Wilson believes the greatest threat to human survival is the loss of biodiversity during this mass extinction that we have brought on the world through the destruction of natural habitats. In order to combat this threat, he elaborated on a conservation ethic (which he feels we are not yet ready for because it is not fully grounded in the natural sciences) and he gave some practical political solutions (including using technology to preserve endangered species and the setting aside of natural preserves). This time we will look at another angle: his epistemological solution. Epistemology is the study of theories of knowledge.
As the title of Wilson’s 1998 paper “Resuming the Enlightenment Quest,” suggests we should strive for a unity of knowledge. “Consilience… means the alignment (literally, the ‘jumping together’) of knowledge from different disciplines….the idea…is the mother’s milk of the natural sciences.” Consilient explanations work in the natural sciences and are assumed to be there even at the unknown frontiers of the hard sciences. But unfortunately, there is a problem outside the hard sciences. “Ever since the decline of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century – and, with it, confidence in the unity of knowledge – it has been customary to speak of these second and third great branches of learning [the social sciences and humanities] as intellectually independent. They are separated, conventional wisdom has it, by an epistemological discontinuity, in particular by possession of different categories of truth, autonomous ways of knowing, and languages largely untranslatable into those of the natural sciences.” There is hope to bridge this discontinuity with hard science thanks to the hard scientific study of the brain. Thanks to advances in cognitive neuroscience, human behavioural genetics, evolutionary biology, and environmental science this space of discontinuity has become a “broad and largely unexplored terrain…. a subject of extraordinary potential awaiting cooperative exploration from both sides [the hard and soft sciences]”
A central subject of study in the social sciences and humanities is the relationship of the nebulous concepts popularly called culture and human nature. Without a firm causal connection and falsifiable predictions all theories are just speculation. Therefore, to ground the social sciences and humanities on objective and indisputable facts means they (and by extension the concepts of culture and human nature) must be grounded in hard science. The central problem of the social sciences and of the humanities must be “the nature of gene-culture coevolution, and how has it affected the human condition today” in other words a theory of culture and human nature that is not grounded in genetics, epigenetics, and all the biological sciences is not really grounded in factual explanation. At best other theories are catalogs of observation with guess work as to their explanations. “Compelling evidence shows that all culture is learned. But its invention and transmission are biased by innate properties of the sensory system and the brain. These developmental biases, which we collectively call human nature, are themselves prescribed by genes that evolved or were sustained over hundreds of thousands of years in primarily cultural settings.” Genes and cultures are linked and have co-evolved. He does not say that genes determine culture – but genes make culture possible and limit culture within genetic boundaries of what is possible. Further culture is subject to natural selection therefore some aspects of every culture will be more or less fit for the culture’s continuation and for that culture’s reaction to shocks from other cultures and the natural environment.
Wilson recognizes that he has a starting dogma of faith. He is a materialist; that means that all phenomena have a material explanation. For example, what we call “mind” is really a shorthand term to cover what we observe but do not understand about the brain. Likewise, the supernatural does not exist but terms like it are commonly used to describe phenomena that we do not have a material explanation for yet. “Confidence in the unity of knowledge – universal consilience – rests ultimately on the hypothesis that all mental activity is material in nature and occurs in a manner consistent with the causal explanations of the natural sciences.” On this materialist foundation he builds his theory of knowledge and outlines the premises of future study in the unity of the natural and social sciences.
The first point to make in understanding human nature and culture is in the study of the brain and its development. “The brain…evolved as an instrument of survival. It did not evolve as a device to understand itself, much less the underlying principles of physics, chemistry, and biology. Under the circumstances of physical environment and culture prevailing from one generation to the next during the long haul of prehistory, natural selection built a brain that conferred the highest rates of survival and reproduction.”
Next Wilson considers how limited we are in our senses compared to other animals; we do not have the sensory apparatus to sense the world fully (even today with technology we still do not have the full capability to sense the whole of our natural environment). “Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only lunatics and a sprinkling of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. Inside our heads is a reconstruction of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of symbol based concepts” the deck is stacked against us understanding the natural world but the scientific method, the slow plodding process of observation, hypothesis generation and testing against reality, like evolutionary natural selection, can bring and build true knowledge.
In order to have an epistemology one needs to define one’s terms. Wilson then gives a natural scientific definition of many social science’s cultural and psychological terms in the hopes of grounding them. “[W]hat we call meaning is the linkage among the neural networks created by the spreading excitation that enlarges imagery and engages emotion.” “Emotion operates through physiological processes that select certain streams of information over others, shifting the body and mind to higher or lower degrees of activity, agitating the neural circuits that create scenarios, and selecting for ones that end in certain ways.” “The competitive selection among scenarios is what we call decision making.” “The self…is the necessary central player in the scenarios.” “The persistent form and intensity of emotion is called mood. The ability of the brain to generate novel scenarios and settle upon the most effective among them is called creativity. The persistent production of scenarios lacking reality and survival value is called insanity.” “Human nature is the ensemble of epigenetic rules of mental development, the hereditary regularities in the growth of individual minds and behavior.” [underlines mine]. For Wilson the virtue of these working definitions is that they are grounded in materialism (ie specific tissue can be identified) and they open huge vistas for further study.
Gene-culture coevolution is the fourth great idea of biology. The first was Darwin’s 1859 notion of evolution through natural selection, the second Gregor Mendel’s 1865 gene theory, the third is embryologist Conrad Waddingtondel’s 1942 epigenetic theory and the fourth is Charles Lumsden and E.O. Wilson's 1981 gen-culture coevolution theory published in their book “Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process,”
There is a poorly understood but still causal relationship starting with genes in the DNA and epigenetic factors that facilitate the expression or de-expression of genes that govern the possibilities of various cells. These cells make up every sensory organ and function in proscribed ways that gather information processed in a brain (that makes mostly unconscious pattern recognition) behavioural decisions which make up culture. Culture is also subject to natural selection and as such casts its influences down the causal chain to DNA. That is how genes and culture co-evolve. This “is not to claim that particular forms of culture are genetically determined. Certain cultural norms can survive and reproduce better than others…causing culture to evolve in a track parallel to and usually much faster than genetic evolution. The quicker the pace of cultural evolution, the weaker the connection between genes and culture although the connection is never completely broken.” Culture is an evolutionary trait that “allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment by finely tuned adaptations invented and transmitted without correspondingly precise, matching genetic prescription. In this respect, human beings differ fundamentally from all other animal species.” Culture makes humans the most adaptable species on the planet. A particular culture behaviour like a gene mutation can be good or bad; adaptive or maladaptive. “Particular cultures can also be maladaptive in the long term, causing the destruction of individuals and societies that contrived them.”
Universal consilience has begun. Wilson believes that it will be possible to scientifically explain the arts, aesthetics, creativity, ethics, and religion on a firm foundation of biology and the natural sciences and only in this way can we as a species come to understand our place in the universe and how to preserve our existence as we face the unprecedented challenge of a mass extinction.