“If our behavior was driven entirely by group selection, then we’d be robotic cooperators, like ants,” he writes. “But, if individual selection was the only thing that mattered, then we’d be entirely selfish.”
The result of the constant tension between these two selective extremes, Wilson writes, is our human nature: the malleable expression of genes that shapes the way our senses perceive the world, the options for action that we pose to ourselves, and the decisions that we find most satisfying to make.
The tension between individual and group selection has also resulted in giving us a conflicted nature of motivations.
“It renders each of us part saint and part sinner,” he writes, tracing the origin of human morality, honor, and religion through the lens of group selection.
OEB Professor Richard C. Lewontin, one of the fiercest critics of the 1975 “Sociobiology,” holds that Wilson’s inquiries fall outside the domain of science.
“The impulse to make grand generalizations about our world is very powerful—we’ve all been taught that this is what it takes to make a great scientist, like a Newton or a Darwin,” Lewontin says.
“The danger of this impulse,” he continued, “is to tell a ‘Just So Story’ like Rudyard Kipling’s ‘How the Camel Got His Hump.’ I fear that Wilson has been lured down that path.”
It is true that Wilson is relentless in chasing stories—and the story of our evolution is among the grandest. But he is unapologetic. “There is a real creation story of humanity, and only one,” he writes, “and it is not a myth.”
THE TWO CULTURES
Echoing C.P. Snow’s 1959 lament near the end of his book, Wilson writes, “If there was a reason for bringing the humanities and science closer together, it is the need to understand the true nature of the human sensory world.”
He holds that the humanities, however fruitful, are filtered through what he describes as “the narrow biological channels of human cognition”: our eyes capture only a miniscule fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, while our ears catch only a few frequencies of sound and our noses even fewer chemical scents.
The scientist works to heighten and extend our senses to fill in the details.
“In my fieldwork as a scientist, I can leave the intellectualization of academy behind me and become a hunter of a scientific bent, investing myself in something extremely literal—in touch, smell, taste, and sight,” Wilson says. “But when I write, it’s a different kind of discipline, and it becomes my objective to illuminate my experiences in nature in a captivating way.”
In this light, Wilson attempts to answer Gauguin in “The Social Conquest of Earth” by embracing the existential questioning of the humanities without sacrificing the “unrelenting application of reason” at the core of empirical science.
Balancing these motivations, as C.P. Snow writes, is the challenge: “the clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures—of two galaxies—[ought] to produce creative chances.”
As a man of two cultures, E.O. Wilson—ever the dreamer, ever the storyteller—is one such creative chance.
—Staff writer Alyssa A. Botelho can be reached at abotelho@college.harvard.edu.