E.O. Wilson for Governor of Alabama, 2010
July 16th, 2008
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
I once tried to goad newspaper reporters in Alabama to pick up the story that if basketball star Charles Barkley ran for governor of Alabama as a Republican, then the Democrats should recruit E. O. Wilson.
The campaign headline could be: Brains v. Brawn!
Beneath his gentle manner and Southern charm, Dr. E.O. Wilson, an Alabama native who made Time magazine’s list of the top 100 minds of the 20th century, is a “scrapper.”
According to a story recounted in the New York Times science section on Tuesday, where Wilson grew up the local custom with respect to fistfights was this: prevail or get knocked out. There was no third option.
“I never picked a fight,” he wrote in Naturalist, his autobiography. “But once started I never quit, even when losing, until the other boy gave up or an adult mercifully pulled us apart.”
Dr. Wilson wasn’t picking a fight when he published Sociobiology in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior in which he set out the theoretical groundwork for a genetic basis to human behavior, expanding Darwinian evolutionary natural selection to multi-level group influence on genes and behavior, over time of course. A lot of time.
In the debate between nature vs. nurture, in other words, he made a quantitative argument for nature.
Behavior is not only learned. It evolves.
Convinced even more by new data mapping the genetics of ant colonies, he says human behavior, such as people trading favors, develops through natural selection on many levels. Groups, such as tribal or church groups, evolve strategies for survival that influence their genetic development over long periods of time.
Many social scientists picked a fight with him in the ’70s. They were of course influenced by the philosophies of Karl Marx as well as Sigmund Freud, as all academics are, since they are among the top five thinkers in history, along with Albert Einstein and others. I would not call them political Marxists, as the Times reporter uses the term, although I suppose when it comes right down to it, they ended up on the political left.
Hard scientists at his own university, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, also came after him, since their life’s work rested on the simpler idea that natural selection acts only on one level, the genetic level.
Richard Dawkins, who wrote The Selfish Gene, was in Gould’s anti-Wilson camp.
But he fought them off. And now he is picking this new fight because of the new, hard information.
It is through multilevel or group-level selection - favoring the survival of one group of organisms over another - that evolution has in Dr. Wilson’s view brought into being the many essential genes that benefit the group at the individual’s expense. In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior. Such traits are difficult to account for, though not impossible, on the view that natural selection favors only behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children.
“I believe that deep in their heart everyone working on social insects is aware that the selection that created them is multilevel selection,” Dr. Wilson said.
He and David Sloan Wilson, a longtime advocate of group-level selection, laid out a theoretical basis for this view last year in an article in the Quarterly Review of Biology, evoking an angry response from Dr. Dawkins in New Scientist; he accused them of lying on a minor point and demanded an apology.
Proposing an idea heretical to many evolutionary biologists is one of the smaller skirmishes Dr. Wilson has set off, according to the Times. In his 1998 book Consilience, he proposed an overarching theory for bringing together the social and natural sciences on many questions from economics to ethics and morality, where progress has been slow.
“It is an astonishing circumstance that the study of ethics has advanced so little since the 19th century,” he said, a jab at a century of work by “moral philosophers,” as the Times calls them. His insight has been supported by the recent emergence of a new school of evolutionary psychologists who are constructing an evolutionary explanation of morality.
There is another reason to come to Wilson’s aid in this fight.
While ants may be Dr. Wilson’s first and lasting love, he has become one of the world’s most renowned biologists through two other passions, his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for science writing. He has two Pulitzers on his belt, and through the power of his words, he champions the world’s biodiversity and international conservation measures.
He also recently made a swing through the South trying to get Southern Baptists aboard his campaign to document and save the world’s species biodiversity, if not on the basis of science, then on the Biblical demand that God’s creatures should be protected on a moral basis.
I would relish the thought of Wilson coming home to Alabama after retiring in his 80’s in a few years, he’s now 79, and whipping up on old Charles Barkley. But now that Barkley says he is going to run as a Democrat, since Bush and the Republicans have messed things up so much in the world with Iraq and “the economy stupid,” we may just have to put them both in the primary and see what wins out: Brain Power or Brawn.
Not that Barkley ain’t smart or anything, it’s just that we get the feeling Wilson is a bit more evolved in the head, if not in body, and might do his home state some good. As everyone knows, Alabama suffers a certain brain-drain syndrome, in that a lot of genetically smart, culturally educated young people tend to get the hell out as soon as they can.
Read that last part again and notice how I slipped nature vs. nurture in there again. From my own studies in this area, it’s pretty obvious that it’s both.
