The Meaning of Human Existence

by Edward O. Wilson

By definition, the members of a eusocial group cooperatively rear the young across multiple generations. They also divide labor through the surrender by some members of at least part of their personal reproduction in a way that increases the “reproductive success” (lifetime reproduction) of other members.

Bear in mind that during organic evolution the unit of natural selection is not the individual organism or the group, as some popular writers have misconstrued it. It is the gene (more precisely the alleles, or multiple forms of the same gene). The target of natural selection is the trait prescribed by the gene.

A second diagnostic hereditary trait of human behavior is the overpowering instinctual urge to belong to groups in the first place, shared with most kinds of social animals. To be kept forcibly in solitude is to be kept in pain, and put on the road to madness.

Two forces impacting our behavioral urges

We’re addicted to anthropocentricity, bound to a bottomless fascination with ourselves and others of our kind. Even the best-educated live on an ad libitum diet of novels, movies, concerts, sports events, and gossip all designed to stir one or more of the relatively small range of emotions that diagnose Homo sapiens.

Their action is summarized in this maxim: selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members.

The winning combination was a randomly acquired mix of preadaptations, which include a life cycle spent entirely on the land, a large brain and the cranial capacity to evolve a still larger brain, free fingers supple enough to manipulate objects, and (this is the hardest part to understand) reliance on sight and sound for orientation instead of smell and taste.

Think of the kitchen ants not as pests or bugs, but as your personal guest superorganisms.

It is the inability to conceive of an all-knowing divinity who created a hundred billion galaxies, yet whose humanlike emotions include feelings of pleasure, love, generosity, vindictiveness, and a consistent and puzzling lack of concern for the horrific things Earth-dwellers endure under the deity’s rule.

The basic goal of activity mapping is to connect all of the processes of thought—rational and emotional, conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, held both still and moving through time—to a physical base. It won’t come easy. Bite into a lemon, fall into bed, recall a departed friend, watch the sun sink beyond the western sea. Each episode comprises mass neuronal activity so elaborate, so little of which as yet been seen, we cannot even conceive it, much less write it down as a repertory of firing cells.

Nervous system is like a superorganism (ants, eg)

We are addicted to tribal conflict, which is harmless and entertaining if sublimated into team sports, but deadly when expressed as real-world ethnic, religious, and ideological struggles.

When an individual is cooperative and altruistic, this reduces his advantage in competition to a comparable degree with other members but increases the survival and reproduction rate of the group as a whole. In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue.

Internal conflict is not a personal irregularity but a timeless human quality. No such conflict exists or can exist in an eagle, fox, or spider, for example, whose traits were born solely of individual selection, or a worker ant, whose social traits were shaped entirely by group selection.

The same practice might be adopted for dogmatic political ideologies, of which we have altogether too many around the world. The reasoning behind these secular religions is always the same, a proposition considered to be logically true followed by top-down explanation and a handpicked checklist of evidence asserted to be supportive. Zealots and dictators alike would feel their strength draining away if they were asked to explain their assumptions (“speak clearly, please”) and verify their core beliefs.

Original discoveries, having generated vast knowledge, will ease off and begin to decline in number. Within decades, knowledge within the technoscientific culture will of course be enormous compared to that of the present, but also the same everywhere in the world. What will continue to evolve and diversify indefinitely are the humanities. If our species can be said to have a soul, it lives in the humanities.