The Meaning of Human Existence

by Edward O. Wilson

“acidic” or “fetid.” In contrast, the vast majority of other organisms, ranging in kind from bacteria to snakes and wolves, rely on odor and taste for their very existence. We depend on the sophistication of trained dogs to lead us through the olfactory world, tracking individual people, de...

Yet another part of the environment beyond the reach of humans is Earth’s magnetic field, used by some migratory birds to guide them during their long-distance journeys.

can predict conditions in both the infinitesimal and near-infinite by the unified theory of physics; and we can watch blood flow and nerve cells in the human brain light up during conscious thought. In time, likely no more than several decades, we will be able to explain the dark matter of the Universe, the origin of life on Earth, and the physical basis of human consciousness during changes of mood and thought. The invisible is seen, the vanishingly small weighed.

Our ancestral species, traced further and further back through a series of ever more primitive life-forms, are all lucky lottery winners that stumbled their way through the labyrinth of evolution.

The first Enlightenment was undertaken more than four centuries ago when science and the humanities both were elementary enough to make their symbiosis look feasible. It became possible with the opening of the global sea routes by Western Europe from the late fifteenth century onward. The circumnavigation of Africa and the discovery of the New World led to new, global trade routes and expanded military conquest. The new, global reach was a turning point in history that placed a premium on knowledge and invention. Now we are launched into a new cycle of exploration—infinitely richer, correspondingly more challenging, and not by coincidence increasingly humanitarian.

Keep in mind that nearly everything that can be called science is less than five centuries old. Because scientific knowledge has been more or less doubling according to discipline (such as physical chemistry and cell biology) every one or two decades for the past two centuries, it follows that what we know is by geological standards brand-new.

Technological applications are also in an early stage of evolution. Humanity entered our present global, hyperconnected technoscientific era only two decades ago—less than an eyeblink in the starry message of the cosmos.

By chance alone, and given the multibillion-year age of the galaxy, the aliens reached our present-day, still-infantile level millions of years ago. It could have...

What then can we teach our extraterrestrial visitors? Put another way, what could Einstein as a toddler have taught a professor of physics? Nothing at all. For the same reason our technology would be vastly inferior. If that were not so, we would be...

So what could the hypothetical aliens learn from us that has any value to them? The correc...

theoretical physics consists of a small number of laws and a g...

The same is true, a fortiori, of all ...

seven thousand languages currently spoken worldwide, 28 percent are used by fewer than a thousand people, and 473 are on the edge of extinction, spoken only by a handful of elderly people.

Cultural evolution is different because it is entirely a product of the human brain, an organ that evolved during prehuman and Paleolithic times through a very special form of natural selection called gene-culture coevolution (where genetic evolution and cultural evolution each affect the trajectory of the other).

banks of the frontal cortex, arose from the tenure of Homo habilis two million to three million years ago until the global spread of its descendant Homo sapiens sixty thousand years

requires intimate contact with people and knowledge of countless personal histories. It describes the way a thought is translated into a symbol or artifact. All this the humanities do. They are the natural history of culture, and our most private and precious heritage.

Scientific discovery and technological advance have a life cycle. In time, after reaching an immense size and unimaginable complexity, they will certainly slow and stabilize at a much lower level of growth. Within the span of my own career as a published scientist across half a century, the number of discoveries per researcher per year has declined dramatically. Teams have grown larger, with ten or more coauthors on technical papers now a commonplace. The technology required to make a scientific discovery in most disciplines has become much more complex and expensive, and the new technology and statistical analysis required for scientific research more advanced.

But—and this is the most important part—science and technology will also be the same everywhere, for every civilized culture, subculture, and person. Sweden, the United States, Bhutan, and Zimbabwe will share the same information. What will continue to evolve and diversify almost infinitely are the humanities.

most major technological advances are likely to occur in what is often denoted BNR: biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics. In pure science the secular grails now sought along the broad frontier include the deduction of how life originated

on Earth, along with the creation of artificial organisms, gene substitution and surgically precise modification of the genome, discovery of the physical nature of consciousness, and, not least, the construction of robots that can think faster and work more efficiently than humans in most blue-collar and white-collar labor. At the present time these envisioned advanc...

First on the agenda is the correction of the more than a thousand genes for which rare mutant alleles have been identified as the cause of hereditary diseases. The method of choice will be gene substitution, replacing the mutant allele with a normal one. Although still in the earliest, mostly untested stage, it promises eventually to replace amniocentesis, which allows first a readout of the embryonic chromosome structure and genetic code, then therapeutic abortion to avoid disability or death. Many people object to therapeutic abortions, but I doubt that many would object to gene substitution, which can be compared with replacement of a defective heart valve or diseased kidney. An even more advanced form of a volitional evolution, albeit indirect in ...

between populations is declining, genetic variation within populations is increasing, and, as an overall result, the genetic variation of the species as a whole is also increasing—the last dramatically so. These trends create a dilemma of volitional evolution likely to catch the attention of even the most myopic political think tanks in a few decades. Do we wish to guide the evolution of diversity in order to increase the frequency of desirable traits? Or increase it still more? Or finally—this will...

