CONSILIENCE: THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE

By

Karl H. Puechl

October 4, 1998

This is a review of the latest book written by Edward O. Wilson who is an entomologist and the world's expert on ants. He is a Professor of Science at Harvard and is the Curator in Entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology also at Harvard.. He is the creator of the field of sociobiology and the author of its defining text, SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS which was voted by the International Animal Behavior Society as the most influential book of this century. Also, I really enjoyed his book: THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE. This might be the best book ever written on the subject of evolution. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he has since taught, and where he has received both its college-wide teaching awards. The complete title of the book I am going to review is: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

The following short excerpts tell why Wilson wrote the book and what the title means.

Most of the issues that vex humanity daily ---ethnic conflict, arms escalation, over-population, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most persistently before us --- cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need. Yet the vast majority of our political leaders are trained exclusively in the social sciences and humanities, and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences. The same is true of the public intellectuals, the columnists, the media interrogators, and the think-tank gurus. The best of their analyses are careful and responsible, and sometimes correct, but the substantive base of their wisdom is fragmented and lopsided.

Strong consilience holds that nature is organized by simple universal laws of physics to which all other laws and principles can eventually be reduced. The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics. In support of this idea is the conclusion of biologists that humanity is kin to all other life forms by common descent.

The cutting edge of the consilience endeavor is cognitive neuroscience, also more popularly known as the brain sciences, an alliance formed by neurobiologists, cogitive psychologists, and a new school of empirically minded philosophers sometimes referred to as neurophilosophers.

Now, after having given you some idea as to what this book is all about, I should say at the outset that, in my estimation, this is not the best book that Wilson has written, since it includes little that is new, but even so, it is well worth reading. Much of what he says is drawn upon work that is being carried out in San Diego, at UC San Diego and at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, as well as at other neurophysiological centers throughout the country. If, after this talk, you find yourself deeply interested in the subject matter, here are a few of the deeper books that are well-worth reading. There are books by the Churchlands, a husband/wife team at UC San Diego. Pat is a Professor of Neurophysiology and Paul is a Professor of Philosophy. Pat wrote: NEUROPHILOSOPHY: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and later with Terrence J. Sejnowski, a Professor of Biology at UC San Diego wrote: THE COMPUTATIONAL BRAIN. Paul wrote: MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind; and later wrote THE ENGINE OF REASON, THE SEAT OF THE SOUL. Another book that ties emotions into the physical behavior of the brain is DESCARTES ERROR or Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonia R. Demasio who is Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and is also adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. Still another book from a Professor at the Salk Institute is THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS or The Scientific Search for the Soul by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA molecule. Finally, by an author that I just love, are two books by Daniel C. Dennett who is theDistinguished Arts and Sciences Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University; these are entitled: CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED, and DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA: or Evolution and the Meanings of Life..

Now let me give a few more generalized quotations from the book that I'm reviewing.

People expect from the social sciences --- anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science ---the knowledge to understand their lives and control their future. They want the power to predict, not the preordained unfolding of events, which does not exist, but what will happen if society selects one course of action over another.

Political life and the economy are already pivoted upon the presumed existence of such a predictive capacity. The social sciences are striving to achieve it, and to do so largely without linkage to the natural sciences. How well are they doing on their own? Not very well, considering their track record in comparison with the resources placed at their command.

Epigenesis, originally a biological concept, means the development of an organism under the joint influence of heredity and environment. Epigenetic rules, to summarize very briefly, are innate operations in the sensory system and brain. They are rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment.

Belief in the intrinsic unity of knowledge --- the reality of the labyrinth --- rides ultimately on the hypothesis that every mental process has a physical grounding and is consistent with the natural sciences. The mind is supremely important to the consilience program for a reason both elementary and disturbingly profound. Everything that we know and can ever know about existence is created there.

People are innate romantics, they desperately need myth and dogma, and scientists cannot explain why people have this need. The alignment of outer existence with its inner representation has been distorted by the idiosyncrasies of human evolution. That is, natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment. The effort to do so has only begun.

For the remainder of this presentation, I have to apologize that I didn't have time to make any sort of condensation. Whenever I read a book of this nature, I note passages that I would like to remember, or have ready reference to, and I then type these into the computer, which usually takes as long as it took for me to read the book. To make my life simple, for the remaiinder of this presentation I'll simply read some of these passages; condensing them further from what I have in the computer; i.e., leaving only the "gems". Also I'll note the chapters and their titles to show more clearly their broader content.

