Evolution, the Arts, and Consilience

REFLECTIONS ON THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE

Roger Shattuck, James Q. Wilson, Susan Haack, and, in reply, Edward O. Wilson

erhaps in answer to the intense specialization that has accompanied the p explosion of information in the modern era, yearnings have developed for a broader perspective. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Knopf, 1998), Edward O. Wilson presents such a vision and contends that disparate fields of intellectual endeavor would profit from a single vocabulary formulated by reducing human nature to its most fundamental genetic elements. In postu- lating a coevolution of culture and genes that assumes a tendency among humans to construct environments optimally suited for their genetic makeup, he asserts that mankind's most basic questions will yield to explanation in terms of epigenetic rules. Thus, for instance, the search for truth and beauty that defines the humanities and arts might properly emphasize esthetic universals that express a common biological longing. So, too, might the recognition in humans of innate and heritable predispositions augment the predictive capabilities of the social sciences. Professor Wilson envisions a comprehensive redirection of the pursuit of knowledge to connect great branches of learning through a material web of cause and effect. As such, he stands at the head of a movement to rephrase academic questions along evolutionary lines. We have discussed this trend previously in these pages (see Letters, this issue), and now, as consilience, we put it before several distinguished scholars in the disciplines that Edward O. Wilson seeks so fundamentally to alter.

Does It All Fit Together? Evolution, the Arts, and Consilience

Roger Shattuck: University Professor and professor of modern foreign languages and literature emeritus at Boston University, Massachusetts.

In thinking about the largest questions of all-existence, space-time, life, humanity-we do well to keep in mind that at least three principal paths of

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56 Shattuck, Wilson, Haack, and Wilson 57

understanding and explanation are open to us. All three imply some form of "the Great Chain of Being," a logical and ontological ladder that connects the most indivisible and microscopic particulars to the highest and most uni- versal manifestation of Being. One form of thinking appeals to a supreme Being as the transcendent source and illumination of everything that is. A second, more recent form of thinking appeals to the tiniest atomic and molecular entities as units to which we can reduce all other phenomena. The third form of thinking, accepting our lot as human beings perched midway between the other two infinitely regressive perspectives, holds to a median course directed toward the individual organism as the fundamental unit of life, agency, and meaning. Pascal said all this beautifully in his long pensge about the two infinities. Well before 1809 when Lamarck proposed a theory of evolution, the second Copernican reversal of everything, Pascal had described the relations between top-down thinking, bottom-up thinking, and thinking on our own scale. Though drawn to both extremes by his powerful religious convictions and his scientific genius, Pascal conveys dramatically that we do our best thinking at our own order of magnitude. These three ways and scales of thinking throw some light on the major attempts in history to produce a synthesis of all human knowledge. For ex- ample, Plato appealed to the transcendence of the forms or ideas, whereas the dialogue structure of his writings anchored his philosophy in the scale of believable human beings in their daily lives. It is the strength of Aristotle to have deployed all three modes of exploration-transcendent, reductionist, and humanist. In the preface to Principia Mathematica (1687), Newton writes that he uses mechanics to investigate the forces of nature and "to deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea." (Voltaire would have wanted to add: apples.) Newton continues that he wishes he "could de- rive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles." Is his project transcendent? reductionist? humanist? Newton would have claimed the first. We might classify mechanics and the laws of motion differently today. We know, at least, that LaMettrie and D'Holbach went on to reduce consciousness itself to terms of matter and motion-the world as machine. E. O. Wilson's Consilience aspires to compete in this Olympic league of syn- thesizers of all knowledge. Affably, he refers to himself as "a naturalist." Then comes the thunderbolt. "Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history" (11). Only two chapters later do we learn how human and physical fit together. "The cutting edge of science is reductionism, the breaking apart of nature into its natural constituents" (54). Those constituents are limited to the laws of physics and chemistry and evolution by natural selection. They will explain everything, from the bottom up. The book and the term "consilience" stand, not for a scientific discipline, but for Wilson's belief that all disciplines, including the social sciences and 58 Academic Questions / Summer 1998

