Having extensively researched aspects of evolutionary theory, including the work of Edward O. Wilson, for my Durham master’s thesis, I chose to devote my first assessable essay for the MSt in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford (2016) to making an original contribution to understanding Wilson’s intellectual biography.

An important figure in evolutionary theory, Wilson was among the first to apply evolutionary theory to social and cultural contexts without degenerating into social Darwinism. People know him as the coiner of Biophilia. His impact on academia, however, is far greater than just that. Many of today’s first principles and evidence-based social-scientific disciplines (i.e., the ones that matter) owe their existence to his pioneering work.

Apart from his seminal importance, Wilson’s ethical, philosophical, and religious reflections on evolution resonated with me, much like E.M. Forster’s ideas about human nature and worldview. Consciously going against our evolutionary instinct toward tribalism and widening our moral circle is the way forward for humanity if we are to thrive collectively in this age of science and technology. Because of this belief, I deeply resonated with Effective Altruism, a movement I encountered at Cambridge which will be left for a future post.

To prepare for this essay, I re-read relevant books and articles from previous bibliographies and then began to read Wilson’s books and articles chronologically, from his 1971 article proposing to unify Socio-biology to his popular book The Meaning of Human Existence (2014). Because Wilson is a prolific writer, the preparation to write the essay required total focus for several months. By the end, I had become an expert in Wilson’s intellectual history. Likely no one, including Wilson himself, knew more about the evolution of his thought than me.

As part of the MSt programme requirements, we had to present our essays in a seminar format to all master’s students in our sub-discipline. As mentioned in the previous post, graduate students could sit in any undergraduate lecture. Graduate students in a faculty/department could also sit in any graduate seminar in that faculty.

A philosophy of religion graduate student enjoyed sitting in our science and religion seminars. Schooled in analytic philosophy, his verbal intelligence was first rate and he absolutely loved tearing apart the arguments from the S&R graduate students’ presentations: many graduate students, including myself, aren’t schooled in analytic philosophy (those not trained in analytic philosophy are seen as inferior beings ripe for devouring).

He was there, without fail, every week, chomping at the bit to argue, debate, and rip through the ‘façade’ of fallacious non-analytic thinking with his unparalleled acumen and iron-clad logic. It was clear that he took great pleasure in doing this. Our seminars may have been the highlight of his week. When it came to my presentation on this topic, however, he was conspicuously absent.

Reflecting on his absence afterwards, I realised that he probably didn’t show because he couldn’t cut his way through my thesis with abstracted logic (debating abstract logic alone is like trying to play sports on a frictionless plane: winning or losing becomes meaningless). My thesis was not about some abstract philosophical/apologetic idea about a contrived harmony or conflict between science and religion that could be dismissed with clever sophistry / arcane counter-arguments, it required a gargantuan accumulation of real-world knowledge to assess. The only way he could cut it down was to know more about Wilson than me, an impossible task because we share our topic and presentation notes with the group only a few days in advance.

This experience made me realise an important, albeit adjacent, notion that stuck with me since, and, having been working for a while now, rings truer than ever. If you have legitimate talents and skills in certain domains, work in an environment with reliable real-world metrics that can correctly judge said expertise/success so that you can be recognised as skilled, and people cannot take that away from you or pretend to be experts themselves.

With the right incentives (i.e., money, status, power, etc.), people are infinitely capable of various forms of pretence, deceiving others and often themselves about their abilities, with clever rhetoric for example. A competitive environment that offers no reliable and objective metric for expertise/success will push out true experts over time, leaving behind those who love to talk big but cannot deliver (or who resort to unethical means to appear as if they can, e.g., withholding information, backdoor deals, underhanded shortcuts, etc.).  

