Source of book: I own this.
One of the great things that the Library of America has done in the last few years is offer collections of non-fiction writings from science writers of the 20th Century. Often, these books are a bit hard to find used, are often out of print, or are available only in paperback. In some cases, people of my age may not be familiar with them.
In this case, I splurged with a bit of my credit card rewards (essentially my “mad money” for books) and got the E. O. Wilson hardback. Biophilia is the first work in that book, and I decided to read it first. (Well, it was first in the book, so…)
I probably ran across Wilson somewhere at some point, because his name seems familiar, as does his work studying ants. But I certainly hadn’t read anything longer than a magazine article.
Biophilia is a pretty short work, but it packs in a lot of wonderful writing, and thoughtful contemplation. The name itself was coined by Wilson to refer to the fact that humans naturally gravitate toward the natural world, toward living things. This instinct is certainly part of my personality, and indeed research has proven this to be a near-universal of human psychology. (And those who do not resonate with the natural world are sad persons indeed.)
It is a bit difficult to describe the book itself, because it consists of a series of related but not directly connected essays on the subject. Each is different and could stand alone. The best I can probably do is hit some highlights.
The book thinks long and hard about the ways that our evolutionary history still affects our psyches, and about the connections we have to other organisms in our ecosystem.
I won’t quote from the opening chapter, but it is entitled “Bernhardsdorp,” after the town in Suriname where Wilson spent significant time researching ants - that was his major contribution to scientific knowledge. In particular, he was looking at leaf-cutter ants, which are, to be sure, thoroughly fascinating. It is easy to take for granted that these ants are well known - for many of us, we first saw them in action at the zoo. (Both Los Angeles and San Diego keep colonies.) But they are not native to the wilds of urban California, and were not well known outside of South America for much of history. The second chapter is all about these ants, and has a great description of the “superorganism” that characterizes Hymenoptera.
People often ask me whether I see any human qualities in an ant colony, any form of behavior that even remotely mimics human thought and feeling. Insects and human beings are separated by more than 600 million years of evolution, but a common ancestor did exist in the form of one of the earliest multicellular organisms. Does some remnant of psychological continuity exist across that immense phylogenetic gulf? The answer is that I open an ant colony as I would the back of a Swiss watch. I am enchanted by the intricacy of its parts and the clean, thrumming precision. But I never see the colony as anything more than an organic machine.
Let me qualify that metaphor. The leafcutter colony is a superorganism. The queen sits deep in the central chambers, the vibrant growing tip from which all the workers and new queens originate. But she is not in any sense the leader or the repository of an organizational blueprint. No command center directs the colony. The social master plan is partitioned into the brains of the all-female workers, whose separate programs fit together to form a balanced whole. Each ant automatically performs certain tasks and avoids others according to its size and age. The superorganism’s brain is the entire society; the workers are the crude analogue of its nerve cells. Seen from above and from a distance, the leafcutter colony resembles a gigantic amoeba. It’s foraging columns snake out like pseudopods to engulf and shred plants, while their stems pull the green pieces down holes into the fungus gardens. Through a unique step in evolution taken millions of years ago, the ants captured a fungus, incorporated it into the superorganism, and so gained the power to digest leaves. Or perhaps the relation is the other way around: perhaps the fungus captured the ants and employed them as a mobile extension to take leaves into the moist underground chambers.
In either case, the two now own each other and will never pull apart.
That’s marvelous writing, I must say. The whole book is that way, just gem after gem, the work of a master scientist who is also a great writer.
From these specifics, Wilson in the next chapter moves to a more expanded view of the science of biology as a whole (with a discussion of Darwin versus Agassiz thrown in for good measure.) Here is another brilliant passage.
The modern biological vision sweeps from microseconds to millions of years and from micrometers to the biosphere. But it is merely ordinary vision expanded by the electron microscope, earth-scan satellite, and other prosthetic devices of science and technology. The precise discipline is defined by the point of entry. Organismic biology explores the way we walk and speak; cell biology, the assembly and structure of our tissues; molecular biology, the ultimate chemical machinery; and evolutionary biology, the genetic history of our whole species. The modes of study depend upon the levels of organization chosen, which ascend in a hierarchical fashion: molecules compose cells, cells tissues, tissues organisms, organisms populations, and populations ecosystems. To understand any given species and its evolution requires a knowledge of each of the levels of organization sufficient to account for the one directly above it.
The next chapter is all about the Bird of Paradise (the birds, not the plants that resemble them.) I have to quote this line, which is just amazing and profound.
The role of science, like that of art, is to blend exact imagery with more distant meaning, the parts we already understand with those given as new into larger patterns that are coherent enough to be acceptable as truth.
This is really a microcosm of the human experience. We learn through our senses, which give us an impression of the reality, not some pure reality itself. Just as an obvious, colors do not exist. Different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation exist, and our sensory organs interpret a narrow band of these waves (or is that particles?) in a way that creates what we call “color” in our brains. We instinctively understand the “redness” of red light, but trying to explain it to anyone who cannot see color is pretty much impossible. Our very experience of the world is a metaphor our brains create.