Now from Chapter 3. The Enlightenment. This is a good development of philosophy from the Enlightenment on through postmodernism. Wilson specifically lists the Enlightment philosophers: Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, and Newton in England; Galileo in Italy; de Condorcet, Descartes and the eighteenth-century philosophes around Voltaire in France; Kant and Leibniz in Germany; and Grotius in Holland.

Bacon believed that nature and her secrets must be as stimulating to the imagination as are poetry and fables. Wilson adds; "People, after all, are just extremely complicated machines. Why shouldn't their behavior and social institutions conform to certain still-undefined natural laws? The physicists succeeded magnificantly, but in so doing they revealed the limitations of intuition unaided by mathematics; an understanding of nature, they discovered comes very hard. Theoretical physics and molecular biology are acquired tastes. The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its way of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution."

The great branches of learning emerged in their present form --- natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities --- out of the unified Enlightenment vision generated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment, defiantly secular in orientation while indebted to theology, had brought the Western mind to the threshold of a new freedom. It waved aside everything, every form of religious and civil authority, every imaginable fear, to give precedence to the ethic of free inquiry. It pictured a universe in which humanity plays the role of perpetual adventurer.

The faculties of higher education around the world are a congeries of experts. To be an original scholar is to be a highly specialized world authority in a polyglot Calcutta of similarly focused world authorites. In 1797, when Jefferson took the president's chair at the American Philosophical society, all American scientists of professional caliber and their colleagues in the humanities could be seated comfortably in the lecture room of Philosophical Hall. Most could discourse reasonably well on the entire world of learning, which was still small enough to be seen whole. Their successors today, including 450,000 holders of the doctorate in science and engineering alone, would overcrowd Philadelphia. Professional scholars in general have little choice but to dice up research expertise and research agendas among themselves. To be a successful scholar means spending a career on membrane biophysics, the Romantic poets, early American history, or some other such constricted area of formal study. The same professional atomization afflicts the social sciences and humanities.

All movements tend to extremes, which is approximately where we are today. The exuberant self-realization that ran from romanticism to modernism has given rise now to philosophical postmodernism (often called post-structuralism, especially in its more political and sociological expressions). Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers believed we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.

Psychology, if not allowed to be contaminated with too much biology, can accommodate endless numbers of theoreticians in the future. Consider this rule ot thumb: To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

Chapter 4. The Natural Sciences. Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. Science, to put its warrant as concisely as possible, is the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles. The diagnostic features of science that distinguish it from pseudoscience are: repeatibility, economy, mensuration, heuristics, (the best science stimulates further discovery, often in unpredictable new directions; and the new knowledge provides an additional test of the original principles that led to its discovery) and consilience (the explanations of different phenomena most likely to survive are those that can be connected and proved consistent with one another). Complexity is what interest scientists in the end, not simplicity. Reductionism is the way to understand it. The love of complexity without reductionsim makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Natural selection, in short, does not anticipate future needs. But this principle, while explaining so much so well, presents a difficulty. If the principle is universally true, how did natural selection prepare the mind for civilization before civilization existed? That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

You have to be a bit compulsive to be a productive scientist. The work is also hard and for long intervals frustrating. Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong. Most flashes of insight lead nowhere; statistically, they have a half-life of hours and maybe days. Most experiments to follow up the surviving insights are tedious and consume large amounts of time, only to yield negative or (worse!) ambiguous results. Over the years I have been presumptuous enough to counsel new Ph.D.'s in biology as follows: If you choose an academic career you will need forty hours a week to perform teaching and administrative duties, another twenty hours on top of that to conduct respectable research, and still another twenty hours to accomplish really important research. This formula is not boot-camp rhetoric. More than half the Ph.D.'s in science are still born, dropping out of original research after at most one or two publications. Percy Bridgman, the founder of high-pressure physics---no pun intended---put the guideline another way: "the scientific method is doing your damnedest, no holds barred." Make an important discovery, and you are a successful scientist in the true, elitist sense in a profession where elitism is practiced without shame. You go into the textbooks. Nothing can take that away; you may rest on your laurels for the rest of you life. But of course you won't; almost no one driven enough to make an important discovery ever rests. And any discovery at all is thrilling. There is no feeling more pleasant, no drug more addictive, than setting foot on virgin soil. Fail to discover, and you are little or nothing in the culture of science, no matter how much you learn and write about science. Scholars in the humanities also make discoveries, of course, but their most original and valuable scholarship is usually the interpretation and explanation of already existing knowledge. A fundamental distinction thus exists in the natural sciences between process and product. The difference explains why so many accomplished scientists are narrow, foolish people, and why so many wise scholars in the field are considered weak scientists. In religious belief, individual scientists vary from born-again Christians, admittedly rare, to hard-core atheists, very common. Few are philosophers. The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper, and I suppose that if gifted with a full quiver, he also writes like a journalist.

