virus: Fwd: long! FWD:Wilson science

Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Wed, 3 Jun 98 09:22:11 -0400


>> I also urge everyone here to read Consilience, by E. O. Wilson,
>> especially the Gene and Culture chapter, for his take on memes and things
>>
>
>do you have a ref, or is that the new book he wrote?

Yes, it is his new book- here is a goodly excerpt from the introduction, basically.

The Gene and Culture chapter is #6, I think. I don't have it here with me, and I'm still reading it myself.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 09:14:05 +0000
From: Sang-Hyun KIM <9705674@skye.sms.ed.ac.uk>
Subject: EO Wilson SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

>From EnviroEthics mailing-list

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From: "Lawrence D. Rupp" <rlawrenc@mail.tds.net>
To: enviroethics <enviroethics@mailbase.ac.uk>
Fri, 03 Apr 1998 21:53:24 -0600

ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
Integrated Science and The Coming Century of The Environment

Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Research Professor and
Honorary Curator in Entomology at Harvard University, is the author
of 18 books, 2 of which have received the Pulitzer Prize; an ardent
defender of the liberal arts; and a promoter of global conservation
of species and natural ecosystems.

The sesquicentennial of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science is a good time to acknowledge that science is no longer
the specialized activity of a professional elite. Nor is it a
philosophy, or a belief system, or, as some postmodernist thinkers
would have it, just one world view out of a vast number of possible
views. It is rather a combination of mental operations, a culture of
illuminations born during the Enlightenment four centuries ago and
enriched at a near-geometric rate to establish science as the most
effective way of learning about the material world ever devised. The
sword that humanity finally pulled, it has become part of the
permanent world culture and available to all.

"Science, to put its warrant as concisely as possible, is the
organized systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the
world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and
principles."* Its defining traits are first, the confirmation of
discoveries and support of hypotheses through repetition by
independent investigators, preferably with different tests and
analyses; second, mensuration, the quantitative description of the
phenomena on universally accepted scales; third, economy, by which
the largest amount of information is abstracted into a simple and
precise form, which can be unpacked to re-create detail; fourth,
heuristics, the opening of avenues to new discovery and
interpretation.

And fifth, and finally, is consilience, the interlocking of causal
explanations across disciplines. "This consilience," said William
Whewell when he introduced the term in his 1840 synthesis The
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, "is a test of the truth of the
theory in which it occurs." And so it has proved within the natural
sciences, where the webwork of established cause and effect, while
still gossamer frail in many places, is almost continuous from quantum
physics to biogeography. This webwork traverses vast scales of space,
time, and complexity to unite what in Whewell's time appeared to be
radically different classes of phenomena. Thus, chemistry has been
rendered consilient with physics, both undergird molecular biology,
and molecular biology is solidly connected to cellular, organismic,
and evolutionary biology.

The scales of space, time, and complexity in the explanatory
webwork have been widened to bracket some 40 orders of
magnitude. Consider, for example, the webwork's reach from
quantum electrodynamics to the birth of galaxies; or the great
breadth it has attained in the biological sciences, which are not only
united with physics and chemistry but now touch the borders of the
social sciences and humanities.

This last augmentation, while still controversial, deserves special
attention because of its implications for the human condition. For
most of the last two centuries following the decline of the
Enlightenment, scholars have traditionally drawn sharp distinctions
between the great branches of learning, and particularly between the
natural sciences as opposed to the social sciences and humanities. The
latter dividing line, roughly demarcating the scientific and literary
cultures, has been considered an epistemological discontinuity, a
permanent difference in ways of knowing. But now growing evidence
exists that the boundary is not a line at all, but a broad, mostly
unexplored domain of causally linked phenomena awaiting cooperative
exploration from both sides.

Researchers from four disciplines of the natural sciences have entered
the borderland:

Cognitive neuroscientists, outriders of the once but no longer
"quiet" revolution, are using an arsenal of new techniques to map the
physical basis of mental events. They have shifted the frame of
discourse concerning the mind from semantic and introspective
analysis to nerve cells, neurotransmitters, hormones, and recurrent
neural networks. Working on a parallel track, students of artificial
intelligence, with an eye on the future possibility of artificial
emotion, search with neuroscientists for a general theory of
cognition. Combining molecular genetics with traditional
psychological tests, behavioral geneticists have started to
characterize and even pinpoint genes that affect mental activity,
from drug addiction to mood and cognitive operations. They are also
tracing the epigenesis of the activity, the complex molecular and
cellular pathways of mental development that lead from prescription
to phenotype, in the quest for a fuller and much-needed understanding
of the interaction between genes and environment. Evolutionary
biologists, especially sociobiologists (also known within the social
sciences as evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary
anthropologists), are reconstructing the origins of human social
behavior with special reference to evolution by natural selection.
Environmental scientists in diverse specialties, including human
ecology, are more precisely defining the arena in which our species
arose, and those parts that must be sustained for human survival.

The very idea of a borderland of causal connections between the great
branches of learning is typically dismissed by social theorists and
philosophers as reductionistic. This diagnosis is of course quite
correct. But consider this: Reduction and the consilience it implies
are the key to the success of the natural sciences. Why should the
same not be true of other kinds of knowledge? Because mind and culture
are material processes, there is every reason to suppose, and none
compelling enough to deny, that the social sciences and humanities
will be strengthened by assimilation of the borderland disciplines.
For however tortuous the unfolding of the causal links among genes,
mind, and culture, and however sensitive they are to the caprice of
historical circumstance, the links form an unbreakable webwork, and
human understanding will be better off to the extent that these links
are explored. Francis Bacon, at the dawn of the Enlightenment in 1605,
prefigured this principle of integrative science (by which he meant a
large part of all the branches of learning) with an image I especially
like: "No perfect discovery can be made upon a flat or a level:
neither is it possible to discover the more remote or deeper parts of
any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science and
ascend not to a higher science."

