All Together Now

Alfred North Whitehead best acknowledged our great debt to the Age of Enlightenment: “A brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of the intellectual life during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own time is that they have been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century.” That gracious bow also stands as a brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of Edward O. Wilson’s new book, “Consilience” --the very title of which is meant to link together what you’ve learned from disparate fields.

Wilson is perhaps our foremost scientific naturalist, a stylist’s stylist whose achievements blanket the biological landscape, from ants to island biogeography to sociobiology. So when he announces, it’s time to reinvest in the Enlightenment bank and relaunch its “Icaran flight of the mind”--this time around by leveraging our newly won knowledge of molecular biology, genetics and evolution to leap from biology and how the brain works to the social sciences, arts and humanities, ethics and theology--then, to paraphrase the old E.F. Hutton financial ads, when E.O. Wilson speaks, people listen.

For Wilson, genes build brains, brains build behavior and behavior builds all the rest, from Newton’s laws of planetary motion to Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon.” Wilson argues that understanding human nature must be underpinned by understanding biology and, once that’s mastered, the move to culture comes naturally, a consilience engineered by natural science.

A noble enough endeavor, except it’s a cracker-barrel history of science. In Wilson’s eyes, apart from the scientists who stuck to their physics guns and “achieved an unbroken string of successes during the next three centuries,” it’s been mostly downhill since. “Then [the Enlightenment] failed. Astonishingly--it failed”--scotched partly at the hands of Romantics from the likes of Rousseau and Goethe (You can put to one side the rise of industrial capitalism or the Napoleonic wars). So curiously enough, when it comes to the Enlightenment, Wilson the rationalist comes across as a dyed-in-the-wool Romantic: There are either white hats like Condorcet and Newton or black hats like Rousseau, Goethe, Freud and on into the 20th century’s “mostly left-wing” sociologists, painters, architects and deconstructionists--in short, the usual suspects.

Wilson’s revivalist program starts out on the right track with his title. But his “one big tent” quickly shrinks to a narrow Procustean bed of reductionism: “The central idea of consilience is that all tangible phenomena . . . are reducible to the laws of physics,” so there can be “intrinsically only one class of explanation.” “Consilience’s” successive chapters boil down anything and everything into a physicist’s and biologist’s stew of molecules bumping up against one another--from a shaman’s dreams of snakes to our consciousness of pain to the interplay of genes and culture to the social sciences, arts, ethics and religion. Whatever’s gone wrong, Wilson claims, follows from society’s lack of attention to basic biology and physics, and we’ve got to re-inject these Enlightenment values into our culture.

For Wilson, the failure of logical positivism “was caused by ignorance of how the brain works. That in my opinion is the whole story.” Not quite. “Ignorance of the natural sciences by design was a strategy fashioned by founders, most notably . . . Sigmund Freud. They aimed to isolate their nascent discipline from the foundational sciences of biology and psychology.” Well, there’s certainly a lot to dis Freud about, but biological isolationism’s probably not it, as Wilson’s own colleague Frank Sulloway’s “Freud: Biologist of the Mind” argues convincingly.

Even so, Wilson remains adamant that an Enlightenment revival for the social sciences calls for still more biology. Here’s Wilson on modern medicine: “[M]edical scientists build upon a coherent foundation of molecular and cell biology.” And what do the medical sciences have that the social sciences don’t? Consilience. Sounds like the Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz”: “If I only had a brain.” Perhaps the days of rational medicine are fast approaching but, then again, perhaps not. Wilson must have stuck close to the doctors at Harvard and not have visited any managed care physicians lately.

And according to Wilson, gene-culture interaction is all “epigensis,” which “means the development of an organism under the joint influence of heredity and environment”--well, what else could it be? Wilson the sociobiologist sticks to his quarter-century crusade, proclaiming the human incest taboo “a straightforward sociobiological exercise,” a behavioral universal disgust bred in the genes. An exercise, yes; straightforward, no. If our genes order us so strongly to avoid incest, why do we need explicit incest taboos at all? Wilson does puzzle over that one. And “variation in virtually every aspect of human behavior is heritable to some degree, and thus in some manner influenced by differences in genes among people.”

But what does that mean? Here, Wilson oversimplifies, only to later dig into some of the complexities. Heritability doesn’t mean “genetically determined”--indeed, one of the problems is that it can mean the opposite, or it can suddenly change from “genetic” to “environmental”--which should give anyone pause. To adapt an example from the philosopher Ned Block, a decade ago the characteristic “wearing earrings” was nearly 100% genetically “determined,” when only women wore earrings, but today it’s almost entirely environmentally correlated; it’s a fad. You’d think one would be properly cautious about applying a concept so slippery that it can change in the twinkling of an eye. Wilson understands that the trek from genes to behavior is “tortuous”: “It does not all follow that the gene determines the organ or process affected. Typically, many genes contribute. How many?” Good question. But we really don’t know the answer. At least right now, it’s easier for molecular biologists to pick the easy-to-get-at low-hanging fruit where there seem to be only one or two genes involved, as in, say, the textbook example Wilson offers, phenylketonuria, an inability to digest the amino acid phenylalanine.