The level of creativity in science, as in art, depends as much on self-image as on talent. To be highly successful the scientist must be confident enough to steer for blue water, abandoning sight of land for a while. He values risk for its own sake. He keeps in mind that the footnotes of forgotten treatises are strewn with the names of the gifted but timid.

On September 3-9, 1939, many of the scholars sympathetic to logical positivism met at Harvard University to attend the fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science. It was a scintillating assemblage of names now enshrined in the history of ideas: Rudolf Carnap, Phillip Frank, Susane Langer, Richard von Mises, Ernest Nagel, Otto Neurath, Talcott Parsons, Willard van Quine, and George Sarton. The scholars persisted, however, in exploring the idea that rationally acquired knowledge is the best hope of humanity.

Chapter 5. Ariadne's Thread. The machine the biologists have opened up is a creation of riveting beauty. At its heart are the nucleic acid codes, which in a typical vertebrate animal may comprise about 50,000 to 100,000 genes. Each gene is a string of 2,000 to 3,000 base pairs (genetic letters). Among the base pairs composing active genes, each triplet (set of three) translates into an amino acid. The final molecular products of the genes, as transcribed outward through the cell by scores of perfectly orchestrated chemical reactions, are sequences of amino acids folded into giant protein molecules. There are about 100,000 kinds of protein in a vertebrate animal. Where the nucleic acids are the codes, the proteins are the substance of life, making up half the animal's dry weight. They give form to the body, hold it together by collagen sinews, move it be muscle, catalyze all its animating chemical reactions, transport oxygen to all its parts, arm the immune system, and carry the signals by which the brain scans the environment and mediates behavior.

The role a protein molecule plays is determined not just by its primary structure, not just by the sequence of amino acids within it, but also by its shape. The amino acid string of each kind is folded upon itself in a precise manner, coiled about like twine and crumpled together like a piece of wadded paper. The total molecule bears resemblance to forms as variable as clouds in the sky. Looking at these forms, we readily imagine lumpy spheres, donuts, dumbbells, rams' heads, angels with wings spread, and corkscrews.

The resulting contours of the surface are particularly critical for the function of enzymes, the proteins that catalyze the body's chemistry. Somewhere on the surface is the active site, a pocket or groove consisting of a few of the amino acids, held in place by the architecture of the remaining amino acids. Only substrate molecules of a very specific form can fit the active site and submit to catalysis. As soon as one docks in the correct alignments, its active site alters shape slightly. The two molecules bind more closely, like hands clasped in greeting. Within an instant the substrate molecule is changed chemically and released. In the embrace of the enzyme sucrase, for example, sucrose is cleaved into fructose and glucose. Just as swiftly the active site of the enzyme molecule returns to its original shape, with its chemical structure unchanged. The productivity of most types of enzyme molecules, snapping in and out of the active state, is prodigious. A single one can process a thousand substrate molecules every second.

Scientists are acquiring the computational capacity needed to simulate these and even more complex processes. In 1995 an American team using two linked Intel paragon computers set a world speed record of 281 billion calculations per second. The U.S. federal high-performance program has upped the goal to a trillion calculations per second by the end of the century. By the year 2020, petacrunchers, capable of reaaaching a thousan trillion calculations per second, may be possible, although new technologies and programming methods will be needed to reach that level. At that point brute-force simulation of cell mechanics, racking every active molecule and its web of interactions, should be attainable --- even without the simplifying principles envisioned in complexity theory.

Chapter 6. The Mind. Logic launched from introspection alone lacks thrust, can travel only so far, and usually heads in the wrong direction. Much of the history of modern philosophy, from Descartes and Kant forward, consists of failed models of the brain. The shortcoming is not the fault of the philosophers, who have doggedly pushed their methods to the limit, but a straightforward consequence of the biological evolution of the brain. All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental process in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.