The unavoidable complement of reduction is synthesis, the step that
completes consilience from one discipline to the next. Synthesis is
far more difficult to achieve than reduction, and that is why
reductionistic studies dominate the cutting edge of investigation. To
reduce an enzyme molecule to its constituent amino acids and describe
its three-dimensional structure is far easier, for example, than to
predict the structure of an enzyme molecule from the sequence of its
amino acids alone. As the century closes, however, the balance between
reduction and synthesis appears to be changing. Attention within the
natural sciences has begun to shift away from the search for elemental
units and fundamental laws and toward highly organized systems.
Researchers are devoting proportionately more time to the
self-assembly of macromolecules, cells, organisms, planets,
universes--and mind and culture.

If this view of universal consilience is correct, the central question
of the social sciences is, in my opinion, the nature of the linkage
between genetic evolution and cultural evolution. It is also one of
the great remaining problems of the natural sciences. This part of the
overlap of the two great branches of learning can be summarized as
follows. We know that all culture is learned, yet its form and the
manner in which it is transmitted are shaped by biology. Conversely,
the genes prescribing much of human behavioral biology evolved in a
cultural environment, which itself was evolving. A great deal has been
learned about these two modes of evolution viewed as separate
processes. What we do not understand very well is how they are linked.

The surest entry to the linkage, or gene-culture coevolution as it is
usually called, is (again in my opinion) to view human nature in a new
and more heuristic manner. Human nature is not the genes, which
prescribe it, or the universals of culture, which are its products. It
is rather the epigenetic rules of cognition, the inherited
regularities of cognitive development that predispose individuals to
perceive reality in certain ways and to create and learn some cultural
variants in preference to competing variants.

Epigenetic rules have been documented in a diversity of cultural
categories, from syntax acquisition and paralinguistic communication
to incest avoidance, color vocabularies, cheater detection, and
others. The continuing quest for such inborn biasing effects promises
to be the most effective means to understand gene-culture coevolution
and hence to link biology and the social sciences causally. It also
offers a way, I believe, to build a secure theoretical foundation for
the humanities, by addressing, for example, the biological origins of
ethical precepts and aesthetic properties of the arts.

The naturalistic world view, by encouraging the search for consilience
across the great branches of learning, is far more than just another
exercise for philosophers and social theorists. To understand the
physical basis of human nature, down to its evolutionary roots and
genetic biases, is to provide needed tools for the diagnosis and
management of some of the worst crises afflicting humanity.

Arguably the foremost of global problems grounded in the
idiosyncrasies of human nature is overpopulation and the destruction
of the environment. The crisis is not long-term but here and now; it
is upon us. Like it or not, we are entering the century of the
environment, when science and polities will give the highest priority
to settling humanity down before we wreck the planet.

Here in brief is the problem--or better, complex of interlocking
problems--as researchers see it. In their consensus, "[t]he global
population is precariously large, will grow another third by 2020,
and climb still more before peaking sometime after 2050. Humanity is
improving per capita production, health, and longevity. But it is
doing so by eating up the planet's capital, including irreplaceable
natural resources. Humankind is approaching the limit of its food and
water supply. As many as a billion people, moreover, remain in
absolute poverty, with inadequate food from one day to the next and
little or no medical care. Unlike any species that lived before, Homo
sapiens is also changing the world's atmosphere and climate, lowering
and polluting water tables, shrinking forests, and spreading deserts.
It is extinguishing a large fraction of plant and animal species, an
irreplaceable loss that will be viewed as catastrophic by future
generations. Most of the stress originates directly or indirectly
from a handful of industrialized countries. Their proven formulas are
being eagerly adopted by the rest of the world. The emulation cannot
be sustained, not with the same levels of consumption and waste. Even
if the industrialization of developing countries is only partly
successful, the environmental aftershock will dwarf the population
explosion that preceded it." Recent studies indicate that to raise
the rest of the world to the level of the United States using present
technology would require the natural resources of two more planet
Earths.

The time has come to look at ourselves closely as a biological as well
as cultural species, using all of the intellectual tools we can
muster. We are brilliant catarrhine primates, whose success is
eroding the environment to which a billion years of evolutionary
history exquisitely adapted us. We are dangerously baffled by the
meaning of this existence, remaining instinct-driven, reckless, and
conflicted. Wisdom for the long-term eludes us. There is ample
practical reason--should no other kind prove persuasive--to aim for
an explanatory integration not just of the natural sciences but also
of the social sciences and humanities, in order to cope with issues
of urgency and complexity that may otherwise be too great to manage.

The author is at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard
University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

*E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Knopf, New York,
1998), p. 53. W. Whewell, The Philosophy of Inductive Sciences
(Parker, London, 1840), p. 230. F. Bacon, Advancement of Learning
(Tomes, London, 1605). E. O. Wilson, Consilience, p.280.

Volume 279, Number 5359 Issue of 27 March 1998, pp. 2048 - 2049
©1998 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Sang-Hyun Kim
501 Patrick Geddes Hall
Milnes Court
Lawnmarket
Edinburgh EH1 2PF
United Kingdom
E-mail: s.kim-2@sms.ed.ac.uk
jhl1513@nownuri.net (Korean)
Tel: 44-131-220-1964

----- End of forwarded message from M.A.B. -----

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Wade T. Smith
morbius@channel1.com
wade_smith@harvard.edu
morbius@cyberwarped.com
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