E. O. Wilson
A number of years ago for a Christmas gift, I gave two of my young nieces E.O. Wilson's encyclopedic, The Ants. A few years ago, I was talking to the older of the two and she said, “That book was great. I was able to use it to write a lot of reports for school.” Today, she's literally a rocket scientist, so I guess that was a well given gift, a much harder task than one thinks.
Unfortunately, Wilson passed a couple days ago. He was one of those people everyone should know of, but no one does. Wilson was an important evolutionary biologist who few know of because few know anything about evolution. Nonetheless, we push our bio-technology head-on into the forces of natural selection, and amusingly enough, it is increasingly clear our technologists don't know much about evolution either.
Wilson studied ants, some of the most numerous animals on the planet. He was rightly fascinated with the social organization of ants, how ant order is distributedly organized, not centrally controlled. Tens of thousands of ants interact with each other in complex and at times disordered ways, none of which are centrally directed. Wilson's interest in ants helped him develop the idea of sociobiology, an understanding of the biological basis of the social behavior of animals, including humans. As all animals interact in some fashion, if only to reproduce, sociobiology is an important developing field of study, though much of it needs to be approached very cautiously. Many social characteristics ascribed to nature are only transferred human experience. Our vocabulary and definitions of such activity can prove confusing as much as clarifying, helping lead to no end of quackery. The understanding of nature's social interactions are rarely, if ever, independent of the influence of human culture itself.
No greater example of this is the claptrap of the “selfish” gene. Selfish is a human created cultural value, a value with no meaning beyond ourselves. A selfish gene would require genes with a choice to be altruistic. They have no choice. Genes simply do what genes do. Human cultural values are extremely problematic in providing insight outside human culture. Damn, they're confusing enough providing insight from within. However, a societal elite prizing selfism and avarice will be happy to promote those values as entrenched characteristics of our genetic code. The greedier the person the better their genes is I guess how it goes.
Unfortunately at times, sociobiology led Wilson through that great looking glass of evolutionary thought, the topsy turvy conception that genes, and not the greater environment, are the main force of natural selection. Darwin developed the idea of natural selection before genes were even discovered. Advocating genes as evolution's prime force turns the theory on its head. This gene-centric view of evolution is very much in the Western scientific tradition – understanding through reductionism and determinism – blame Descartes. Darwin's theory of natural selection is a radical addition, necessitating a whole system's view in order to truly understand the parts. Certainly genes, where information for replicating all life resides, are fundamental, but they are not the moving force of evolution, that belongs to the influences of the greater environment. A gene, an individual, a species are all understood only in context to the greater environment from which they evolved.
Diversity, Darwin noted, creates more robust and healthier environments. Wilson became a leading advocate for biodiversity, calling for the rescue of plant and animal species from the present homo sapiens induced global mass extinction episode. Wilson suggested we need to keep half the earth wild, that is, beyond our engineering, reversing a now well established ten-thousand year course.
Since the dawn of the Agrarian Era, humanity has altered and radically changed the environment from which we evolved. Our agrarian ways created vast environmental mono-cultures, increased exponentially in size over the last two centuries by industrial agriculture. In the summer, you can travel across the US Midwest through hundreds of miles of fields, all containing one or two species, corn or soy bean. These fields may be vibrantly verdant, but they ain't green.
As in all things industrial, these fields are fossil fuel dependent from the seeds to the plants' tops; the fertilizer, the sowing and reaping, and then their movement to markets across the planet. One key ingredient to producing these endless landscapes of plant mono-cultures are herbicides. Petrochemically derived, these herbicides kill-off all plants but the intended crop. Decades of herbicide use has led the forces of natural selection to create so called “superweeds,” plants no longer susceptible to herbicides.
A recent article gets to the root of the problem, including one of the most incredible statements I've ever seen. A bio-technologist working with herbicides states, “I’ve never been trained as an evolutionary biologist — you know, formally — but basically, what I feel like I try to do in my career is try to stop evolution. And it’s a pretty powerful force. It’s pretty hard to stop.”
Evolution is an unstoppable force, it created us. To stop evolution is to stop life. Yet, evolution remains little understood and/or deliberately misunderstood. The understanding of the science of evolution's influence on present culture, almost nonexistent. One thing for certain, distressingly exemplified by our experience with herbicides, natural selection cares nothing about our ignorance. This has not stopped us from rushing to build bio-technologies which even the technologists don't fully understand – not a strategy for success. We all need to understand a little about evolution. E. O. Wilson added to what we do understand. He can keep teaching even after death, that represents healthy human culture.