That is why even today people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds --- and why the fundamental explanation of mind is an empirical rather than a philosophical or religious quest. It requires a journey into the brain's interior darkness with preconceptions left behind. The ships that brought us here are to be left scuttled and burning at the shore.

The BRAIN is a helmet-shaped mass of gray and white tissue about the size of a grapefruit, one to two quarts in volume, and on average weighing three pounds (Einstein's brain, for example, was 2.75 pounds. Its surface is wrinkled like that of a cleaning sponge, and its consistency is custardlike, firm enough to keep from puddling on the floor of the brain case, soft enough to be scooped out with a spoon.

The brain's true meaning is hidden in its microscopic detail. Its fluffly mass is an intricately wired system of about a hundred billion nerve cells, each a few millionths of a meter wide and connected to other nerve cells by hundreds or thousands of endings. If we could shrink ourselves to the size of a bacterium and explore the brain's interior on foot, as philosophers since Leibniz in 1713 have imagined doing, we might eventually succeed in mapping all the nerve cells and tracking all the electrical circuits. But we could never thereby understand the whole. Far more information is needed. We need to know what the electric patterns mean, as well as how the circuits were put together and, most puzzling of all, for what purpose.

What we know of the heredity and development of the brain shows them to be almost unimaginably complicated. The human genome database accumulated to 1995 reveals that the brain's structure is prescribed by at least 3,195 distinctive genes, 50 percent more than for any other organ or tissue (the total number of genes in the entire human genome is estimated to be 50,000 to 100,000). The molecular processes that guide the growth of neurons to their assigned places have only begun to be deciphered. Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe --- known, that is, to itself.

It rose by evolution to its present form swiftly, even by the standards of the generally hurried pace of mammalian phylogeny evident in the fossil record. Across three million years, from the ancestral man-apes of Africa to the earliest anatomically modern Homo Sapiens, who lived about 200,000 years ago, the brain increased in volume four times over, Much of the growth occurred in the neocortex, the seat of the higher functions of mind, including, especially, language and its symbol-based product, culture.

The result was the capacity to take possession of the planet. Advanced humans, their big spherical skulls teetering precariously on fragile stems of compacted cervical vertebrae, walked, paddled, and sailed out of Africa through Europe and Asia and thence to all the remaining contenents and great archipelagoes except uninhabitable Antarctica. By 1000 A.D. they reached the outermost islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Only a handful of remote mid-Atlantic islands, including St. Helena and the Azore, remained pristine for a few centuries longer.

It is, I must acknowledge, unfashionable in academic circles nowadays to speak of evolutionary progress. All the more reason to do so. In fact, the dilemma that has consumed so much ink can be evaporated with simple semantic distinction. If we mean by progress the advance toward a preset goal, such as that composed by intention in the human mind, then evolution by natural selection, which has no preset goals, is not progress. But if we mean the production through time of increasingly complex and controlling organisms and societies, in at least some lines of descent, with regression always a possibility, then evolutionary progress is an obvious reality. In this second sense, the human attainment of high intelligence and culture ranks as the last of the four great steps in the overall history of life. They followed one upon the other a roughtly one-billion-year intervals. The first was the beginning of life itself, in the form of simple bacteriumlike organisms. Then came the origin of the complex eukaryotic cell through the assembly of the nucleus and other membrane-enclose organelles into a tightly organzied unit. With the eukaryotic building block available, the next advance was the origin of large, multicellular animals such as crustaceans and mollusks, whose movements were guided by sense organs and central nervous systems. Finally, to the grief of most preexisting life forms, came humanity.

Virtually all contemporay scientists and philosophers expert on the subject agree that the mind, which comprises consciousness and rational process, is the brain at work, They have rejected the mind-brain dualism of Rene Descartes, who in Meditationes (1621) concluded that "by the divine power the mind can exist without the body, and the body without the mind."

As late as 1970 most scientists thought the concept of mind a topic best left to philosophers. Now the issue has been joined where it belongs, at the juncture of biology and psychology. With the aid of powerful new techniques, researchers have shifted the frame of discourse to a new way of thinking, expressed in the language of nerve cells, neurotransmitters, hormone surges, and recurrent neural networks.

