A Turn to Reason: A Conversation with E. O. Wilson
This article was published in Museum News September/October 2006.
This summer, “Darwin” was one of the major exhibitions on view at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. On June 14, the museum hosted an evening with the scientist who has been referred to as “Charles Darwin’s natural heir,” the pioneering entomologist and biologist Edward O. Wilson.
That evening, Wilson—a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, professor, and activist—conversed with Michael Novacek, senior vice president, provost of science and curator in the division of paleontology at AMNH. The museum generously shared a recording of the event with Museum News, and a podcast is available on its website www.amnh.org.
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL NOVACEK: As a boy growing up in Alabama and northern Florida, Ed Wilson scoured the fields and the forests and the streams. At night he pored over books. An article from National Geographic inspired his interest in ants.
Ed Wilson’s contributions began early, at age 13, when he discovered in a vacant lot near the shores of Mobile, Ala., the first known U.S. colonies of fire ants—the so-called Ants from Hell.
As an assistant professor at Harvard in the late 1950s, he proposed the radical notion that ant societies are bound together by an elaborate system of chemical signals. He went on to prove the existence of what are now called pheromones.
Fascinated by ant societies, he began seeking parallels in social interactions of birds, lions, monkeys, apes and even humans. In a 1975 book audaciously entitled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, he charted in evolutionary terms the social architecture of a wider range of species, their breeding behavior, gender dominance, caste systems and so forth.
Wilson’s Sociobiology was at once enormously influential and hugely controversial. Its first 26 chapters, which dealt with social systems of non-human species, were widely praised as one of the century’s signal scientific achievements. In the 27th chapter, which applied the same analysis to human behavior and culture, he was sometimes very harshly criticized.
Despite the mixed reaction, Wilson, in this and subsequent books culminating with Promethean Fire, accomplished something few scientists can claim. He established a new field of science, the science of sociobiology.
By this time, however, Ed Wilson was on to a new thing. Drawing from his deep knowledge of the Earth’s little creatures and his sense of their contributions to the planet’s ecology and their underappreciation, he produced what may be his most important work, The Diversity of Life.
In 424 pages, he describes how an intricately interconnected natural system is threatened by a man-made biodiversity crisis that he calls the sixth extinction.
How can we become stewards of the living world? To Wilson, what is required is a new convergence of thought and ethics comparable to the age of enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. The enlightenment thinkers got it mostly right the first time, he points out in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which was published in 1998. They assumed a lawful, perfectible material world in which knowledge is unified across the sciences and the humanities.
Now Ed Wilson, by his own admission, is moving irresistibly into what he calls the literary realm. It’s not a bad place for him. He has created a scientific masterpiece nearly every decade of his life. And in this time of crisis of our planet, we have never had more need for the observations and intuitions of one of the world’s great naturalists.
Ed has said of the biodiversity lost to human-motivated changes that “the process ongoing in the 1980s will take millions of years to correct.” That process is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our decedents are least likely to forgive.
EDWARD O. WILSON: The American Museum of Natural History is a place of great tradition; of great depth, of great history and of great potential for the future. And I’ll take this opportunity to suggest what part of that future may be.
AMNH is one of the major repositories of specimens collected over, in some cases, hundreds of years. These have incalculable value as a historical record, as a source of DNA, as a source of material to track the increase of toxic substances and so on. But it also is our main point of departure for a huge amount of research that has yet to be done, and that’s to explore the rest of life on Earth.
Most people are astonished to learn that possibly only 10 percent of the kinds of plants and animals and microorganisms are known, especially when you throw in what I like to call “the little creatures that run the Earth”—you know, the small invertebrates and the microorganisms. There may be 90 percent yet to be discovered.
We have just begun the great Linnaean enterprise that was begun by Carrolus Linnaeus in Upsala 250 years ago. And we tapered off in that effort when the molecular revolution occurred, which was, of course, one of the major advances of all time, but nonetheless tended to overshadow our efforts to continue the mapping and understanding of life’s diversity on this planet.
So even with something like 1.8 million species of all kinds of organisms known to science, given a formal name attached to specimens that have been authenticated in places like the American Museum of Natural History, we are still facing tens of millions of species yet to be discovered. And why should we try to do this? Why should we bother?
