Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016)
The Meaning of Human Existence (2014)
Letters to a Young Scientist (2013)
The Social Conquest of Earth (2012)
The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct, with Bert Hölldobler (2011)
Anthill: A Novel (2010)
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance,
and Strangeness of Insect Societies, with Bert Hölldobler (2009)
The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (2006)
Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949–2006 (2006)
From So Simple a Beginning:
The Four Great Books of Darwin, edited with introductions (2005)
Pheidole in the New World: A Hyperdiverse Ant Genus (2003)
The Future of Life (2002)
Biological Diversity: The Oldest Human Heritage (1999)
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
In Search of Nature (1996)
Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration, with Bert Hölldobler (1994)
Naturalist (1994; new edition, 2006)
The Diversity of Life (1992)
The Ants, with Bert Hölldobler (1990); Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 1991
Success and Dominance in Ecosystems: The Case of the Social Insects (1990)
Biophilia (1984)
Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of the Mind, with Charles J. Lumsden (1983)
Genes, Mind, and Culture, with Charles J. Lumsden (1981)
On Human Nature (1978); Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 1979
Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects, with George F. Oster (1978)
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; new edition, 2000)
The Insect Societies (1971)
A Primer of Population Biology, with William H. Bossert (1971)
The Theory of Island Biogeography, with Robert H. MacArthur (1967; reprinted 2001)
A wolf defeated by a lion. A fable of fallen pride. (Benjamin Carlson, The Wolf and His Shadow, 2015. Ink on Illustration Board. 20 x 30 inches. © Benjamin Carlson. Benjamin Carlson’s The Wolf and his Shadow [p. 44 in Call of the Wild 2015–16 Aesop’s Fables, by Bronwyn Minton, Associate Curator of Art and Research, The National Museum of Wildlife Art].)
The solace of familiarity, cited here as a metaphor for the failing of both the humanities and the sciences. (Lamppost, William F. Smith, 1938. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)
The humanities and science address segments in the single continum of creative thought, from the molecular processes of heredity to the emotional responses they program, reaching through all space and time. Above, the underside of an African swallowtail (Papilio lormieri), produced by the evolution of one particular genetic code. (Photograph by Robert Clark.) Below, a segment of DNA with a fragment of the histone proteins around which DNA is wound. (Image created with Molecular Maya [Clarafi.com] by Gaël McGill, precisely as it would appear if viewed by ultra-magnification.)
The endless beauty of life on earth. Each “snowflake” has been composed by the artist from multiple images of species of invertebrates. (The Harvard University Invertebrate Zoology Department members who contributed snowflakes were: Tauana Cunha, Sarah Kariko, Vanessa Knutson, Laura Leibensperger, and Kate Sheridan. Kate Sheridan did the design work of photographing and placing the snowflakes together in Photoshop.)
The Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794, his favorite work, shows the god Urizen creating the second Enlightenment. Urizen, thought Blake, was an evil god, because he invented science in order to force humanity into a single way of thinking.
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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in the United States of America by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2017
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2017
Copyright © Edward O. Wilson, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover: Man vs Machine
Frontispiece: The Reality Unseen where science and the humanities meet (Calley O’Neill and Rama the Elephant. Painting from The Rama Exhibition, A Journey of Art and Soul for the Earth. www.TheRamaExhibition.org. Used by permission).
ISBN: 978-0-241-30922-3
The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study and interpretation of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.
—National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, U.S.A., 1965, as amended
The humanities arose from symbolic language, a capacity that singly and dramatically distinguishes our species from all others. Coevolving with the structure of the brain, language freed the mind from the animal to be creative, thence to enter and imagine other worlds infinite in time and space. We were empowered but, as I will show in this first part, we retained the emotions of our ancient primate ancestors. The combination, composing what we roughly call the humanities, is why we are both supremely advanced, and supremely dangerous.
Creativity is the unique and defining trait of our species; and its ultimate goal, self-understanding: What we are, how we came to be, and what destiny, if any, will determine our future historical trajectory.
What, then, is creativity? It is the innate quest for originality. The driving force is humanity’s instinctive love of novelty—the discovery of new entities and processes, the solving of old challenges and disclosure of new ones, the aesthetic surprise of unanticipated facts and theories, the pleasure of new faces, the thrill of new worlds. We judge creativity by the magnitude of the emotional response it evokes. We follow it inward, toward the greatest depths of our shared minds, and outward, to imagine reality across the universe. Goals achieved lead to further goals, and the quest never ends.
The two great branches of learning, science and the humanities, are complementary in our pursuit of creativity. They share the same roots of innovative endeavor. The realm of science is everything possible in the universe; the realm of the humanities is everything conceivable to the human mind.
Drawing on the combined consciousness of our species, each one of us can go anywhere in the universe, seize any power, achieve any goal, search for infinity in space and time. Of course, it is also true that when ruled by wild surmise and the animal passions we all share, our unbounded fantasy can disintegrate into madness. Milton expressed this greatest risk of the human condition very well.
A mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, and a Hell of Heav’n.
So perhaps it is a blessing that the mind does not travel easily to vast and unfamiliar regions, but instead prefers to cruise and repeat its excursions in small familiar circles. Further, as a rule, people do not like the solitude of their own thoughts. A team of psychologists from the University of Virginia and Harvard University recently found that volunteers disliked sitting alone for even as little as six minutes with nothing to do but think. They enjoyed mundane external activities more. They even preferred administering electric shocks to themselves if nothing else was available.
