The Meaning of Human Existence

by Edward O. Wilson

The audiovisual signals of the living world excite our emotions and throughout history have often inspired great creative works, the best of music, dance, literature, and the visual arts. They are nevertheless of themselves all paltry compared to what goes on around us in the world of pheromones and allomones. To illustrate this humbling principle of biology, imagine that you had the power to see these chemicals as vividly as the rest of life all around you that smells them. You are thrust instantly into a world far more dense, complex, and fast-moving than the one you left behind or even imagined. This is the real world of Earth’s majority biosphere. Other organisms live in it, but until now you have only lived on the edge. Billowing clouds lift off the ground and vegetation. Odorant tendrils leak out from beneath your feet. Breezes pull all this up past the tops of the trees, where in the stronger winds the tendrils are quickly torn apart and dissipate. Below the ground, confined by litter and soil, wisps arise from rootlets and fungal hyphae, then seep through nearby crevices. The combinations of odors vary from site to site, separated at distances as short as a millimeter away. They form patterns and serve as guideposts—used by ants and other small invertebrates all the time but beyond your meager capacity as a human. In the midst of the background odor field, rare and unusual organic chemicals flow in ellipsoidal streams and expand in hemispherical bubbles. These are ...