the humanities, can he unified by means of enlightened reductionism. He writes as a convert and missionary whose homiletic style unfolds hidden correspondences among all things, physical correspondences verging at times on the occult. His resolve to surmount the barrier between nature and culture makes for exciting and challenging reading. The book demands close critical attention. In On Human Nature (1978), Wilson wrote: "the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have" (192). Now he has under- taken to write that epic himself, using his enormous learning and persuasive skills. Wilson's publisher believes strongly enough in the appeal of this epic myth to an educated public to have ordered a first printing of 125,000 copies. Yes, there is something here for everyone. The book will sweep away the uninformed and the uncritical. For those prepared to scrutinize Wilson's key concepts of epigenetic rules (borrowed from Waddington without acknowl- edgment) and gene-culture coevolution, the book provokes a confrontation over fundamental principles. "All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental process in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive" (96). An- other thunderbolt. But don't flinch. This sentence is a conjecture, an un- demonstrated hypothesis, a claim made by one of the world's authorities on ants, who founded the imperialist field of sociobiology in 1978, and whose "epiphany" in graduate school turned him away from Baptist beliefs to an overpowering trust in evolution as the unifying principle of knowledge. To designate this book, he would have done better to retain one of the early working titles, Natural Philosophy. Consilience sets out with a strong bias in favor of reductionist science and a no-nonsense rejection of any claims of autonomous non-material status for mind, culture, the spiritual, or any other domain. Wilson presents this pros- pect with unfailing optimism. Such a unified materialist evolutionary approach would allow us finally to deal with the problems of humanity and civilization without illusions. Epigenetic rules such as incest avoidance and color vision, Wilson insists, would explain human nature and behavior. By the last chapter, however, a tectonic shift has modified the landscape. The two Faustian bar- gains we have struck with technology and with molecular biology have brought us face to face with the fragility of the environment and of life itself. We must practice a careful conservationism in this transformed world where "our future [is] entirely up to us" (297). Such responsibility for our actions does not follow from the evolutionary sequence of causes and effects presented in earlier chapters. On the second to last page, is Wilson affirming free will and human au- tonomy? It appears so. And as a result he loses his optimism and yields to unmistakable pessimism about our survival in this fragile environment. Eco- nomics, the most advanced and reliable of the social sciences in Chapter 9, now becomes the most regressive and dangerous in its emphasis on growth and its refusal to recognize the environmental consequences of that growth. Shattuck, Wilson, Haack, and Wilson 59

I find the last chapter exhilaratingly well argued and well documented. It effectively unsays and even contradicts the optimistic reductionism of the previous eleven chapters. For the reader, the shift is disconcerting. But it may be attributable to the deep epigenetic rules of Wilson's thinking. For he made a similar move in the final pages of Sociobiology, where he suddenly expresses doubts about his own vast argument. (See my Forbidden Knowledge, 1996, 304- o5.) Chapter 10, "The Arts and Their Interpretation," comes between chapters titled "The Social Sciences" and "Ethics and Philosophy." At this point in the book, we still need a way to bridge the gap between purely physical epigenetic rules and the works and behaviors we call culture. To that end, Wilson proposes to deal with the personal creations of art and literature, which we endow with "the true and the beautiful." But he cannot so limit himself for long and turns almost immediately to interpretation, criticism, and humanities scholars. (The central field of history escapes his attention.) I cite one of Wilson's most direct definitions of the arts.

[T]he exclusive role of the arts is the transmission of the intricate details of human experience by artifice to intensify aesthetic and emotional response. Works of art communicate feeling directly from mind to mind, with no intent to explain why the impact occurs. In this defining quality, the arts are the antithesis of science. (218)

Why should the arts accept this assignment of an "exclusive role" and this dubious allegation of an incapacity to explain themselves? "Intricate detail" need not exclude larger perspectives, and many poets and artists proceed by indirect, not direct, communication of feelings. Wilson concludes this pas- sage by affirming that "the arts place humanity in the center of the universe" (219). The abstraction "humanity" troubles me. The arts, in contrast with philosophy and science, deal with individuals and their particular actions, thoughts, and feelings in contingent situations that we find pertinent. The arts and the humanities do not look primarily for universals and general laws: they seek out the revelation and uniqueness of individual cases. Wilson offers us three examples to support his thoughts on the arts. He asks us to admire Milton's sensuous pleasure in nature's beauty described in eight lines from Book IV of Paradise Lost. But because the lines belong to a negative description of Eden-classical scenes from which the attractive quali- ties of Eden lie "wide remote"-Wilson's comments are confusing and turn aside into an awkward statement about Milton's genius. A paragraph on how Mondrian's early landscapes developed into pure abstract compositions informs us also that neurobiological and bioaesthetic research reveals that his mazelike patterns closely resemble those that stimu- late maximum brain arousal. Presumably Mondrian worked close to identifi- able epigenetic rules. A discussion of Neolithic paintings in the recently 60 Academic Questions / Summer 1998