We have every reason in the world if we want to know the nature of most of the life with which we’re living. If we don’t know what’s in the little lake out in Central Park, for example, down to the lowest level, say, including the microorganism that runs so much of the machinery of life in that little lake, then we do not understand the ecology of it. We only understand certain broad features of what’s happening there. And we will not be able to master and, in any sense, protect and control the basic processes of the ecosystems of the world until we do.
Moreover, we will always continue to be taken by surprise when a new pathogen appears. Countries around the world are being swamped with alien species. Some of these we call invasive species because they become pests. But many others are simply pathogens, parasites. West Nile is an example.
And these pathogens are going to continue to sweep in—and we won’t know about them until people start getting sick. We need to be able to know where they are in advance and know what the likelihood is that they might be transmitted and what might be transmitting them.
And this is going to take an enormous amount of research and it’s going to yield a vast amount of priceless information in basic science and in practical human concerns. This work will come out of museums like this one, and it will require the recruitment of a whole generation of new scientists interested in biodiversity for its own sake.
I think increasingly historians and philosopher scientists recognize that the biology of the future—now and of the future, both—consists of three dimensions. One dimension is the up-and-down, through all levels of biological organization, from the molecule to a small number of typical species, whose positions in the ecosystem are studied in thoroughness. That’s one dimension of biology. And that’s what has dominated biology, particularly down at the molecular and cell level, because of its great relevance for medicine, primarily through the last few decades.
The second dimension is what I just talked about, the diversity of life. And the third is the concept of the tree of life, tracking the history of all of these species.
Implicit in this is an urgent mission to save life diversity because it’s disappearing rapidly. I won’t burden you with giving you the figures, except to say that I think most people who work in the field, most scientists who work in the field of biodiversity agree that we’re going to lose a great many of the life forms of Earth.
They figure we’ll lose one-half of all the species of plants and animals by the end of the century, unless we can somehow abate all these enormous changes that are human-caused from global warming and climate change.
And so this becomes a matter of some urgency. It’s not as easy to get across to the public as, say, the need to cure cancer. But it is in a way equally urgent because this is what’s going to affect all generations to come, a loss of biodiversity. And as it is lost, a lot is lost with it: future economic potential, environmental security, which is dependent upon vast biodiversity, and not least, spirituality.
I’ve just completed a work that has given me some personal hope. And that is representing scientists and secularists, as best I can, in extending a hand of friendship to the evangelicals, telling them, please, let’s put aside the metaphysical arguments. Let’s agree not to fuss, at least for a while, and let it confuse everything else. Could we get together in mutual respect and form an alliance to save all creation?
I think this is something worth trying. Eventually we might actually raise public consciousness concerning the state of the rest of life on Earth, to a point where it is an important issue in the mainstream political discourse. One challenge at the intersection of politics and science is whether scientists can go forth bravely, without fearing losing too much credibility.
NOVACEK: In the beginning of your book [Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006] you state, “I began as a boy who turned a fascination with insects into a determination to become a professional entomologist. My dream was not visionary. What I hoped for was to stay outdoors as long as possible and luxuriate in the pleasures of natural history.”
Another nature lover, Charles Darwin, had a few problems with that vocation. As we showed in our “Darwin” exhibit here in the museum, his father, soberly reflecting on his beetle collection and his wanderings in nature, said, “Charles, you are good for nothing but shooting dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to you and all of your family.”
What was the parental pressure like for you?
WILSON: None. My parents didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I grew up in a generation in which boys and girls were allowed the kind of freedom that a child needs to find himself or herself. And that includes ideally, in my opinion, that they have access to what Henry David Thoreau famously called the wood lot, which every town should have, or a river in the woods, anything. Kids deserve a natural environment to explore on their own, to make their own, to identify as their place, to make a hiding place to study bugs, figure things out, watch people while hidden, and so on and on, and have adventures; that is the natural way for children to grow up. Children are little savages, in the best sense of the word.