With more and more decision making and work done by robots, what will be left for humans to do? Do we really want to compete biologically with robot technology by using brain implants and genetically improved intelligence and social behavior? This choice would mean a sharp departure away from the human nature we have inherited, and a fundamental change in the human condition.

But let’s also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.

Few questions in biology are as important as the evolutionary origin of instinctive social behavior.

The most complex forms of social organization are made from high levels of cooperation. They are furthered with altruistic acts performed by at least some of the colony members.

The highest level of cooperation and altruism is that of eusociality, in which some colony members surrender part or all of their personal reproduction in order to increase reproduction by the “royal” caste specialized for that purpose.

For example, an unfavorable mutant gene in humans is that which prescribes cystic fibrosis.

prescribe adult lactose tolerance. After originating in dairying populations in Europe

A gene for a trait that affects a group member’s longevity and reproduction relative to other members in the same group is said to be subject to individual-level natural selection. A gene for a trait entailing cooperation and other forces of interaction with fellow group members may or may not be subject to individual-level selection. In either case it is also likely to affect longevity and reproduction of the group as a whole.

groups compete with other groups, in both conflict and their relative efficiency in resource extraction, their differing traits are subject to natural selection. In particular, the genes prescribing interactive (hence social) traits are subject to group-level selection.

Here is a simplified scenario of evolution according to the standard theory of natural selection. A successful thief furthers his own interests and those of his offspring, but his actions weaken the remainder of the group. Any genes prescribing his psychopathic behavior will increase within the group from one generation to the next—but, like a parasite causing a disease in an organism, his activity weakens the rest of the group—and eventually the thief himself. At the opposite extreme, a valiant warrior leads his group to victory, but in doing so is killed in battle, leaving...

The two levels of natural selection, individual and group, illustrated by these ext...

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

The theory of inclusive fitness, in opposition to the standard theory of natural selection, and with it the established principles of population genetics, treats the individual group member, not its individual genes, as the unit of selection. Social evolution arises from the sum of all the interactions of the individual with each of the other group members in turn, multiplied by the degree of hereditary kinship between each pair. All the effects of this multiplicity of interactions on the individual, both positive and negative, make up its inclusive

fit...

controversy between natural selection and inclusive fitness still flickers here and there, the assumptions of the theory of inclusive fitness have proved to be applicable only in a few extreme ...

The use of the individual or group as the unit of heredity, rather than the gene, is an even more fundamental error.

The life cycle of ants has always been a favorite of inclusive fitness theorists as offering proof of the role of kinship and the validity of inclusive fitness. Many ant species have the following life cycle: their colonies

continued, and because they favor sisters over brothers, they invest more in virgin queens than in males. The colony, with workers in control, accomplish this end by making the queens individually much larger in size. This process deduced with inclusive fitness theory is called indirect natural selection.

The assumption of inclusive fitness theory that workers control the colony’s allocation, a crucial point in this reasoning, is also wrong. Using the valve on her spermatheca, the bag-like organ in which the sperm are stored, the queen determines the sex of the offspring born. If a sperm is released to fertilize an egg in the queen’s ovary, a female is born. If no sperm is released, the egg is not fertilized, and from the unfertilized egg a male is born.

But (Haldane said) it does not also require altruism on the part of your genes, including those responsible for making you altruistic. The reason is the following. Because the man is your brother, half of his genes are identical to yours. So you jump in, save him, and sure enough, you drown. Now you’re gone, but half of your genes are saved. All your brother has to do in order to make up the loss in genes is to have two additional children. The genes are the unit of selection; the genes are what count in evolution by natural selection.

An extreme case would be Haldane’s heroism biased toward a brother. The result would be nepotism, resulting in a Darwinian advantage over others in the group. But where does that lead an evolving population? As the collateral-favoring genes spread, the group would change into an ensemble not of competing individuals and their offspring, but of an ensemble of parallel competing extended families. To achieve group-wide altruism, cooperation, and division of labor, in other words organized societies, requires a different level of natural selection. That level is group selection.

Richard Dawkins explained the idea to the general public in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene.

Why did an outwardly arcane topic of theoretical biology excite such fierce partisanship? Because the problem it addresses is of fundamental importance, and the stakes in trying to solve it had become exceptionally high. Furthermore, inclusive fitness was beginning to resemble a house of cards. To pull even one out risked collapsing the whole. Pulling cards, however, was worth the price to reputation. There existed in the air the promise of a paradigm shift, a rare event in evolutionary

joined two Harvard mathematicians and theoretical biologists, Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, for a top-to-bottom analysis of inclusive fitness. Nowak and Tarnita had independently discovered that the foundational assumptions of inclusive fitness theory were unsound, while I had demonstrated that the field data used to support the theory could be explained equally well, or better, with direct natural selection—as in the sex-allocation case of ants just described.

Yet no one since that time has refuted the mathematical analysis by Nowak and Tarnita, or my argument favoring the standard theory over inclusive fitness theory in the interpretation of field data.

The creation of groups from personal and intimate mutual knowledge was the unique achievement of humanity.