problems. What should be done instead is for government and economy to work in a way such that everyone helps everyone else—not that all are entirely equal, as communists would think, but everyone can make a decent living and contribute their resources to the good of society. More presented this as a story, told to him by the fictitious Raphael Hythloday, about a utopian society somewhere in the recently-discovered Americas, so that he could if necessary tell King Henry VIII that it was just a story. Actually, Native American societies were closer to this ideal than European societies, and maybe More had heard this. More’s view contrasts greatly with not only other philosophers of his time but also differs greatly from those of Wilson and London that I had just read.

Lastly, I read a little bit of George Carlin, the late cynical humorist. Sometimes I wonder if he understood human nature better than either More or London.

Passing the Consilience Test

In the cult classic movie Harold and Maude, Maude recites a quote, but cannot remember who had said it. “Oh, well,” she said, “I did.”

The statement “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is now famous. I’m not sure who said it first—I have heard it was Carl Sagan, but I’ll bet he was quoting one of the giants on whose shoulder he was standing. What I wish to consider now is, what constitutes extraordinary evidence? An important kind of extraordinary evidence is consilience.

Consilience means that a theory has been supported by numerous, independent lines of evidence—independent, that is, unless the theory itself is true. William Whewell (pronounced “hule”) invented the term, and used Isaac Newton as an important example. Newton’s theories of motion and gravitation were supported by the movement of objects on Earth and of the planets. Whewell rejected the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, even though evolution has proven to be one of the premier examples of consilience. Evolution is supported by fossils, biogeography, the process of natural selection, and now by molecular evidence. Without evolution, there is no reason to expect that older fossil assemblages should be less similar to modern organisms than younger fossil assemblages, for large placental mammals to be absent from Australia and Borneo, or for chimps to have the same pseudogenes that we do.

There are numerous examples of consilience in the history of science, though few as important as evolution. One example is DNA. Watson and Crick figured out the structure of DNA not only from chemistry and crystallography, but also because this structure made it obvious how could replicate and how genetic information could be stored.

The newest example of massive consilience is the theory of global warming. It is a theory because it is assembled from numerous hypotheses, all of which have been tested and confirmed. Among the lines of evidence are:

• Direct temperature readings by thermometers in the last century and a half

• Direct carbon dioxide measurements from the atmosphere in the last half century

• Indirect temperature estimates from ice cores

• Carbon dioxide measurements from ice cores

• Melting of polar sea ice in the Arctic

• Melting of land ice in Greenland and Antarctica

• Rising sea levels (despite the refusal of the North Carolina legislature to permit it)

• Phenological changes in many species of animals and plants

• Warmer winters allowing insect outbreaks in coniferous forests

• Methane bubbling out of Siberian lakes that no longer freeze even in winter

• Storms of increased intensity in coastal areas

• Droughts of increased intensity and duration in continental areas

And so on. I have contributed some of the phenological data to the above list. (Plants and animals have become active earlier in the spring by about two days per decade or, in some local cases such as my data set, two days earlier per year.) There was a time, about thirty years ago, when global warming was an extraordinary claim that required extraordinary evidence. The evidence is now in, and it constitutes consilience. There is no reason to expect all of those separate lines of evidence to converge on the same theory unless the theory is true. Consilience can be thought of as the opposite of pseudoreplication, in which you measure the same thing over and over.

Edward O. Wilson has written many books of great significance, and you all know about most of them. In case you might have overlooked it, I wish to suggest his book Consilience. He indicated that evolution provides a framework for the consilience of all branches of knowledge. This claim was sufficiently broad and sweeping to evoke some strong responses, perhaps most notably from essayist Wendell Berry, who wrote Life is a Miracle in a sincere but, I think, failed attempt to refute Wilson. I am an immense admirer of Berry, but admit that he was wrong about this one.

It is interesting that the anti-science movement has fought against both evolution and global warming. They have taken on two of the aspects of modern science that not only have the most evidence, but the most consilience.

How to Deal with Fundamentalists: Two Insights from Edward O. Wilson

E. O. Wilson is perhaps the leading environmental and evolutionary scientist of modern times. Not only is he the leading defender of biodiversity, but he invented the term. He also invented the science of sociobiology. He is the world’s leading expert on ants and ant societies. He is a retired professor at Harvard, but continues very active in writing at age 82. His autobiography, Naturalist, describes a truly blessed life of significant contributions to the world, despite some severe attacks that have been made upon his views. He is a prominent scientist but is not too proud to get down on his knees to look at an ant.
When I met Wilson in 2004, he shared his view of religion with me. He considered Christianity to be merely the surviving remnant of an ancient tribal religion whose function was to give some tribes a justification for exterminating the others. In this, he was consistent with the views he expressed in his book Consilience, in which he unites all fields of knowledge into a coherent whole and in which religion plays no part.

I was therefore surprised when, just two years later, he published The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. He wrote it in the form of a letter to a fundamentalist minister, and he emphasized the numerous reasons that scientists and religious conservatives have for joining together to save the Creation. If God made all of the species, whether miraculously or through evolution, should not God’s followers want to save them from extinction?

I was surprised again when in 2010 Wilson published his novel Anthill, about an Alabama boy who grows up to be an environmentalist and a lawyer who successfully saves a biodiversity hotspot by working within, not against, the legal and economic system. At some points in the novel, Wilson reaffirms the common ground that scientists and religious conservatives have. But at the end of the novel, it is three religious conservatives who chase down and try to kill the environmental lawyer. They spew invectives that show just how much they hate God’s Creation.

So I have gotten two partly-contradictory insights from Wilson about the possibility, or not, of environmentalists finding common ground with religious conservatives. I regret to say that I agree more with Wilson’s 2010 ideas than his 2006 ideas. I have come to believe that religious conservatives really do want to destroy as much of God’s Creation (as they consider it to be) as possible. And I believe that some of them, just like the ones in Wilson’s novel, are ready to use violence to do so.

This comes partly from my own experiences with Oklahoma rednecks. Most of them look like they have been injecting steroids, look as if they are ready to beat to a pulp anyone who disagrees with them, and they boast about their guns. While they may pose no current threat, they could become very dangerous the moment we have societal collapse and chaos, a situation that is not hard to imagine. Although most Oklahomans are not like this, I have met people in Oklahoma who are just like the ones in Wilson’s novel.

I am glad that there are some religious conservatives who love God’s Creation, but I believe that most religious conservatives will ignore them or consider them to be hateful apostates to the true religion of destroying the natural world. I think that Christian environmentalism has no hope of success, because their opponents within Christianity have two weapons that Christian environmentalists do not: hatred and guns. And what else could you expect them to believe, if they are convinced that God is going to destroy the world anyway, and soon, possibly this year?

I enjoyed Wilson’s novel, because I enjoy all of his insights. I have to admit, however, that it is not a well-written novel. He passes up many opportunities for interesting developments of plot and character. It gets exciting in the last few pages, but most readers other than devoted Wilson fans like myself will have given up by then. There are nice parts, especially the story of the wars between ant colonies, told from the ants’ viewpoint. If you love nature, and are willing to overlook structural defects of a novel, I recommend Anthill. It may leave you very disturbed about the danger posed by religious conservatism in the United States.

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