That was the kind of childhood I had. I went out after breakfast and if I didn’t go to school, then I said I would be back by dinnertime. And I think that was the kind of childhood that so many people around the world have had for thousands of years. And if I can quote an authority to make my point, [environmentalist] Rachel Carson said, “Take a child to the seashore and let them explore. Don’t tell them what they’re seeing, not right away, but let them explore.”
The end of that [kind of childhood] is something very important that’s happened in American education. And I’m going to make an extreme statement: Soccer moms are the greatest enemy of natural history.
NOVACEK: I can see this is getting to be a political evening.
WILSON: Yes. I couldn’t make out any hissing, but then I’m kind of deaf in the upper registers. But go on.
NOVACEK: You call yourself a naturalist. But some people say a naturalist is a rather quaint thing, rather like stamp collection. Is there such a thing as a modern naturalist?
WILSON: Oh, there really is, indeed. I’ve been working hard to bring that term back to respectability. And I think it ought to be kind of an in-your-face approach in reinstituting natural history, not just as part of our basic education but also because I see it as a big part of the future of science. It’s a superb way to be introduced to science, to have children and adults participate in what we call citizen science, which can be really first-rate science. I think biology is going to be the dominant science of the 21st century. So much of it is going to consist of exploring the world and figuring out how things work, species by species.
Each species is unique in its own right. Each species is up to a million years old and is exquisitely adapted to a particular environment. And the species lock together in systems and symbioses. This is the real world. And we can’t just figure this out with mathematics and pure logic. We’re going to have to get out and actually find out what the real world is like before we can put together a truly modern biology.
NOVACEK: But what about the division between biology and other forms of knowledge? You’ve written about this chasm between the scientific and the literary culture. What do you think can bridge that chasm?
WILSON: Well, I’ve written an entire book on that, Consilience. Unity of knowledge. It was published eight years ago. And my major conclusion was that science is growing so fast and the social sciences are maturing so quickly and enough interest is being shown in the humanities to indicate that what we call the great branches of learning, the traditional medieval divisions of knowledge, were beginning to get a little less distinct.
And so what I proposed simply was that the chasm, as you mentioned it, is not some kind of an epistemological fault line. That was the traditionalist/structuralist view. I suggested that where the disciplines would come together—social sciences reaching across to the biological sciences, the two of them growing and anastomosing, even—would be where we study together the brain and the mind and also the evolution of the human species. And the subject of human nature, both biological and also from the viewpoint of the social sciences.
Where this is, in fact, beginning to happen on one side is in subjects like cognitive neuroscience, brain scan mapping, human behavioral genetics, neuroanatomy; in detailed studies of human physiology in reference to behavioral patterns.
From the social sciences side, in anthropology we study the patterns of human behavior that are consistent, what we call the universal traits of human nature. That’s now called evolutionary anthropology.
And then we have evolutionary psychology, which is contributing more and more studies of higher levels of human behavior that can be examined in depth and linked to the biological discipline. The point here is that gradually we’re beginning to see some bridges built of cause-and-effect explanation, which seems to be abolishing the old C. P. Snow division between the two cultures.
NOVACEK: But there must still be some obstacles in bringing these things together. What do you think those obstacles are?
WILSON: Yes. The sociologist. My sociologist colleagues are at a level of abstraction—general patterns and statistical studies and so on—that doesn’t lend itself well to biological cause and effect. You know, they haven’t linked up yet.
But another field that I feel has really been resistant is economics. It might have been a big mistake to give economics a Nobel Prize. So much of economics has been dominated by applied mathematical models that there is far less understanding of microeconomics, which is where we really need full understanding, particularly if we’re going to link it to human nature and make fewer mistakes about predicting economic behavior.
NOVACEK: Talk more about the collision between economics and some of the questions of biodiversity.
WILSON: Well, as you well know, the seeming conflict between economic strength and growth on the one side and ecology and preservation of the environment on the other side has long roiled the political waters, and unnecessarily so. Because if anything has emerged from modern environmental science it is that the economic potential of saving and using biodiversity, maintaining it and using it for human benefit, including economic growth, is simply enormous.
Take our national forests. We’ve been through a period of dispute and contention over the value of our national forests. They’re unfortunately administered by the Department of Agriculture and were set up for the purpose of supplying natural resources, particularly wood and fiber, to the country. But they have so many other uses, including recreation and visits that are very valuable to the spirit and peace of mind and education.