In the politics and finance, Nassim Taleb of Skin in the Game fame makes the extreme argument that decision-makers should be held responsible for the consequences of their pronouncements (i.e., have skin in the game). See this excerpt from The Guardian about Taleb’s thesis:

“If you have no skin in the game, you shouldn’t be in the game. ‘If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.’ Hawks in the White House should not be taking decisions about bombs in Iraq when they will remain in their air-conditioned houses with their 2.2 children whatever the result. Bankers are in the ‘Bob Rubin trade’, named after the former secretary of the US Treasury, who “collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any cheque – he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts ‘Black Swan’. There are fools of randomness and crooks of randomness, but Taleb’s corrective is the same: they must have skin in the game. This is needed to ensure they think well so that they learn from their mistakes, and because systems learn and species evolve by weeding out failure. Those who don’t succeed must face ruin or death; whatever, something bad. So far, so appealing: most sensible people have agreed for some time that bankers need personal liability if they’re going to make responsible choices.”   

Taleb’s suggestion is extreme and too infeasible to realise, but as a thought experiment, it agrees with any decent person’s intuition that people should be judged and commensurately rewarded (or punished) for their work’s real-world impact, rather than by their ability to speak convincingly, stroke the ideological fancies of the ‘right’ egos, or do mental gymnastics to explain away their apparent failure.     

TDLR, if you are genuinely good at what you do, and wish to be judged correctly, work in an environment that can measure the impact of your work objectively and reliably with systems that can easily identify and weed out fakers. Some things are harder to judge objectively (e.g., arts and humanities), so, where possible, try to get good at something that can be judged objectively, i.e., where success is falsifiable. So, when you achieve success, no one can take that away from you. Do not work in woo-woo environments that reward good talkers/people who can get away with pretending to be good at their core work (i.e., places with unsound appraisal structures, shifting goalposts, and weak/incompetent/unethical leadership), or where your success can be explained away somehow (i.e., too many confounding factors such that success cannot be attributed to you).

After my presentation, the course supervisors began to notice me. They acknowledged my existence more explicitly and were much friendlier. They probably thought I was a run-of-the-mill credential chaser before the presentation and Q&A. Here it is, I received a distinction for it. My supervisor Dr Donovan Schaefer was a great taskmaster. He critically and relentlessly interrogated every aspect of my thesis throughout its drafting process. The resultant quality was achieved, in no small part, because of his dedication. He told me that if the paper was spruced up further, it could be submitted for publication in a Science and Religion journal. I chose not to attempt to do so because of past onerous experiences with getting a peer-reviewed paper published (see previous post on ‘Lightness’) and the fact that I did not want to be an academic. Turning my passion for research and writing into a job would likely kill said passion.

A Critical Assessment of Edward Wilson’s Views on the Evolutionary Origins of Religion

Introduction:

Throughout his successful and prolific career as a myrmecologist and human socio-biologist, enabled in part by his rare ability to describe ideas and concepts in both the humanities and the natural sciences clearly, Edward O. Wilson has devoted a significant fraction of his popular and academic writing to the origin and value of religion. In a nutshell, he characterizes religion as having arisen from the moral inclination toward “tribalism” that evolved in humans. Wilson has routinely linked this understanding of the origin of religion to relevant developments in his scientific thought, from the end of the 1960s to today. They encompass sociobiology, which includes kin selection, population biology, and ethology; the epigenetic rules within his gene-culture co-evolutionary theory; and finally, group and multi-level selection. His views concerning the origin of religion have, by contrast, remained largely the same. This is best understood to be an outflow of his lifelong desire to promote the value of science in solving what he considers to be humanity’s most pertinent problems, which in his estimation are all too often justified by religious tenets: their evolved lack of empathy for groups beyond their kin and the long term consequences of their behaviour on the environment in a well-populated world. However, while he seeks to solve this problem with science, his solutions fluctuate between two opposed positions. In the first instance he proposes that the “evolutionary epic” completely replace the traditional “religious epic” (1978a: 192-201), and in the second, he proposes to seek common ground with religion to serve the common cause of humanity, which in Wilson’s moral vision, entails the enlargement of their cooperative potential with each other and the rest of the biosphere (2006: 165-168). His first position is well represented in his early and late works. At the same time, his second is largely characteristic of those in the middle, beginning with his Biophilia published in 1984 and ending in 2006 with The Creation.