The activity of the brain as a whole, hence the wakefulness and moods experienced by the conscious mind, is profoundly affected by the levels of the neurotransmitters that wash its trillions of synapses. Among the most important of the neurotransmitters are acetylcholine and the amines norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. Others include the amino acid GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid) and, surprisingly, the elementary gas nitrous oxide, Some neurotransmitters excite the neurons they contact, while others inhibit them, Still others can exert either effect depending on the location of the circuit within the nervous system.

Chapter 7. From Genes To Culture. The nature of the genetic leash and the role of culture can now be better understood, as follows. Certain cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms, causing culture to evolve in a track parallel to and usually much faster than genetic evolution. The quicker the pace of cultural evolution, the looser the connection between genes and culture, although the connection is never completely broken. Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations invented and transmitted without correspondingly precise genetic prescription. In this respect human beings differ fundamentally from all other animal species.

Chance mutations are the raw material of evolution. Environmental challenge, deciding which mutants and their combinations will survive, is the necessity that molds us further from this protean genetic clay. If given enough generations, mutations and recombination can generate a nearly infinite amount of hereditary variation among individuals in a population. Except for identical siblings the probability that any two human beings share identical genes, or have ever shared them throughout the history of the hominid line, is vanishingly small.

Paleontologists have steadily improving evidence of the evolution of artifacts, from the controlled use of fire 450,000 years ago, presumably by the ancestral species Homo erectus, to the construction of well-wrought tools by early Homo sapiens 250,000 years ago in Kenya, then elaborate spearheads and daggers 160,000 years later in the Congo, and finally elaborate painting and the accouterments of ritual 30,000 and 20,000 years ago in southern Europe.

This pace in evolution of artifactual culture is intriguing. We know that the modern Homo sapiens brain was anatomically fully formed by no later than 100,000 years before the present. From that time forward the material culture at first evolved slowly, later expanded, and then exploded. It passed from a handful of stone and bone tools at the beginning of the interval to agricultural fields and villages at the 90 percent mark, and then --- in a virtual eyeblink --- to prodigiously elaborate technologies (example, five million patents so far in the United States alone). In essense, cultural evolution has followed an exponential trajectory. It leaves us with a mystery: When did symbolic language arise, and exactly how did it ignite the exponentiation of cultural evolution?

Chapter 8. The Fitness Of Human Nature. What is truly unique about human evolution, as opposed say to chimpanzee or wolf evolution, is that a large part of the environment shaping it has been cultural. Therefore, construction of a special environment is what culture does to the behavioral genes. Members of past generations who used their culture to best advantage, like forages gleaning food from a surrounding forest, enjoyed the greatest Darwinian advantage. During prehistory their genes multiplied, changing brain circuitry and behavior traits bit by bit to construct human nature as it exist today. Historical accident played a role in the assembly, and there were many particular expressions of the epigenetic rule that proved self-destructive. But by and large, natural selection, sustained and averaged over long periods of time, was the driving force of human evolution. Human nature is adaptive, or at least was at the time of its genetic origin.

Gene-culture coevolution may seem to create a paradox: At the same time that culture arises from human action, human action arises from culture. The contradiction evaporates, however, if we compare the human condition with the simpler form of reciprocity between environment and behavior widespread in the animal kingdom. There is nothing contradictory in saying that culture arises from human action while human action arises from culture.

Chapter 9. The Social Sciences. Epigenic rules are rules of thumb that allows organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment. They predispose individuals to view the world in a particular innate way and automatically to make certain choices as opposed to others. With epigenetic rules, we see a rainbow in four basic colors and not in a continuum of light frequencies. We avoid mating with a sibling, speak in grammatically coherent sentences, smile at friends, and when alone fear strangers in first encounters. Typically, emotion-driven, epigenetic rules in all categories of behavior direct the individual toward those relatively quick and accurate responses most likely to ensure survival and reproduction. But they leave open the potential generation of an immense array of cultural vatriations and combinations. Sometimes, especially in complex societies, they no longer contribute to health and well-being. The behavior they direct can go awry and militate against the best interest of the individual and society.

Experience in behavior such as incest avoidance has shown that the hard instincts of animals are translatable into epigenetic rules of human behavior. The practical role of evolutionary theory is to point to the most likely location of the epigenetic rules.

