On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson (1978), Ch. 1: Dilemma

This illuminating volume is the third is a loose trilogy by naturalist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson. The first work was a study of the social nature of ants; the second, a proposition to establish sociobiology as a field of study (and detailing the sociology of many animal species); and finally, this volume looks at human nature in the sociobiological perspective.

In short, this perspective views all living creatures as products of evolution, and hence of all of their past environments. Every trait they embody is either something with a distinct evolutionary function or is an outgrowth of something that once had such a function.

Here I present [dum-dum-dum] summaries, re-formulations, and responses to this work, starting oddly enough with Chapter 1: Dilemma.

Wilson begins by observing that if humans evolved through natural selection, then we have two great spiritual dilemmas: 

1. We have no purpose beyond the imperatives created by our genetic history. There is no goal outside of our biological nature.

Expanding on this, he writes "It could be that in the next hundred years humankind will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and material crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. The world can at least hope for a stable ecosystem and a well-nourished population. But what then? Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized?"

One of the ramifications of this is that, if this were widely known, certain societies which organize themselves around transcendental goals (such as propagation of a master race, religious reasons, etc.) would dissolve.

On a related note, Wilson notes the inescapable nature of our biology: "The reflective person knows that his life is in some incomprehensible manner guided through a biological ontogeny, a more or less fixed order of life stages. He senses that with all the drive, wit, love, pride, anger, hope and anxiety that characterize the species he will in the end be sure only of helping to perpetuate the same cycle."

2. Innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. [...] Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated?"

In other words, how should we apply our capacity for judgment to guiding our behavior?

On another note, Wilson makes the interesting point that fields of study concerned with a adjacent levels of organization often influence each other in fundamental ways - usually with the lower (more detailed / smaller focus) discipline reformulating the higher. For example quantum physics informed nuclear physics which informed chemistry, molecular biology, cytology, physiology, medicine, and so on up the chain. An expert scientist must know about his field as well as each adjacent field. In the same way he predicts that evolutionary biology is now in a position to influence the social sciences.

(to be continued...)