One way to understand this may be to distinguish between two modes of thought and exposition in his work. The sociologist Ullica Segestrale has identified them as his “Ionian” and “Icarian” modes (Segerstrale 2006: 67). As their namesakes suggest, he writes with the careful respect for the epistemic limits of science in his “Ionian” mode and with a crusading idealism and willingness to speculate in his creative “Icarian” mode. His adoption of both positions, sometimes in jarring proximity, which has caused much controversy throughout his career, can itself be understood as motivated by his strong desire to promote a consilient worldview, wherein knowledge from seemingly incompatible sources synthesize for the benefit of humanity. This he concedes to be a metaphysical understanding of the world unprovable by science (1998a: 9). Given this understanding of the nature of his work, it may be easy to explain away his changing views on the value of religion as the product of his unpredictable shift in modes, culminating in his rejection of hopeful synthesis in his two recent books: The Social Conquest of Earth and The Meaning of Human Existence. One may therefore be tempted to believe that, given the latest state of his views concerning the negative value of religion in relation to his bio-centric vision, these encapsulate the most consistent trajectory of his scientific philosophy. This essay wishes to challenge this hypothesis, taking evidence from his views concerning the origin of religion and the malleability of human nature, the holistic philosophy behind his desire for consilience, his implicit, if unconscious, socialization into organicist philosophy at Harvard, and his personal history, in order to argue that his middle works, in which he expresses his most optimistic hopes for a synthesis between the evolutionary and religious epic, represent the more consistent trajectory of his thought.

Wilson’s Views on the Origin of Religion:

The seeds of Wilson’s sociobiological theory were planted when he encountered Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz’s work on chemical communication during their visit to Harvard University in 1953 (Wilson 1994: 285). Wilson began to explore this research direction with the help of William Bossert from 1961 and later Bert Hölldobler from 1969, discerning that ‘population biology, ethology, and evolutionary theory [which] form the content of the new discipline of sociobiology’ would be a promising fusion of methods for the study of social behaviour in insects and, by analogous comparison, vertebrates as well (Wilson 1994: 300). He also became interested in applying his insight to humans after attending the Man and Beast symposium in 1969 that dealt with the ‘potential contributions that biology could make to contemporary urban problems’ (Segerstrale 2006: 52-53). The word “sociobiology” can already be found in an article and book that was published in 1971, wherein he posits that ‘the same parameters and quantitative theory [can be] used to analyze both termite colonies and troops of rhesus macaques’ (1971a: 400; 1971b). It is in his publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975 that he first explicitly applies his sociobiological framework to both ants and other animals, including humans. Accordingly, Wilson speculated that there were certain universal behavioural dispositions in humans and argued that their hypothalamic-limbic complex would have evolved to promote ‘behavioral responses that bring into play an efficient mixture of personal survival, reproduction, and altruism’ (1975: 4). He devotes a section in his final chapter to an explanation of the origin of religion via its connection with the evolution of “tribalism”. He argues that ‘religion, like other human institutions, evolve to further the welfare of their practitioners’ (1975: 561). Consequently, absolute certainty of belief in dogma, which he argues to be ‘the heart of all religion’, is adaptive to the interests of the tribe (1975: 561).

At this point, having been converted to kin selection by reading William Hamilton’s paper in 1965 and adopting it in his Sociobiology, Wilson did not have a simple explanation for this “tribalism” that an appeal to group selection could offer if it had not also been rejected at the middle of the twentieth century along with other theories such as orthogenesis and the organicist theory of evolution advocated by William Wheeler (Gibson 2013: 613). Nevertheless, he continued to write on the origin and purpose of religion with his 1978 book On Human Nature in much the same vein, invoking the concept of hypertrophy, ‘the extreme growth of pre-existing structures’, (1978a: 89) to justify his connection between the evolution of “tribalism” with the much larger and more complex phenomena of religion. Applying his “tribalism” hypothesis with aid from anthropological data, he argued that Judeo-Christian moral sanctions against homosexuality are consistent with ‘an aggressive pastoral nation whose success was based on rapid and orderly population growth’. Consequently, ‘the biblical logic seems consistent with a simplistic view of natural law when population growth is at a premium’ (1978a: 142, 190; 1975: 561). Being graciously non-partisan, he goes on to write that, since religions have been created to more effectively ensure group cohesion and survival, which can be evidenced in their almost universal sanction of “pseudo-speciation” (1978a: 70), it is no surprise that ‘some Arab extremists think the struggle against Israel is a jihad for the sacred cause of Islam’ (1978a: 164).