Those things tend to get shortchanged. And then we come into a situation where tempers flare—for example, the famous spotted owl controversy, where it was a matter of saving local biodiversity or pursuing what had to be short-term economic gain from continuing logging.
Consider the following: In 1997, the U.S. Forest Service reported a yield to the gross domestic product of the United States of $35 billion. And 78 percent of that came from—let me repeat that, 78 percent—came from recreation. Only 14 percent came from logging and the rest came from mining and grazing.
In other words, people were willing and are willing to pay a lot to make use of the forest, in terms of what you’d broadly call recreation. And to log these forests—to continue to log them is not only less productive, but also it is inimical to where most people would be willing to put their money.
Also in the late 1990s, economists and biologists made a very rough estimate of the value in dollars of what are called the ecological services of the remaining natural environments of the world. Ecological services include water purification, maintenance of watersheds in a productive and optimally efficient way, pollination, air purification, renewal of soil and so on. The estimated figure in 1997 or 1998 was $33 trillion annually—$33 trillion. And that was approximately equal to what all of the nations of the world produced as domestic product.
So there are little hints like this that maybe we haven’t been thinking straight about the relationship between the environment and economics, particularly long-term economics, and that we need some more solid research on the relationship of those two issues.
NOVACEK: You’ve done a lot of different things in ways that many scientists are perhaps more hesitant to do; you’ve followed those diverse paths and you’ve launched a lot of ideas.
What ideas that you’ve shared with the scientific community do you feel have really made the least amount of progress since the time that you shared them?
WILSON: The relation between genetic evolution and biological evolution. In the early ’90s, I published two books on what I thought was one of the great remaining problems of science. And that’s the relation of cultural evolution and biological evolution.
We know enough now to be certain that cultural evolution is very much influenced by our biological human nature. And we know for virtually certain what makes the human brain so distinctive: being programmed with great abilities and properties of human nature that we all share. A lot of those biological properties must have evolved in a pretty advanced cultural environment.
So how exactly are they linked together? I’ve taken a shot at it and several others have taken a shot at it. But it kind of just died away. And I don’t understand this.
If I were a young social scientist, just getting his degree, and I really wanted to do groundbreaking research, I think it would be a roll of the dice to do it. You might have to have a tolerant dean of the faculty. You might have to have somebody willing to give you a grant for five years instead of three. I’d go there.
I like to tell graduate students at Harvard that it’s the reverse of the military here. You know, in the military, if you’re lost and you want to know where to go, they say ride to the sound of the guns. I say ride away from the sound of the guns. You’re likely to come into a wonderful new area, if you’re willing to do that.
NOVACEK: How about some other fields you’re very familiar with, like taxonomy. Is there such a thing as modern taxonomy? What are the tools of modern taxonomy?
WILSON: We badly need to revive that subject. And that is the exploration, discovery and the classification of life on Earth. What could be simpler?
However, we tend to get diverted too easily, those who are coming into the field now. There are certain essential tools we can use, but I think they may be overemphasized a bit. One of them is bar coding. This is the use of specified sections of protein or DNA that, like a DNA fingerprint, will identify a species with certainty.
But what is left to do is to go out and find out what the species are. You’ve got to collect them and bring them into the museum. You have to diagnose them. You have to do the proper nomenclatural work in order to get them pinpointed, placed in the right higher group; to make them accessible.
Then begins the long process of biological studies on each one of them in turn. That may not seem very glamorous. But believe me, it is one of the great physical adventures left in science. To go and explore and re-explore the world.
It’s emblematic that we probably only know a fraction of what organisms are in Central Park, especially when you get down to the very small invertebrates and microorganisms.
And this is exciting work. I mean, not just Central Park, but the canopy of the Amazon Forest, the rivers of the Upper Congo, islands that have never been thoroughly explored—this awaits a new generation of young Theodore Roosevelts and explorers. But they will be armed with these new technologies.
NOVACEK: Yet biodiversity is vanishing before our eyes, as you’ve said, and many habitats are fragmented. And on top of that, with invasive species and pollution, not to mention climate change in combination, all of these bad things are happening mainly through human activities.