discovered Chauvet cave links them to sympathetic magic and therefore to adaptive hunting strategies. In every case, Wilson carries art back to archetypes as the primary site of the coevolution of genes and culture. Archetypes will provide the missing bridge, the needed link. Twentieth-century intellectual fashions in the West have tolerated and even welcomed archetypes, a tidied-up protoscientific version of ancient myths, because their very bigness and vagueness allowed ambitious thinkers like C. G. Jung to associate them with a dubious entity called "the collective un- conscious." In a similar move, Wilson is foolish enough to hypostatize culture into a "superorganism" that produces archetypes, and to cite Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a reliable source on the subject. In these passages Wilson abandons reductionist thinking and follows the transcendent road toward entities that have low viability in both the sciences and the arts. I give greater credence to Wilson's argument that the arts are adaptive and favor our survival. The price we pay for human intelligence and consciousness, he states, takes several forms: "the shocking recognition of the self" (224), awareness of our mortality, and a sense of chaos and suffering in the world. Spawned by those challenges, the arts proffer some sense of order and meaning. Since our slow-moving genes have not yet evolved responses to the challenges created by our high-velocity intelligence, we have recourse to sto- ries and drawings and musical sounds that embody consoling coherence amid reigning chaos. Perhaps this has been the primary role for the arts. Though not an established scientific truth, it contributes to consilience. But the arts can also have an unsettling function. And the function of providing needed order embraces more cultural activities than just the arts. Philosophy and narrative history belong there also, along with an ancient category that takes on increasing importance in this chapter on the arts: magic. Magic is far older than the very recent class of behavior we call "the creative arts." The two activities lie closer to each other than we usually admit. I suppose it is foolish to wish that in this chapter Wilson had dealt with the arts along with the humanities as representing the third category of thinking, the human perspective that seeks to avoid both the reductive and the transcendent. Chapter 10 on the arts carries a heavy load and strikes me as a weak link in the overall hypothesis of consilience. Wilson examines no work of art and no artist in such a way as to show how it represents gene-culture coevolution. Milton alludes to some existing archetypes of paradise. But his true contribu- tion was to create an entirely new Eden and a vast epic poem to bring it to life. Mondrian's designs conform to schemas that the brain may be pro- grammed to respond to. Both may comfort us with a needed sense of order. But they do not show us the bridge across the gap between nature and culture, between Wilson's "ennobling" epic of physical evolution and the complex moral burden of human life as we know it. Shattuck, Wilson, Haack, and Wilson 61

Two circumstances may draw the enterprising reader to Wilson's Consilience. It serves as a goad for one to try to become as widely informed and engaged as E. O. Wilson, the ant man who writes pungently about art and religion. And the last chapter on the dire perils of technology and genetics in our future redeems the criticisms I have made of the other eleven. Wilson cannot withhold the truth, even when it belies his own epic of evolution. He finally stops throwing thunderbolts and comes down from the Olympus of the unity of all knowledge to join us in the wide fields of living at our own order of magnitude.

Imputing a Biological Impetus to Society

James Q. Wilson:James A. Collins Professor of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Many years ago, when the Harvard faculty was debating the adoption of a new core curriculum, I asked E. O. Wilson his view of this issue. He strongly favored the core and was quite helpful in getting it accepted. His argument then, like the one in this book, was that the progress of scholarship had not fragmented knowledge into an endlessly proliferating class of diverse special- ties, each entitled to its own unique place in a university faculty, but had, instead, revealed beneath these disciplines the workings of a few broad principles that could make possible a simple but powerful interpretation of other- wise isolated facts. In this book, Wilson makes that argument broadly and forcefully, calling the effort to create a unity of the sciences "consilience," by which he means the linking together of facts and fact-based theories into a "common groundwork of explanation." In that linking, biology and evolution will play a central role. Organisms are the most complex systems known to man; their creation and adaptation is at the heart of animal and human history; that adaptation is the result of cells that are maximally fit for the environments they occupy. But neither Wilson's current view nor his extraordinary accomplishments in biological science make him a mindless hereditarian. Indeed, in biology no such thing exists, despite what one reads in our popular press. Genes and the environment interact for all living creatures. The range over which heredity can shape behavior is governed for each gene by its norm of reaction, which is the total variation in some trait that is caused by any environment in which the gene (or group of genes) causing the trait can survive. That norm can be very wide or quite narrow. I have ten fingers and two eyes; so does virtually every other human being. Even though these traits are the product of my genes, the norm