The intense backlash that he had received from these two books, later referred to as the “Sociobiology Controversy”, wherein he was accused by a group of scientists and public intellectuals of biological determinism and crude reductionism, suggests that his following two books on human nature, Genes, Mind and Culture, and Promethean Fire, published in 1981 and 1983 respectively, wherein he proposes his new gene-culture co-evolutionary model, represents a significant revision of his views. However, evidence from his earlier works suggests that he already appreciated the complexity of human culture and its immense difference from the rest of the animal kingdom (1971b: 402; Segerstrale 2006: 61) but did not yet know how to incorporate it into his sociobiology. It required his collaboration with his then post-doctoral research assistant Charles Lumsden, who possessed the crucial facility with mathematics that Wilson had always lacked (Wilson 1994: 122), and two years of deep immersion in cognitive neuroscience, to bring his ideas to paper (Wilson 1983: 50). Together they argued that to better appreciate the unique eu-cultural status of human beings, the target of study should not primarily be on behaviour but rather on the inner workings of the mind (1981: 2, 5, 348-349). To this end, they proposed a unit of measurement, “culturgen”, roughly analogous to Richard Dawkin’s “meme”, that is, a ‘relatively homogeneous set of artefacts, behaviors, or mentifacts’ to determine how genes translate into culture and vice versa via the epigenetic rules (Wilson 1981: 26; 1994: 351). With this new tool, Wilson argued that the growth of the brain in hominins was not driven solely by tool use, but also by coping with the growing complexity of their social relationships, with its concomitant premium ‘on intelligent, cooperative action’ (1983: 163, 101; Holloway 1974). He therefore suggests that gene-culture co-evolution may be able to further ‘penetrate the mysteries of human nature and to put to test powerful political and religious beliefs’ (1983: 169). [1] This is further explored in his 1998 book Consilience wherein he draws evidence from archeological and ethnographic data detailing how the epigenetic rules translated hereditary human nature to culture, leading stone-age humans in different geographical locations to invent agriculture, erect hierarchical class structures and construct similar mythical stories and art that resembled each other (1998a: 162, 244-246). He repeats his claim concerning the origins of religion by pointing to its almost inevitable development from the “tribalism” rooted in evolved human nature, arguing that every culture will inevitably create its own religious mythos, ‘urged into birth through biases in mental development encoded in the genes’ (1998a: 281). This model also enables him to suggest that human nature is malleable, and can be directed toward greater cooperative potential via cultural evolution working through the epigenetic rules to alter their genes to ‘formulate more enduring moral codes’ (1986: 192; 1981: 348).

The third important development in his thought occurs in the 21st century when he became increasingly dissatisfied with kin selection as an explanation for the evolution of eusociality in the Hymenoptera. Termites and other Hymenoptera never fit the model, many haplodiploid species did not evolve eusociality, and there were additional difficulties with the associated mathematical equations (Wilson 2012: 170-172). [2] This resulted in several publications reversing his support for kin selection, [3] the latest being collaborative efforts with Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and Benjamin Allen in 2010 and 2013, which have since aroused critical protests from over a hundred biologists (Gibson 2013: 599). Wilson argued that natural selection acting on the individual is enough to account for the evolution of eusociality in the Hymenoptera, and by making a distinction between the unit versus target of selection for hominins, he argued that they evolved eusociality via an interplay of selection at the level of the individual and the group, that is, through multi-level selection (2012: 20; Gibson 2013: 624). Wilson’s revival of group selection provided strong justification and further explanatory scope for his more or less stable understanding of the origin of religion. They include ‘the tendency [in humans] to form groups and then favor in-group members’ (2012: 59) and the never-ending push and pull of altruism and selfishness being the source of the creative arts and by extension the aesthetic attractiveness of the mythical stories in religion, which then harnesses its appeal for adaptive purposes, for example, in-group cohesion, taming the potentially destructive evolutionary arms race in social intelligence, which accounts for the current success of humans over other extinct hominins (1996: 167; 2012: 223-4, 243-245, 289-292; 2014: 22, 75). Of the numerous examples he provides, one includes the inborn religious bigotry that he witnessed personally, ‘having grown up in the Deep South in the 1930s and 1940s’ (2014: 31).