The full explanation of any biological phenomenon, including creativity in both science and the humanities, engages three levels of thought. First, for any conceivable living entity or process—a bird taking flight, a lily growing toward the sun, your reading of this sentence—the first inquiry must be, What is it? Provide the structure and functions that define the phenomenon. If it involves music or theater, perform it. The second level is the question, How was it put together? What made it come into existence? What were the events that resulted in the conditions of its origin, whether ten seconds or a thousand years ago? The third and final level is, Why do the phenomenon and its preconditions exist in the first place? Why not a different mode of evolution not present on this planet that might have produced a different kind of thinking brain?
Scientists study living phenomena at all three of these levels. As a rule, they choose entities and processes that engage the what, how, and why in whatever detail and dimension that lies within their reach.
Biologists, however, perhaps even more than other scientists, feel it necessary to seek cause and effect at all three levels. The causes that bring about a living phenomenon, such as the flight of a bird or our perception of a flower’s colors, are called proximate causes. The events that guided the evolution of the phenomenon to its present state are called ultimate causes. Proximate causes are the what and how of a full explanation. Ultimate causes are the why.
Scientific explanations of organic life, including human life, routinely entail both proximate and ultimate causes. In contrast, accounts that govern inquires in the humanities attempt at best only proximate explanations. Ultimate causation tends to be left to the God of Genesis, or ancient alien visitors, or a mysterium tremendum et fascinans imagined to be resident deep within the human mind. Take as a random example the red color of a flower petal placed before you. The redness, like all other hues, is distinguished by the stimulation of a particular portion of the electromagnetic spectrum composing the visual spectrum. The receptors are red-sensitive cones in the retina. The latter transmit signals to a staging center in the brain cortex, thence in relays back to the rear of the cortex, then to integrating units of perception and emotion, and finally back out to the centers of the conscious forebrain, causing you to say “red” (or perhaps rot, or rouge, or krasnyy, or bombu, depending on your native language).
Having gone this far, scientists have in recent decades tracked down the interacting segments of DNA that compose the genes that prescribe the recognition of colors.
Thus, scientific research has brought us close to solving the first line of mysteries in human color vision. Yet the way is now open to the still deeper question of ultimate causation: Why can humans see a particular spectrum of color but cannot see infrared, or ultraviolet, or other frequencies outside the narrow segment of the electromagnetic spectrum yielding visible light? And even deeper, why does DNA, and not some other coding chemical, prescribe color vision and all the other processes of life on Earth? Might we expect to find fundamentally different codes on life-bearing exoplanets? And why do we see color in the first place, instead of just shades of light and dark?
The answers of such why questions await the reconstruction of prehistory, during which our species evolved from earlier hominins, and much further back over tens of millions of years when basic properties of our present brain and senses were shaped within the earliest ancestral primates.
Scholars in the humanities have traditionally confined themselves to the what. They have touched lightly on the how. They have seldom ventured into the world of why. They build upon the biological particularities of the senses and emotions already in place at the dawn of the Neolithic, some ten thousand years ago—hence the almost exclusive contemporary content of the humanities: the creative arts, linguistics, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, moral reasoning, and theology.
It might seem—feel is perhaps the better word—that the human suite of intellect and emotion is the only one that could have attained creativity. This diagnostic trait of our species, almost four billion years in the making, might seem to require some unique feature of evolution or else the hand of God extended special to our lineage.
That supposition, which has dominated religious thinking for millennia, would almost certainly be wrong. It is easy to find in nature alternative springboards in advanced social organization, some of which in time might have swerved in evolution to the human level. Consider the remarkable mound-building termites, technically called macrotermitines, of Africa and South America. Their earthen nests, multistoried, built of soil and feces, teem with populations of hundreds of thousands to millions, and rise in places to higher than a human head. Like those of humans, their abodes are exquisitely well designed. In some species, the nests are air-conditioned by elaborate systems of ducts that continuously circulate fresh air from the surrounding ground surface and used air, by heat convection, from the massed inhabitants up and out of the mound. Each macrotermitine colony contains a proletariat of sterile workers and their two parents, a royal pair responsible for all reproduction. How is this possible? The massive queen, the size of your two thumbs, lays a continuous stream of tiny eggs. The workers divide labor by division into physical castes, including a large army of suicidally ferocious, large-headed soldiers. (In Surinam, I once required assistance to dissect their scimitar-shaped mandibles out of the web of my right thumb.)
The inhabitants remain underground within the mound and the meters-deep labyrinth of galleries and chambers excavated below the mound, with a couple of notable exceptions: the flights of virgin queens and their consort males that establish new colonies, and swarms of workers that come out at night to search for bits of dead vegetation. Placing an ear close to the nests (not too close!), one hears a faint hiss raised by countless tiny footfalls. The nocturnal harvests are used to grow an edible fungus in subterranean gardens.
The macrotermitines are true superorganisms. The collective intelligence of each of the colonies is still far below the level of humans and other mammals, even below most birds, but well above that of solitary insects. Yet their creativity remains zero. Let us suppose they had ascended during their evolution to the human level. Their “termiteries,” if I may coin a term, would include the following: a love of absolute darkness (and a Dracula-like panic at the merest hint of daylight); an exclusive diet of cultivated mushrooms; sex limited to royals; and death to all would-be immigrants, even from the same species. The sick and the injured of the colony promptly and peremptorily eaten; no hospitals, no pity.
Consider this. In a century or two, space technology may well provide a first close look at exoplanets, the planets of other star systems. An intensive search for evidence of life will certainly follow. If life is found, and one or more intelligent species, we should be prepared for, well, anything.