Wilson’s point is universal. Every scientific endeavor requires taking an immense amount of information, data, experience, whatever you choose to call it, finding patterns that work coherently enough to strike us as true. Nobody really knows what gravity is or how it works, but we can, through various metaphors, from classical physics to Einstein’s relativistic space-time, to predict its effects and accept it as truth.
So too with the artist, of course. A poem is true (at least if it is a good poem), but it isn’t the truth. It is a metaphorical blending of imagery we understand with that other, new or forgotten, kernel of underlying reality that, when emotionally coherently blended by a master poet, can be accepted as truth.
The next chapter, my favorite, “The Poetic Species,” takes this idea further. If I were to recommend a single chapter, this would be it. Here are some favorite quotes from it. Speaking of scientists and the endeavor above, he says this:
Their principal aim is to discover natural law marked by elegance, the right mix of simplicity and latent power. The theory they accept is the one that defeats rival schemes by uniquely explaining the experiments of numerous independent investigators. It is a sleek instrument forge by repeated exposure to stubborn and sometimes inconvenient data. Conversely, the ideal experiment is one that settles the rival claims of competing theories. Both the dominant theory and its patron data endure only if they fit the explanations of other disciplines through a network of logically tight and quantitative arguments.
This tidy conception is made the more interesting by the deep epistemological problem it creates and the biological process it implies. Elegance is more a product of the human mind than of external reality. It is best understood as a product of organic evolution. The brain depends on elegance to compensate for its own small size and short lifetime. As the cerebral cortex grew from apish dimensions through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it was forced to rely on tricks to enlarge memory and speed computation. The mind therefore specializes on analogy and metaphor, on a sweeping together of chaotic sensory experience into workable categories labeled by words and stacked into hierarchies for quick recovery.
Dang, that’s amazing. It isn’t a new idea to me, of course, but he puts it so beautifully and, dare I say, elegantly? Here is more:
Scientific innovation sometimes sounds like poetry, and I would claim that it is, at least in the earliest stages. The ideal scientist can be said to think like a poet, work like a clerk, and write like a journalist. The ideal poet thinks, works, and writes like a poet. The two vocations draw from the same subconscious wellsprings and depend upon similar primal stories and images. But where scientists aim for a generalizing formula to which special cases are obedient, seeking unifying natural laws, artists invent special cases immediately. They transmit forms of knowledge in which the knower himself is revealed.
That last line is thrilling. And another one:
The essence of art, no less than of science, is synecdoche. A carefully chosen part serves for the whole. Some feature of the subject directly perceived or implied by analogy transmits precisely the quality intended. The listener is moved by a single surprising image.
This extended comparison of art and science really resonates with me. There is a tendency by many to set up art and science as opposed opposites, perhaps even as mortal enemies, but this is a gross misunderstanding. The two are so closely related in actual fact, that they can and should be seen as part of the same tradition, facets of the same wonder at life, existence, and being. It is no accident that many scientists are fans of poetry and music and art. Or that many artists, musicians, and poets seek inspiration not merely from the natural world, but from science itself. Wilson clearly is in that category, quoting Octavio Paz in this chapter, and expressing a deep admiration for artistry.
The mind is biologically prone to discursive communication that expands thought. Mankind, in Richard Rorty’s expression, is the poetic species. The symbols of art, music, and language freight power well beyond their outward and literal meanings. SO each one also condenses large quantities of information. Just as mathematical equations allow us to move swiftly across large amounts of knowledge and spring into the unknown, the symbols of art gather human experience into novel forms in order to evoke a more intense perception in others. Human beings live - literally live, if life is equated with the mind - by symbols, particularly words, because the brain is constructed to process information almost exclusively in their terms.
As I said, the whole chapter is amazing. The next one is on snakes, and their universal presence in all mythologies, likely reflecting our evolved mechanisms for not dying from snakebite. I won’t quote from it, but it is fascinating.
“The Right Place” is similarly fascinating, tying evolutionary theory to recognized human behaviors. In this case, he makes the observation that, given a choice, humans naturally seek specific habitats, just like other animals. In our case, we tend to like to be on top of hills, in open country with some trees, overlooking water. Think about it: where do rich people tend to want to be…that lake or ocean or river view… Wilson ties this to where humans first evolved, and the way that our particular strengths made survival under those conditions easiest.
The more habitats I have explored, the more I have felt that certain common features subliminally attract and hold my attention. Is it unreasonable to suppose that the human mind is primed to respond most strongly to some narrowly defined qualities that had the greatest impact on survival in the past?
He continues later:
The practical-minded will argue that certain environments are just “nice” and there’s an end to it. So why dilate on the obvious? The answer is that the obvious is usually profoundly significant. Some environments are indeed pleasant, for the same general reason that sugar is sweet, incest and cannibalism repulsive, and team sports exhilarating. Each response has its peculiar meaning rooted in the distant genetic past. To understand why we have one particular set of ingrained preferences, and not another, out of the vast number possible remains a central question in the study of man.