Wilson’s Philosophy of Consilience and Socialization into Organicism:

Given his commitment to a universal human nature and a stable understanding of the origin of religion despite large shifts in his scientific thinking, it is helpful to realize that one of the major motivations for Wilson was for science to lead discussions about the future ethical direction of humankind – made possible by the fact that human nature is malleable, given the epigenetic rules – (1983: 177-182; 1998a: 181) so as to prevent religion from imposing its arbitrary values and creating ‘ceaseless and unnecessary suffering’ on both the overgrown populace and the biosphere they inhabit (2014: 150). [4] To that end, he promotes the concept of consilience, that is, the idea that hitherto incommensurable sources of knowledge can cooperate to solve human problems. By 1986, Wilson was willing to propose a synthesis between the research on certain genes’ effect on behaviour via illness, such as the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, and cognitive psychology, to model morality as an applied science (1986: 177, 178). This attempt to provide an evolutionary determination of moral “ought” based on the ‘needs and pitfalls of human nature’ (1998a: 274) that Wilson so strongly champions in much of his work has been dismissed as reductionistic ‘nonsense’ by Daniel Dennett (1995: 470), in what has been the typical response to Wilson by other scientists and public intellectuals throughout his career. This essay does not deny that much of his work can be interpreted as reductionistic – the idea that complex levels of organization can be explained solely by principles derived from less complex ones, for example, chemistry solely by the laws of physics – or that some of it is. However, it has already been noted that many of Wilson’s overreaching comments can be attributed to quick shifts in the modes of his thought, from “Ionian” to “Icarian” and back again as part of his desire to instantiate his moral vision. Hence, it is defensible nevertheless to perceive the overarching ethos of his consilience project to be holistic rather than reductionistic.

From early on, Wilson had already made a distinction between philosophical and methodological reduction in defense of his sociobiology, claiming that he was not committed to the former (1978b: 13). Concerning the latter, he argues that this heuristic tool is what counts for the success of science, and will promote an efficient restructuring of the disciplines designed to treat subject matters at a higher level of physical organization based on the principles of the lower ones (1978a: 13). In his article on the relation of science to theology, he defends the encroachment of biology in the humanities by elaborating that science is both analytic and synthetic, and in the synthetic phase, one can comprehend the holistic properties of behaviour and their relation to lower levels of complexity more clearly (1980: 429). He even argues against philosophical reduction, promoting the value of consilience while defending the integrity of methods of inquiry in different disciplines. He writes:

Biology is the key to human nature, and social scientists cannot afford to ignore its emerging principles. But the social sciences are potentially far richer in content. Eventually they will absorb the relevant ideas of biology and go on to beggar them by comparison (1978b: 13).

His autobiography details his strong distaste for the spread of reductionism in biology in his department at Harvard as a result of the monumental discovery of DNA and the appointment of James Watson as assistant professor there in 1956, who was given license to push the department in directions that favoured his approach because of ‘the greatness of the discovery he had made’ (1994: 219). He even wondered if some of his overstatements about the explanatory scope of science resulted from his corruption at the hands of reductionistic biology at Harvard throughout the 50s and 60s (1994: 224; Gibson 2013: 614). In his book In Search of Nature, he expresses his hope for ‘a pluralization of biology and the restoration of the expert naturalist to a position of leadership in biological research [since] symbiosis between disciplines is the natural result’ (1996: 150). In his article on resuming the enlightenment quest, he argues for the ‘intrinsic consilience of all knowledge [concerning the orderliness of the universe] and the ingenuity of the human mind in comprehending both’ (1998b:16). He characterizes such syntheses as ‘cooperative exploration’ rather than reduction (1998b: 17). Consequently, the philosophy underlying consilience is holistic – the idea that knowledge from different levels of complexity are re-structured to better reflect their relationship with each other while at the same time retaining their integrity, such that cooperative synthesis may result – rather than reductionistic. [5]