The enterprise within the social sciences best poised to bridge the gap to the natural sciences, the one that most resembles them in style and self-confidence, is economics. But its similarity to "real" science is often superficial and has been puchased at a steep intellectual price. Economic models also fall short because they are hermetic --- that is, sealed off from the complexities of human behavior and the constraints imposed by the environment. As a result, economic theorists, despite the undoubted genius of many, have enjoyed few successes in predicting the economic future, and they have suffered many embarrassing failures.

Chapter 10. The Arts and Their Interpretation. If the arts are steered by inborn rules of mental development, they are end products not just of conventional history but also of genetic evolution. The question remains: Were the genetic guides mere byproducts --- epiphenomena --- of that evolution, or were they adaptations that directly improved survival and reproduction?

This is the picture of the origin of the arts that appears to be emerging. The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term social contracts. In combination they gave early Homo sapiens a decisive edge over all competing animal species, but they also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of the shocking recognition of the self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and of the chaos of the environment. These revelations, not disobedience to the gods, are what drove human-kind from paradise. Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile. Other animals are exquisitely adapted to just those parts of the environment on which their lives depend, and they pay little or no attention to the rest. When Homo-level intelligence was attained, it widened that advantage by processing information well beyond the releaser cues. It permitted flexibility of response and the creation of mental scenarios that reached to distant places and far into the future. The evolving brain, nevertheless could not convert to general intelligence alone; it could not turn into an all-purpose computer. So in the course of evolution the animal instincts of survival and reproduction were transformed into the epigenetic algorithms of human nature. It was necessary to keep in place these inborn programs for the rapid acquisition of language, sexual conduct, and other processes of mental development. Had the algorithms been erased, the species would have faced extinction. The reason is that the lifetime of an individual human being is not long enough to sort out experiences by means of generalized, unchanneled learning. Yet the algorithms were jerry-built: They worked adequately bult not superbly well. Because of the slowness of natural selection, which requires tens or hundreds of generations to substitute new genes for old, there was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence. Algorithms could be built, but they weren't numerous and precise enough to respond automatically and optimally to every possible event. The arts filled the gap. Early humans invented the arts in an attempt to express and control through magic the abundance of the environment, the power of solidarity, and other forces in their lives that mattered most to survival and reproduction.

Chapter 11. Ethics and Religion. There are generally two viewpoints relative to morality; either a code of ethics comes from the outside as advocated by the transcendentalists, or it comes from humanity itself as advocated by the empiricists. In simplest terms the option of ethical foundation is as follows: "I believe in the independence of moral values, whether from God or not, versus I believe that moral values come from humans alone; God is a separate issue. Moral reasoning, I believe, is at every level intrinsically consilient with the natural sciences.

The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured --- especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised. "Fear" as the Roman poet Lucretius said, "was the first thing on earth to make gods." Our conscious minds hunger for a permanent existence. If we cannot have everlasting life of the body, then absorption into some immortal whole will serve. Anything will serve, as long as it gives the individual meaning and somehow stretches into eternity that swift passage of the mind and spirit lamented by st. Augustine as the short day of time.

Religion is also empowered mightily by its principal ally, tribalism. The shamans and priests implore us, in somber cadence, Trust in the sacred rituals, become part of the immortal force, you are one of us. As your life unfolds, each step has mystic significance that we who love you will mark with a solemn rite of passage, the last to be performed when you enter that second world free of pain and fear.

If the religious mythos did not exist in a culture, it would be quickly invented, and in fact it has been everywhere, thousands of times through history. Such inevitability is the mark of instinctual behavior in any species.

My point is the following. Behavioral scientists from another planet would notice immediately the semiotic resemblance between animal submissive behavior on the one hand and human obeisance to religious and civil authority on the other. They would point out that the most elaborate rites of obeisance are directed at the gods, the hyperdominant if invisible members of the human group. And they would conclude, correctly, that in baseline social behavior, not just in anatomy, Homo sapiens has only recently diverged in evolution from a nonhuman primate stock. Countless studies of animal species, with instinctive behavior unobscured by cultural elaboration, have shown that membership in dominance orders pays off in survival and lifetime reproduction success. That is true not just for the dominant individuals, but for the subordinates as well. It would be surprising to find that modern humans had managed to erase the old mammalian genetic programs and devised other means of distributing power. All the evidence suggest that they have not. True to their primate heritage, people are easily seduced by confident, charismatic leaders, especially males. That predisposition is strongest in religious organizations. What all celebrants evidently feel (as I once felt to some degree as a reborn evangelical) is hard to put in words, but Willa Cather came as close as possible in a single sentence. "That is happiness," her fictional narrator says in My Antonia. "to be dissolved into something complete and great."

