E. O. Wilson on human evolution, altruism and a 'new Enlightenment'
“History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.”
-- E. O. Wilson, Seminars About Long-term Thinking, The Long Now Foundation, Apr 20, 2012.
"Scientific advances are now good enough for us to address coherently questions of where we came from and what we are. But to do so, we need to answer two more fundamental questions. The first is why advanced social life exists in the first place and has occurred so rarely. The second is what are the driving forces that brought it into existence.
A conflict between individual and group-selected traits
"Only the understanding of evolution offers a chance to get a real understanding of the human species. We are determined by the interplay between individual and group selection where individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. We're all in constant conflict between self-sacrifice for the group on the one hand and egoism and selfishness on the other. I go so far as to say that all the subjects of humanities, from law to the creative arts are based upon this play of individual versus group selection. (...) And it is very creative and probably the source of our striving, our inventiveness and imagination. It's that eternal conflict that makes us unique.
Q: So how do we negotiate this conflict?
E O. W: We don't. We have to live with it.
Q: Which element of this human condition is stronger?
E O. W: Let's put it this way: If we would be mainly influenced by group selection, we would be living in kind of an ant society. (...)
Q: What determines which ideology is predominant in a society?
E O. W: If your territory is invaded, then cooperation within the group will be extreme. That's a human instinct. If you are in a frontier area, however, then we tend to move towards the extreme individual level. That seems to be a good part of the problem still with America. We still think we're on the frontier, so we constantly try to put forward individual initiative and individual rights and rewards based upon individual achievement. (...)"
-- Edward O. Wilson, American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author, Interview with Edward O. Wilson: The Origin of Morals, Der Spiegel, 2013
Eusociality, where some individuals reduce their own reproductive potential to raise others' offspring, is what underpins the most advanced form of social organization and the dominance of social insects and humans. One of the key ideas to explain this has been kin selection theory or inclusive fitness, which argues that individuals cooperate according to how they are related. I have had doubts about it for quite a while. Standard natural selection is simpler and superior. Humans originated by multilevel selection—individual selection interacting with group selection, or tribe competing against tribe. We need to understand a great deal more about that. (...)
We should consider ourselves as a product of these two interacting and often competing levels of evolutionary selection. Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society. If we look at it that way, then we have what appears to be a pretty straightforward answer as to why conflicted emotions are at the very foundation of human existence. I think that also explains why we never seem to be able to work things out satisfactorily, particularly internationally.
Q: So it comes down to a conflict between individual and group-selected traits?
Yes. And you can see this especially in the difficulty of harmonizing different religions. We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories. We have bizarre creation myths and each is characterized by assuring believers that theirs is the correct story, and that therefore they are superior in every sense to people who belong to other religions. This feeds into our tribalistic tendencies to form groups, occupy territories and react fiercely to any intrusion or threat to ourselves, our tribe and our special creation story. Such intense instincts could arise in evolution only by group selection—tribe competing against tribe. For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.
Q: Can we do anything to counter our tribalistic instincts?
I think we are ready to create a more human-centered belief system. I realize I sound like an advocate for science and technology, and maybe I am because we are now in a techno-scientific age. I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves. Right now we're living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That's dangerous. (...)
I'm devoted to the kind of environmentalism that is particularly geared towards the conservation of the living world, the rest of life on Earth, the place we came from. We need to put a lot more attention into that as something that could unify people. Surely one moral precept we can agree on is to stop destroying our birthplace, the only home humanity will ever have.
Q: Do you believe science will help us in time?
We can't predict what science is going to come up with, particularly on genuine frontiers like astrophysics. So much can change even within a single decade. A lot more is going to happen when the social sciences finally join the biological sciences: who knows what will come out of that in terms of describing and predicting human behavior? But there are certain things that are almost common sense that we should not do.
Q: What sort of things shouldn't we do?
Continue to put people into space with the idea that this is the destiny of humanity. It makes little sense to continue exploration by sending live astronauts to the moon, and much less to Mars and beyond. It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. It's a commonly stated idea that we can have other planets to live on once we have used this one up. That is nonsense. We can find what we need right here on this planet for almost infinite lengths of time, if we take good care of it.
Q: What is it important to do now?
The title of my final chapter is "A New Enlightenment". I think we ought to have another go at the Enlightenment and use that as a common goal to explain and understand ourselves, to take that self-understanding which we so sorely lack as a foundation for what we do in the moral and political realm. This is a wonderful exercise. It is about education, science, evaluating the creative arts, learning to control the fires of organized religion and making a better go of it.
Q: Could you be more concrete about this new Enlightenment?
I would like to see us improving education worldwide and putting a lot more emphasis—as some Asian and European countries have—on science and technology as part of basic education."