This thesis that holism in the form of synthesis and cooperation underlie his scientific philosophy is bolstered by examining the direct and indirect influences in his thought. Abraham Gibson has noted that Wilson belongs to ‘a long line of organicists, biologists whose research highlighted integration and coordination’ (2013: 599). They include Herbert Spencer, William Wheeler, whose work on emergent evolution Wilson professes deep familiarity (Wilson 2012: 139), and his student Frank Carpenter, who would serve as Wilson’s doctoral advisor (Gibson 2013: 603, 606, 607, 610). The holistic approach to biology was the prevailing zeitgeist in the interwar period, and after the death of Wheeler, his “superorganism” concept continued to be supported (Gibson 2013: 609, 611). Segerstrale has also noted that Wilson had absorbed the ‘“crypto-vitalist” spirit prevalent at Harvard during this time’ (2006: 47-8). She points out that there was another ‘“hidden curriculum” conveyed by the informal weekly dinner discussions in the Society of Fellows’ where they speculated on the possibility of the ‘unity among all of science’ (2006: 48).

Therefore, while Wilson only ever embraced the “superorganism” concept briefly as an adequate explanation for the evolution of eusociality in ants before modifying it to fit into his kin selection framework and then abandoning it again with his reversal on kin selection (Gibson 2013: 601, 613, 620), his commitment to its underlying philosophy has not been missed. Segestrale believes ‘there is no indication that Wilson seriously gave up the metaphysical notion of the superorganism’. This, she argues, can be discerned as early as his Sociobiology (2006: 48). Gibson has also written that, with his embracement of group and multi-level selection, despite its corresponding rejection of the “superorganism” concept, ‘he appears to have made peace with his pedigree’ (2013: 602). His distinction between the unit and target of selection to justify multi-level selection and its role in the evolution of eusociality in hominins, with its concomitant source for the evolution of morality and religion in humans, has been attacked by Richard Dawkins, with some irony, as ‘a bland, unfocussed ecumenicalism of the sort promoted by […] the late Stephen Jay Gould’ (2012). Furthermore, Segerstrale has suggested that Wilson’s critics during the sociobiology controversy could not understand him because they could not see that he ‘represented an older tradition in biology, one that naturally and explicitly combined science with values’ – which can be understood to be the motivation behind, but not to be confused with, the holistic philosophy undergirding his consilience – and therefore that he thought and wrote in the same vein as individuals such as Konrad Lorenz, C. H. Waddington and Vero Wynne-Edwards (2006: 70).

Wilson’s Views on the Value of Religion and his Personal History:

Given then that holism in the form of integrative synthesis and cooperation of knowledge is a defensible interpretation of the breadth of his work, it is curious that Wilson wishes religion, something he admits to be deeply ingrained in human nature, to be eradicated in some of them. Segerstrale notes that his claim that culture was on a leash and that morality has no other demonstrable function than to keep human genetic material intact in On Human Nature can be understood as a thinly disguised critique of religion because he wanted scientific materialism to explain away and consequently replace religious dogma for the benefit of humankind (2000: 38-40; Wilson 1978a: 167). [6] He further elaborates in his article on moral philosophy as applied science that because morality and belief in the supernatural are intimately connected, scientific materialism must triumph over these beliefs so that ‘individuals cannot in any sense regard themselves as belonging to a chosen group or as the sole bearers of revealed truth’ and bigotry can decline (1986: 188). In Consilience, he writes that religion has lent its cohesive power to legitimize conquest throughout human history (1998a: 267-268) – citing the Crusades, the Islamic siege of Constantinople in the 15th century, pro-war statements by Martin Luther, Buddhist violence (2012: 64, 68-69), contemporary conflicts between ‘Shiites and Sunnis, the murder of Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan’s cities by other Muslims and the slaughter of Muslims by Buddhist-led “extremists” in Myanmar’ (2014: 154) – going on to write that ‘those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure’ because they are fundamentally incompatible (1998a: 286). One seeks truth while the other seeks to justify maladaptive ideas and courses of action that once promoted in-group survivability. It is important to note that he does not blame religious ideology per se as the primary cause of suffering and premature death, but rather, the “tribalism” that undergirds it. For example, he points out that secular ideologies such as ‘the pagan corpus mysticism of Nazism and the class warfare doctrine of Marxism-Leninism […] were put to the service of tribalism’ (1998a: 267) resulting in great suffering as well. However, he believes that the most dangerous ideologies, promoted most frequently in religious devotion, center on the proposition: ‘I was not born to be of this world’ 1998a: 268), and consequently reserves his strongest critique on them.