Take a look at a pack of sugar-free gum and read the fine print where it warns: “phenylketonurics: contains phenylalanine.” That’s because the sugar-free ingredients contain the amino acid potentially harmful to people who can’t digest it. One gene’s supposed to block the digestive pathway, so perhaps we’ll be able to fix this “simple” genetic disease; for now, some people have to read chewing gum labels more carefully than others.

But wait a minute. Just a few months ago, Charles Scriver at McGill University reported that this “trait” is determined by at least five different gene products; Wilson’s “One Gene-One Disease” view might, according to Anna DiRenzo, “reflect our limited knowledge.”

Wilson alludes to this “infancy” of human behavioral genetics but pulls his punches: For example, to properly carry out a genetic analysis of a hypothetical “incest taboo trait,” 100,000 people with trait variants would have to be studied--so far out of reach simply for reasons of cost, if nothing else. So the analysis has never been done; we simply don’t know.

Wilson on modern art and architecture fares no better than he does on genetics; he seems put out that Cubism abandoned perspective or that the Bauhaus architects wanted to rejigger the world. But the Cubists’ aim was also partly to record not just the outside world but the inner world of sight, mental representations. Picasso’s obliterating of perspective by juggling two eyes on the same side of Dora Maar’s left profile was not just convention-violating but reflected a far deeper direct perception of the inner mental world.

Such casual ruminations reflect a more fundamental flaw. Wilson pleads “guilty, guilty, guilty” to this charge of reductionism--to which one’s tempted to reply, if you’re going to commit a crime to repay the Enlightenment, you should at least rob a bank with some cash in its vaults. Reductionism has never succeeded, contrary to Wilson’s claim that Newton’s “triumph enshrined Cartesian reductionism.” Ironically, the real problem with science lies but two words away from Wilson’s title, in the subtitle--unity, not reductionism. It would indeed be enlightening to integrate all the ways of looking at the world, but reductionism isn’t the way to do it. Take Newton’s “triumph.” It didn’t “reduce” planetary motion to other more basic principles. Rather, it was more in the way of a complete reformulation of physics itself; Newton had to introduce the notion of an “occult force,” gravity, that could act at a distance without any physical contact, a notion completely contrary to the “mechanical philosophy” of the preceding centuries. But Newton didn’t throw out the motions of the stars; he changed the more fundamental underlying physics. And so it has gone for the next three centuries: Scientists couldn’t explain magnetism in terms of the known, so they introduced new concepts like electromagnetic fields and quantum physics to account for it.

In only a few cases in the history of science have we witnessed a true reduction, with a “lower-level” science driving the “higher.” One is the Watson-Crick extension of molecular biochemistry to decipher DNA, which went on to explain much of biology, and perhaps this is what lures an evolutionary biologist like Wilson to the reductionist recipe. So when Wilson writes, “And that started Enlightenment scholars thinking: Why not a Newtonian solution to the affairs of men?,” the simple answer is that sociology’s not reducible to social physics just as planetary motion is not reducible to its mechanical counterpart.

If we don’t understand the brain in terms of physics, then how should we proceed? Simply the way scientists like Newton and Maxwell and Einstein always have: expansionism. Introduce new concepts and revise the supposedly more fundamental “physics.” If mental states have to be introduced to account for consciousness, that’s no different from magnetism and just as real. There’s no reason to believe that the reductionist account is the true one. One’s reminded of philosopher Hilary Putnam’s old chestnut explaining why a square peg won’t fit into a round hole; one needn’t appeal to the laws of quantum physics. Sometimes, there are simply different ways of looking at the world.

And that brings us to the book’s final irony. Wilson’s writing is at its lyrical best on his home turf, not the red clay from his hometown, Birmingham, Ala., but the Earth itself. Some of the finest passages in “Consilience” resound with his early thrill in tracking down the chemical signals guiding ants or, as in his previous books, celebrating the Amazon rain forest. In the end, it’s the naturalist’s joy that courses through Wilson’s veins, all the way from tracking ants, to his path-breaking island biogeography (painstakingly counting every insect, bird and beast arriving at a previously depopulated island), to championing biodiversity, to his final lecture at Harvard last year. Surely there’s small shame and sufficient glory in all these earthly triumphs without the need to resort to premature philosophy.

And therein lies Wilson’s rub. He desperately seeks an almost Scientology-like One True Way (he movingly describes his early Baptist fervor and its evolutionary replacement). But such is not to be. The ultimate irony of Wilson’s “Consilience” is that in his naturalist’s embrace of life’s diversity, he should also follow a parallel embrace of explanatory diversity, that there cannot be “intrinsically only one kind of explanation.” Had Wilson only followed Voltaire’s advice and, like Candide, cultivated his own garden.