Edward O Wilson is 78. But his face still lights up like a 12-year-old at the
joy of science - “This is science! This is how it is done!” - or at yet
another Darwinian controversy: “It’s got Richard Dawkins ballistic!”
He is the supreme scientific grandee, the “new Darwin” as Tom Wolfe called
him, the finest prose writer in science and, I would argue, one of the
greatest living thinkers. He flew from Boston to London this month to
receive yet another award - the Linnean Society’s tercentenary medal. The
Linneans were charmed out of their socks. One girl asked him to sign a book.
He did so, adding a little drawing of an ant. She swooned.
So let’s start with the ants. There are, give or take, 10,000 trillion ants in
the world. One ant weighs about one-millionth of one human. There are, give
or take, 6.6 billion humans in the world. The total weight of ants in the
world is therefore quite a lot more than the total weight of humans. This is
a source of immense satisfaction to Wilson. He is, apart from anything else,
the greatest living myrmecologist - ant expert - and it is to ants that he
has returned to announce the greatest revolution in Darwinian theory in 50
years.
“We are,” he says, beaming with excitement, “moving to a new paradigm.” It is
a paradigm of which Dawkins wants no part.
Ant colonies are “superorganisms” - this is the title of the book Wilson has
just finished - and they pose the most important question to Darwinians.
Ants live and die for the good of the colony, not themselves: they are
hyper-altruistic. But how can this be if evolution is a method of making the
individual fit for reproduction?
The first answer, proposed by the great British biologist William Hamilton and
popularised by Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, is “kin selection”.
Genes exist to replicate themselves. This is ideally done by ensuring that
the individual reproduces. But it might also be done by ensuring that
relatives of the individual reproduce because they share many of the same
genes. So altruism starts with family members. Altruism towards strangers,
meanwhile, is explained by game theory - computer models show that a
cautiously benign approach to strangers is the best evolutionary strategy.
Either way, Dawkins’s “selfish gene” is at the heart of the whole process.
Wilson, like everybody else, bought into this idea in the 1960s and 1970s. It
was the orthodoxy and the only other contender - group selection - was
rigorously suppressed. This was in fact an anti-Darwinian moment, since
Darwin himself had thought that selection must happen at the level of the
group.
“Kin selection was a very seductive idea,” Wilson explains, “and I promoted it
heavily in my books in the 1970s. Unfortunately it has produced a little
industry with its own mathematical models. It hasn’t produced much else and,
meanwhile, sociobiology has flourished.”
Sociobiology is the study of social behaviour in the light of Darwinian
theory. Wilson created the discipline in 1975. He suggested that it could be
applied to humans. The left hated this, calling him a racist, a sexist and a
fascist. In fact he is a sweet-natured Democrat. But the left wanted to
believe in the human mind as a “blank slate”; Wilson had shown this to be
profoundly illogical.
There is such a thing as human nature and we are to an important extent
preprogrammed. It is sociobiology - particularly the phenomenon of the
superorganism - that has led Wilson to reject kin selection. Group selection
is the new paradigm that has Dawkins ballistic.
Along with his collaborator David Sloan Wilson (no relation), Wilson wrote a
paper outlining his conversion. It was picked up by the New Scientist and in
the subsequent article by the two Wilsons they suggested that at some point
Dawkins had been forced to acknowledge an error in his interpretation of kin
selection. “We were trying to mollify him,” says Wilson with, I think, a
slight twinkle.
Incandescent and unmollified, Dawkins wrote to the magazine. He said the
statement was “not a semantic confusion; not an exaggeration of a half
truth; not a distortion of a quarter truth; but a total, unmitigated,
barefaced lie”. He also said it was safe to assume that the “wise and
sensible” Ed Wilson was innocent and this was all down to D S Wilson. Both
Wilsons responded by producing a quote from a Dawkins book which seemed to
show that, however barefaced and unmitigated it was, it wasn’t a lie.
“We are united in our view of group selection,” the Wilsons concluded, “which
we converged upon through separate lines of inquiry.” Group selection says
that evolution acts on many levels. Take the ants again. “They are
constantly at war,” says Wilson. “Give ants nuclear weapons and the world
would be destroyed in a week.”
Warring ants will be better off if the entire fitness of the colony can be
improved. If it is improved then the methods of that colony will be
successful in war and the genes that carried the improvement will be
disseminated to a wider ant population. Kin selection may play a part within
the colony. But group selection is the far more potent evolutionary force.
In his next book Wilson is to study the implications of this new paradigm
for humans. Knowing him, it may well turn out to be the first great
scientific statement of the 21st century.
“It will be a reexamination of the forces of social evolution - what kind of
changes are brought about by higher social organisation in insects and
humans. We’ve done the insects now and I’m going into the humans, consulting
and studying and building a new picture of the origins of social behaviour
in humans.” What has him really excited is that he doesn’t know what he'll
find. There are two possibilities - either human social behaviour evolves in
much the same way as insects or human culture “has entirely changed the way
evolution works”. Either way, the crucial point for Wilson is that group
selection may offer us a way out of our deepest problem.
“If inter-group conflict turns out to be a powerful force in human evolution,
as Darwin thought it was, then perhaps it would make it easier for the
leaders of people on the edge of violence to step back and say, ‘Let’s try
the other way, let’s try understanding why we feel this way’. We are
bedevilled as a species by hair-trigger aggressive tendencies.”
Something like that, I point out, happened in the Cuban missile crisis when
both sides were rational players. “Yes, it wouldn’t work for Hitler or
Islamic fundamentalists. There are cases where we have to realise that
there’s sickness in the world like cancer, that there has to be drastic
action. But we should know what is treatable and what is not.” Wilson is an
optimist. He agrees, for example, with the recent finding that human
evolution is continuing: “We’re not evolving progressively, getting smarter
or acquiring a new organ, what we are doing is homogenising the species.”
In a thousand years, he says, the people in Stockholm may look exactly like
the people in Lagos. But - and here his optimism kicks in - we will be a
species full of novel possibilities. Interbreeding between previously
separated populations will produce new gene combinations so, although we
will be more homogenised on average, we will also be more varied.
If, I say, we make it. “Right, if we make it. But we’re getting things figured
out. I’m optimistic.” He admits that we’re “in for a rough ride” on global
warming but we know how to fix it and eventually we will.
His primary concern is biodiversity and the way human activity is threatening
to cause the next big extinction of species, leaving humans in what he has
called the “Eremozoic”, the Age of Loneliness. His own contribution to this
was a typically fine gesture. He “offered the hand of friendship” to the
religious in America. He organised a retreat involving leading scientists
and representatives of 30m evangelical Christians. They signed a covenant
agreeing that the preservation of biodiversity was a moral and practical
good.
Wilson is no atheist; he says we simply do not know enough. And he has a real
feeling for religion that makes him impatient with the new wave of militant
atheists led by - once again - Dawkins.
“I call them the military wing of secularism. I’m the diplomatic wing. It’s a
curious phenomenon, another kind of human polarisation. They feel that
religion is an evil, a sickness, and they think all you have to do is keep
bombarding the religious and sending men over the top and eventually they’ll
fold. I think we have to find common ground.
“These are good, decent people, they’re intelligent. Humans have an innate
tendency to form religious belief. It has a lot of beneficial influences. It
helps people adjust to their mortality and it binds communities tightly
together . . . to have evolved such a powerful tendency and to hold it unto
death, that looks like a biological adaptation.”
It’s time to leave him to the Linneans. What can I say? Only this - ladies and
gentlemen, Ed Wilson, a credit to our species.