While he changes his mind about the value of religion during this period, this conflict narrative is again taken up in two of his recent books. In The Social Conquest of Earth, he writes that religion will never be able to solve problems with the human condition because ‘they were [merely] shaped in part by the environments of those who invented them and for that reason will always be “tribalistic” (2012: 7-8). This is evidenced by the fact that every religious tribe has considered themselves to be superior to all others, and ‘their charity and other acts of altruism are concentrated on their coreligionists’ (2012: 258, 291). He argues that they need to be critiqued ‘because they encourage ignorance, distract people from recognizing problems of the real world, and often lead them in wrong directions into disastrous actions’ (2012: 292). He repeats his aphorism that ‘the conflict between scientific knowledge and the teachings of organized religions is irreconcilable. [They will] cause no end of trouble as long as religious leaders go on making unsupportable claims about supernatural causes of reality’ (2012: 295). Similarly, in The Meaning of Human Existence, he repeats his critique concerning the inherent “tribalism” in religion and claims with some finality that ‘the best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods’ (2014: 158). [7]

Some of his middle works, however, suggest the opposite. In Biophilia, he posits that all humans share an evolved propensity to appreciate the beauty of nature (1984: 22, 85, 112; 2002: 138). He notes that Bishop Lowth in the 18th century was right, concerning Hebrew poetry, in his estimation of how the mind ‘is not satisfied with a plain and exact description but seeks to heighten sensation’ (1984: 74), hinting at the value of religion’s potential to motivate cooperative conservation efforts. He later writes that ‘a satisfying creation myth consistent with scientific knowledge’ is possible when grounded ‘in the origin and diversity of life’ (1996: 177). The rise of eco-theology is an excellent example of this, and religion’s care for the environment has not been lost on him. He cites a May 1992 meeting between representatives from major American denominations, scientists, and the U. S. Senate to discuss issues concerning conservation as an example (1996: 192). He goes on to write in The Diversity of Life that both those committed to religion and those who subscribe to evolution will agree that their philosophies ‘seem destined to gravitate toward the same position on conservation’ (1992: 335). In The Future of Life, he writes that it is useful to adopt the quasi-religious Gaia concept, coined after ‘a vaguely personal goddess of early Greece’, for people to visualize and therefore better empathize with the biosphere (2002: 11). He provides more approving instances of religious institutions mobilizing support for conservation, citing the work of Pope John Paul II, Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Evangelical Environmental Network and the interfaith Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation in interpreting the “dominance” mandate in Genesis to be one of stewardship, calling the destruction of biological diversity a sin, and campaigning for continued funding for the Endangered Species Act (2002: 158-159). In 2006, he publishes The Creation, which is written entirely as a letter to a fictional Southern Baptist pastor, whose flavour of faith Wilson was all too familiar, having grown up as an ardent Southern Baptist himself, and has since been the driving force of much of his critique of religion after he relinquished it (1994: 43; 1998a: 6; Segerstrale 2000: 39). Surprisingly, he considers the pastor to be a humanist, one who would gladly ‘serve on the same jury, fight the same wars, sanctify human life with the same intensity’, and love the biosphere just as deeply (2006: 168), and argues that the best place for them to find common ground is in the stewardship of life (2006: 165).