Chapter 12. To What End? If the natural sciences can be successfullly united with the social sciences and humanities, the liberal arts in higher education will be revitalized. Even the attempt to accomplish that much is a worthwhile goal. Profession-bent students should be helped to understand that in the twenty-first century the world will not be run by those who possess mere information alone. Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? the answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

And this much about wisdom: In the long haul, civilized nations have come to judge one culture against another by a moral sense of the needs and aspirations of humanity as a whole. In thus globalizing the tribe, they attempt to formulate humankind's noblest and most enduring goals. The most important questions in this endeavor for the liberal arts are the meaning and purpose of all our idiosyncratic frenetic activity; What are we, Where do we come from, How shall we decide where to go? Why the toil, yearning, honest aesthetics, exaltation, love, hate, deceit, brilliance, hubris, humility shame, and stupidity that collectively define our species? Theology, which long claimed the subject for itself, has done badly. Still encumbered by precepts based on Iron Age folk knowledge, it is unable to assimilate the great sweep of the real world now open for examination. Western philosophy offers no promising substitute. Its involuted exercises and professional timidity have left modern culture bankrupt of meaning. The future of the liberal arts lies, therefore, in addressing the fundamental questions of human existence head on, without embarrassment or fear, taking them from the top down in easily understood language, and progressively rearranging them into domains of inquiry that unite the best of science and the humanities at each level of organization in turn. That of course is a very difficult task.

The global population is precariously large, and will become much more so before peaking some time after 2050. Humanity overall is improving per capita production, health, and longevity. But it is doing so by eating up the planet's capital, including natural resources and biological diversity millions of years old. Homo sapiens is approaching the limit of its food and water supply. Unlike any species that lived before, it is also changing the world's atmosphere and climate, lowering and polluting water tables, shrinking forests, and spreading deserts. Most of the stress originates directly or indirectly from a handful of industrialized countries. Their proven formulas for prosperity are being eagerly adopted by the rest of the world. The emulation cannot be sustained, not with the same levels of consumption and waste. Even if the industrialization of developing countries is only partly successful, the environmental aftershock will dwarf the population explosion that preceded it.

Some will, of course, call this synopsis "environment alarmism". I earnestly wish that accusation were true. Unfortunately, it is the reality-grounded opinion of the overwhelming majority of statured scientists who study the environment. By statured scientists I mean those who collect and analyze the data, build the theoretical models, interpret the results, and publish articles vetted for professional journals by other experts, often including their rivals. I do not mean by statured scientists the many journalists, talk-show hosts, and think-tank polemicists who also address the environment, even though their opinions reach a vastly larger audience. This is not to devalue their professions, which have separate high standards, only to suggest that there are better-qualified sources to consult for factual information about the environment. Seen in this light, the environment is much less a controversial subject than suggested by routine coverage in the media.

How many people can the world support for an indefinite period? Experts do not agree, but a majority put the number variously between 4 and 16 billion. The true number will depend on the quality of life that future generations are willing to accept. If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.4 billion acres) would supply about 10 billion people. If humans utilized as food all the energy captured by plant photosynthesis, some 40 trillion watts, Earth could support about 16 billion people.From such a fragile world, almost all other life forms would have to be excluded. To raise the whole world to the U.S. level with existing technology woould require two more planet Earths.

Few people in industrialized countries are fully aware of how badly off the poor of the world really are. Roughly 1.3 billion people, more than a fifth of the world population, have cash incomes under one U.S. dollar a day. The next tier of 1.6 billion earn $1-3. Somewhat more than 1 billion live in what the UN classsifies as absolute poverty, uncertain of obtraining food from one day to the next.

Meanwhile, in accordance with the general principle of life that all large perturbations are bad, Earth's ability to support the voracious humnan biomass is becoming even dicier through the acceleration of climatic change. During the past 130 years the global average temperature has risen by one degree Celsius. Overall, the IPCC scientists have made the following asssessment. There will be an additional rise in the global average temperature of 1.0 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.