For the record, and to head off any possible confusion here, both Wilson and Barkley are evolutionary anomalies. They are both off the charts as humans go, several standard deviations above the mean, if you know what I mean : )
But perhaps a little brainy infusion might give the good people of this state a little evolutionary boost - in about a million years or so : )
Now, for more discussion of this, including a great example of science blogging, check this out: E. O. Wilson, Neville Chamberlain Controversialist?
I love the way this kid ends the discussion, and check this out for an interesting example of a comments policy on a science blog. I’m thinking about adopting part of it…
Comments that I feel do not edify this forum will be deleted without warning or explanation. Just as I will not accept arguments in favor of geocentrism, I will not accept Creationist-Intelligent Design talking points. My interest in that topic is limited to political and sociological implications in terms of its cultural impact, not its non-existent scientific validity. You can extrapolate from this what the general comments policy is.
Tags: E.O. Wilson
July 16th, 2008 at 7:10 am
My major problem with Wilson’s notion that the structure of cultural adaptation is genetically determined. I think a more accurate view is that humans adapt both biologically and culturally and given that there are two adaptation mechanisms there is the possibility of interaction effects. An example would be the evolution of white skin. It is well established that dark skin biologically evolved to fit in with the environment of the area where humans biologically evolved, probably somewhere near what is now known as Ethiopia in Africa. However, once humans evolved the ability to pass knowledge, as well as genes, on to the next generation, culture became possible. And, it is through cultural adaptation that humans were able to create ways of life that allowed them to live in areas beyond their evolutionary nest. Once humans created and passed on ways of living that allowed them to move into what is now Northern Europe, they faced a rather unique challenge. They found themselves living in an area where it was no longer possible to obtain an adequate amount of calcium from the food available in the natural environment without domesticating deer and milking them. This turned out to be an all too effective response to calcium deficiency problem and led to the consumption of more calcium than the body was able to process. This led to the formation of calcium deposits on the bones and when these deposits formed on the bones lining the birth canal, it resulted in a high rate of natal and maternal deaths. Under the pressures of this culturally introduced pressure, the survival rates of individuals with lighter and lighter skin, which allowed the production of more vitamin D and processing of excess calcium, to increase. It is the survivors of these de-pigmented Africans who later used skin color to easily identify people who could be owned versus those who could not. The resulting racism is easily explained as a cultural and economic institution that can be changed without waiting for humans to evolve beyond racism. I agree that there are genetic explanations for much of what humans do but to extend genetic explanations to such institutions as racism tends to lead to conclusions that we cannot change these sources of inequality when in fact we can.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:47 am
I think you are right about racism. Social pressures can be brought to bear to change it. Not sure that really contradicts Wilson, however, who as far as I know, doesn’t address that question.
He was accused of being on the side of eugenics when he first came out, but he’s adequately explained how that is not true since. He’s not making a real time political argument. He is talking about evolution over millions of years.
Some say it’s in the genes, and only the genes. Some say it’s in the culture and only the culture. Some say it’s both (and that’s where I come down). He’s saying culture influences genes over time. No blank slate. That’s what’s interesting about it. And he’s backing it up not with critical theory or an editorial opinion, but with quantitative research from looking at the genetic code.
I say he’s the top living brain from Alabama soil. And most people here have never heard of him.
Now let the talk radio hosts argue about that and maybe we can change that too : )
July 16th, 2008 at 11:54 am
A good read in the “nature vs. nuture” discussion is the book “Guns, Germs and Steel.” The author, whose name escapes me at the moment, posits that social evolution on the Eurasian continent, framed by acquired tolerance to germs, domestication of the horse, and finally pre-industrial development of steel and then guns, sealed the dominance of Eurasian nations worldwide.
This dominance was rooted in the earliest civilizations, notably in Mesopotamia, ancient China and Egypt (which qualifies, even though in Africa, due to location.) It was sealed from about 1500 on with the colonialist expansion, most notably of European nations, around the globe, virtually unchallenged, except in East Asia.
The author notes that there is no significant DNA difference between Europeans, Africans, Asians and Native Americans that would explain this phenomenon, and, incidentally, no scientific basis for supposing one “race” of humans is superior over another. Along those lines, in his book “Mapping Human History,” Steve Olson shows that the genetic differences between different “races” of human beings is very minute. Again, this is an argument for nuture versus nature, although obvious differences such as skin color, hair color and texture, cranial and bone differences, etc., can be explained, at least in part, as adaptation to climate and environment over many thousands of years.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Thanks for the contribution, Yana. Now if we could get Jack Zylman to weigh in. I know he has some disagreements with Wilson - E.O. Wilson that is : )