In his autobiography, Wilson recounts an episode in his life in 1984 – the same time his general attitude toward the value of religion changes for the better – when, for the first time in forty years he attends a Protestant service to listen to Martin Luther King Senior’s address on race relations, and, to his surprise, begins to silently weep, experiencing a deep sense of solidarity with the Christian faith that he had forgotten (1994: 46). One may better appreciate this moment knowing that he was deeply affected in his youth as a Christian boy scout when he witnessed the effects of segregation, having been invited to visit a black rural area near Brewton, Alabama in 1944 to talk to boys about the value of being a Boy Scout. He recalls being depressed for days, realizing that those boys ‘would have few advantages no matter how gifted or how hard they tried’, and later greatly admiring the moral singlemindedness and courageousness of the religiously motivated civil rights activists who abolished segregation some twenty years later (1994: 80-81). These were moments in his life when he experienced religion’s ability to evoke strong emotions and galvanize action toward a common cause.

Consequently, Wilson’s periodic call for religion’s abolishment and replacement with the evolutionary epic runs counter to his overarching philosophy and some of his personal experiences with his lost faith presented in this essay. His willingness to stick with his understanding of the origin of religion and certain universal attributes of human nature despite shifts in his scientific thinking suggests a faith in his beliefs that are routinely underdetermined by the theories that were available to him. This can be understood as an outflow of his desire for consilience, expressed in just about all of his works on humans and treated explicitly in his book with the same name. Furthermore, this essay has argued that the underlying philosophy behind consilience is one of holism and cooperation. This is also evidenced in his reversal on kin selection and embracement of group selection despite much protest and even when one of his early collaborators reneged his position, and his socialization into organicist philosophy (Gibson 2013: 621). In addition, his adoption of the epigenetic rules to argue for the malleability of human nature subject to the constant push and pull of genetic and cultural evolution suggests the possibility for religion itself to be adapted to serve his moral vision for humankind (1980: 432-433; 2014: 181-182). When understood in this way, the negative comments on the value of religion in some of his works can be interpreted as overreaching statements themselves, coming from his deep concern for the welfare of the world, a concern that he elsewhere admits religious institutions share. Therefore, since the premium on holism, mutual aid, and cooperation is seen to be most judiciously applied to the value of religion in the works that enclose his explicit concern for the future of humankind and love of nature, they should represent the more consistent trajectory of his thought in his readers’ minds.

Conclusion:

Wilson has written that science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world (2006: 5), and, as stated in his earlier work on gene-culture co-evolution, neither of them are going anywhere anytime soon. He has also made it clear that

we are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely (1998a: 294). [8]

If therefore we are enabled to read the body of his work as a contribution to the dialogue between science and religion from the perspective of a secular scientist with a bio-centric moral purpose, who understands the propensity for humans to be religious, that is, to construct and defend mythical stories and rituals to defend their evolved inclination toward “tribalism”, and who wishes to use that understanding to foster better cooperation among the two for the future of life, then Wilson himself can now be seen as having contributed significantly to a consilience between science and religion.

Endnotes:

• 1 See also (Dunbar 2014: 277-282, 328) for a recent similar approach.
• 2 See also (Wilson 2014: 189-202)
• 3 The papers include (Wilson 2005); (Wilson and Hölldobler 2005); (Wilson and Wilson 2007; 2008)
• 4 See also (Wilson 1978a: 7, 134); (1980: 431); (1981: xlvi); (1983: 174, 177-8); (1986: 176); (1996: 149-150); (1998b: 18); (1998a: 262, 271); (2014: 40)
• 5 See also (1984: 60, 61, 63, 74)
• 6 See also (Wilson 1978a: 192, 193, 196, 197, 201; 1983: 181-184); (1998a: 262); (Segerstrale 2006: 59, 60); (Morgan 2010: 185, 186, 191, 196); (Giberson 2007: 193-4)
• 7 See also (Wilson 2012: 63, 75, 76, 252, 255, 258-9, 265-6, 267, 274, 293, 297); (Giberson 2007: 212)
• 8 See also (Wilson 1978a: 77); (1983: 63); (1996: 134-5); (1998b: 93); (2002: 169); (Segerstale 2000: 326)

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