-- E. O. Wilson, E. O. Wilson: from altruism to a new Enlightenment, New Scientist, 24 April 2012.
"I think science is now up to the job. We need to be harnessing our scientific knowledge now to get a better, science-based self-understanding.
Q: It seems that, in this process, you would like to throw religions overboard altogether?
E O. W: No. That's a misunderstanding. I don't want to see the Catholic Church with all of its magnificent art and rituals and music disappear. I just want to have them give up their creation stories, including especially the resurrection of Christ.
Q: That might well be a futile endeavour ...
E O. W: There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary's bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said, "I wasn't there; therefore, I'm not positive that it happened or didn't happen; but of one thing I'm certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters." That's where science comes in. Seriously, I think we're better off with no creation stories.
Q: With this new Enlightenment, will we reach a higher state of humanity?
E O. W: Do we really want to improve ourselves? Humans are a very young species, in geologic terms, and that's probably why we're such a mess. We're still living with all this aggression and ability to go to war. But do we really want to change ourselves? We're right on the edge of an era of being able to actually alter the human genome. But do we want that? Do we want to create a race that's more rational and free of many of these emotions? My response is no, because the only thing that distinguishes us from super-intelligent robots are our imperfect, sloppy, maybe even dangerous emotions. They are what makes us human."
-- Edward O. Wilson, American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author, Interview with Edward O. Wilson: The Origin of Morals, originally in P. Bethge, J. Grolle, Wir sind ein Schlamassel, Der Spiegel, 8/2013.
A "Social Conquest of the Earth"
"Q: What are some striking examples for you of the legacy of this evolutionary process?
Almost everything. All the way from passion at football games to war to the constant need to suppress selfish behavior that ranges over into criminal behavior to the necessary extolling of altruism by groups, to group approval and reward of people who are heroes or altruists.
Constant turmoil occurs in modern human societies and what I’m suggesting is that turmoil is endemic in the way human advanced social behavior originated in the first place. It’s by group selection that occurred favoring altruism versus individual level selection, which by and large, not exclusively, favor individual and selfish behavior.
We’re hung in the balance. We’ll never reach either one extreme or the other. One extreme would take us to the level of ants and bees and the other would mean that you have dissolution of society.
Q: One point you make in your book is that this highly social kind of behavior that we’ve evolved has allowed us to be part of the social conquest of earth, but it’s also had an unfortunate effect of endangering a lot of the world’s biodiversity. Does that make you pessimistic? If this is just part of the way we’ve evolved, is there going to be any way out of it?
That’s a very big question. In other words, did the pathway that led us to advanced social behavior and conquest make it inevitable that we will destroy most of what we’ve conquered? That is the question of questions.
I’m optimistic. I think that we can pass from conquerors to stewards. We have the intellectual and moral capacity to do it, but I’ve also felt very strongly that we needed a much better understanding of who we are and where we came from. We need answers to those questions in order to get our bearings toward a successful long-term future, that means a future for ourselves, our species and for the rest of life.
I realize that sounds a little bit like it’s coming from a pulpit but basically that’s what I’ve had in my mind. In writing A Social Conquest of Earth, I very much had in mind that need for self-understanding, and I thought we were very far short, and we remain very far short, of self-understanding. We have a kind of resistance toward honest self-understanding as a species and I think that resistance is due in part to our genetic history. And now, can we overcome it? I think so."
-- E. O. Wilson, American biologist, researcher in sociobiology, biodiversity, theorist, naturalist and author, interviewed by Carl Zimmer, What Does E.O. Wilson Mean By a "Social Conquest of the Earth", Smithsonian.com, March 22, 2012
See also:
☞ Edward O. Wilson “The Social Conquest of Earth”, Fora.tv video, 20 Apr 2012
☞ Richard Dawkins, The descent of Edward Wilson. "A new book on evolution by a great biologist makes a slew of mistakes", Prospect, May 24, 2012
☞ The Original Colonists, The New York Times, May 11, 2012:
“Mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity” — and contemporary philosophy is also irrelevant, having “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.” The proper approach to answering these deep questions is the application of the methods of science, including archaeology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Also, we should study insects.”
☞ Sam Harris on the ‘selfish gene’ and moral behavior
☞ Anthropocene: “the recent age of man”. Mapping Human Influence on Planet Earth, Lapidarium notes
☞ Human Nature. Sapolsky, Maté, Wilkinson, Gilligan, discuss on human behavior and the nature vs. nurture debate
☞ On the Origins of the Arts , Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the evolution of culture, Harvard Magazine, May-June, 2013
☞ Anthropology tag on Lapidarium notes