So we want to not only understand nature, but also protect it, manage it. But things look pretty bad, from what you and other scientists have described. All over the Web today is a speech by Stephen Hawking, where he basically says we’ve got to get off this planet and go somewhere else.
What do you think about that as a solution?
WILSON: He wasn’t serious, was he? I think he was joking.
Do you know how much it would cost us to get off this planet, to move 6 1/2 billion people? By the time we get a Hawking space vehicle set up and ready to blast off, it will be 9 billion. And where are we going to go? You want a terra form that is changed into Earthlike conditions? The dry, desert dust of Mars? Do you want to go to the dimly sunlit ice shield of Europa or Callisto or the fiery volcanic rim of Enceladus?
NOVACEK: I just want to go to Hawaii.
WILSON: It’s so much easier just to settle down before we wreck the planet. You know, it’s so much easier to set up reserves, to take the money that’s needed—and it’s not a lot—to build the economic welfare of the people who live around these reserves and save this planet. It’s much, much cheaper.
NOVACEK: But what about the time frame for this. I mean, after all, as you’ve written and many others have, we’re on a fairly short time frame for this current extinction event, aren’t we?
WILSON: We are. We’re losing species fast right now. And I think we must appreciate that every species is a masterpiece of evolution, every species is roughly 10,000 to 10 million years old, with an average longevity of one million years. And we’re wiping them out, even though they’re magnificently adapted to a particular environment and they’re interlocked together in the ecosystems, and so on. We’re just eliminating them before we even know, in most cases, what they were.
We’ve got to get moving. We can do it. There are ways, and it will take the major global and national research organizations and some government agencies. But the point of the spear is the private conservation organizations. I’ll name them. I can do that, I think, without invidious exclusion. I’ll start right here with the World Wildlife Conservation Society. I’ll move to the World Wildlife Fund and to the International Worldwide Fund for Nature and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, headquartered in Europe. And then on to the magnificent Nature Conservancy and the organization, to put my card on the table, of which I’m a board member, Conservation International.
They know now through research that is constantly being refined where the hot spots are—that is, the parts of the world that most need protection right now—and how to protect them and how much it’s going to cost.
Do you know how much it would cost to save all of the 34 leading hot spots, where you can find roughly 40 percent of the known species of plants and animals of the world? If you added to those 34 hot spots the three remaining tropical wilderness areas—the Amazon, Congo and New Guinea—you cover as many as 70 percent of the known species of plants and animals. According to an estimate made five years ago under the auspices of Conservation International, saving it would cost $28 billion. That’s 1/1000 of the World Domestic Product.
And why haven’t we? Why aren’t we doing it? We just haven’t gotten into gear yet and we haven’t really made this commitment on a global scale, much less a national one.
NOVACEK: It’s troubling, the “why not.” I mean, as you once wrote, humans have a fondness for nature. Everybody expresses a fondness for nature. Yet collectively, at the government level, we tend to exploit it and abuse it. To quote one of your provocative titles, are humans suicidal?
WILSON: We sure are capable of messing up our home. And we’re going to move towards a pauperized planet, a lot less pleasant, interesting and secure planet, by wiping out so much of the rest of life. I’m sorry to sound so gloomy, but that’s where we’re headed.
But I think we can take care of 9 billion people. The United Nations estimates that the population is headed from the present 6 1/2 billion to 9 billion, a 40-percent increase, in the next 50 years or so.
For most of the industrialized countries, the fertility rate of women is dropping below the break point of 2.1. So the population will peak at maybe 9 billion, at maximum (we hope) 10 billion. We can handle that; we can feed that many. If we can bring peace to the world, we will be able to do it. We can also save the vast majority of species and ecosystems remaining if we get in gear right now.
NOVACEK: So you have a rather optimistic spirit, despite all of these big problems?
WILSON: Yes. I like to quote Abba Eban, former Prime Minister of Israel, who in the midst of the madness of the 1967 war said, “When all else fails, men turn to reason.”
And I think that probably in this area we just might. You know, there is such a thing as a tipping point. We just might turn to reason.