The older I get, the less a facile and shallow “god in the gaps” argument satisfies. Wilson’s musings are scientifically supportable, of course, but also emotionally satisfying. We are how we are because of how we developed and evolved, and understanding that can help us understand how our instinctive reactions can work poorly in new situations.
The penultimate chapter is “The Conservation Ethic,” and it is really great, but also depressing as hell. Let me give a few quotes to give the idea.
When very little is known about an important subject, the questions people raise are almost invariably ethical. Then as knowledge grows, they become more concerned with information and amoral, in other words more narrowly intellectual. Finally, as understanding becomes sufficiently complete, the questions turn ethical again. Environmentalism is now passing from the first to the second phase, and there is reason to hope that it will proceed directly on to the third.
The future of the conservation movement depends on such an advance in moral reasoning. Its maturation is linked to that of biology and a new hybrid field, bioethics, that deals with the many technological advances recently made possible by biology. Philosophers and scientists are applying a more formal analysis to such complex problems as the allocation of scarce organ transplants, heroic but extremely expensive efforts to prolong life, and the possible use of genetic engineering to alter human heredity. They have only begun to consider the relationships between human beings and organisms with the same rigor. It is clear that the key to precision lies in the understanding of motivation, the ultimate reasons why people care about one thing, but not another - why, say, they prefer a city with a park to a city alone. The goal is to join emotion with the rational analysis of emotion in order to create a deeper and more enduring conservation ethic.
Aldo Leopold, the pioneer ecologist and author of A Sand County Almanac, defined an ethic as a set of rules invented to meet circumstances so new or intricate, or else encompassing responses so far in the future, that the average person cannot foresee the final outcome. What is good for you and me at this moment might easily sour within ten years, and what seems ideal for the next few decades could ruin future generations. That is why any ethic worthy of the name has to encompass the distant future. The relationships of ecology and the human mind are too intricate to be understood entirely by unaided intuition, by common sense - that overrated capacity composed of the set of prejudices we acquire by the age of eighteen.
Herein lies a lot of the difficulty. Humans struggle to think far enough ahead, particularly when the future and present are in conflict. (That’s the central problem of environmentalism: we need to pay costs now to avoid greater costs for our descendants in the future, and few want to do that.) One could even note that better standards of living now are in conflict with environmental protection, or that the right kind of authoritarianism could have better consequences down the road. Wilson, while definitely not a fan of authoritarianism (see below), wrestles with these issues. In addition, humans are pretty horrible. For Wilson, it seems almost hopeless for humans to truly act altruistically, at least at the population level. And, alas, it seems too common for humans to act in ways that are bad now and in the future. (See: Republican Party policies that harm most humans now, destroy the environment for future humans, and essentially enrich a handful of billionaires while making religious bigots feel powerfully self-righteous.)
Human beings, for all their professed righteousness and brotherhood, easily discriminate against strangers and are content to kill them during wars declared for relatively frivolous causes. So it is much easier to find an excuse to exterminate another species.
Furthermore, this leads to the unanswerable question of the purpose of humanity in the first place. We strive for fulfillment, and many of us for the common good. But does it ultimately mean anything? (See: Ecclesiastes)
The truth is that we never conquered the world, never understood it; we only think we have control. We do not even know why we respond a certain way to other organisms, and need them in diverse ways, so deeply. The prevailing myths concerning our predatory actions toward each other and the environment are obsolete, unreliable, and destructive. The more the mind is fathomed in its own right, as an organ of survival, the greater will be the reverence for life for purely rational reasons.
The final chapter takes us back to Suriname, and the changes that took place politically since Wilson studied ants there. An authoritarian dictator took over, and essentially did what authoritarian dictators do. There is a line in that history that I am stealing, about the problem that outside countries have. Suriname cut off both democracies and communist states like Cuba, afraid of anything that might threaten power and control.
All are wrestling with a problem as old as recorded history: how to deal with the kingdoms of Caliban.
The kingdoms of Caliban indeed. I can think of no better way to describe the Trumps and other dictators of history. They are all irrational rage and destruction, feeding fears and hatreds and leaving nothing but destruction behind them. Because Wilson looks at the long view, he notes that regimes are just blinks of the eye. They can be removed a generation later, and often are. What lasts forever is extinction, and that is why environmental degradation is the biggest long-term issue we face. They are all connected, though, as environmental arsonists like Jair Bolsinaro and Trump demonstrate. The same instinct behind authoritarianism seems to be connected to a willingness to burn the planet to the ground to make a few more bucks.
I really loved this book, and look forward to reading the others in the collection. (And also the promised second volume of Wilson’s works from LoA.)
***
Other Library of America selections that are related to conservation:
Home Economics by Wendell Berry
The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eiseley
My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
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