Consilience

Wilson believes that the arts—literature, painting, music, dance—can benefit from scientific input, especially through the medium of interpretation. Using brain imaging experiments, researchers have found no single source for artistic genius but, instead, “engagement of a broader area of the same parts of the brain used by those less able" (232). Though the minds of the greatest artists are only incrementally better used, they produce works that seem “qualitatively new.”

Art critics tend to subscribe to postmodernism, which states that all artistic viewpoints are subjective and equally valid, and that science has nothing to offer because it, too, is subjective, and there are no fundamental patterns of human aesthetics for it to find. Postmodernism is the latest oscillation between Classical rationalism and Romantic emotionalism in the arts. If art interpreters can accept the evidence from science that human nature is innate, they can then develop a theory of the arts and a theory of innovation. Innovation, like all other human traits, evolves under natural selection, with the environment already having favored ensembles of human genes that confer creativity. Certain ideas also survive through generations to affect cultural archetypes. The arts and innovation thus tend to focus on particular themes that they develop freely, especially by expressing them in linguistic and artistic metaphors.

Art cannot be restricted by science because art involves "the transmission of the intricate details of human experience by artifice to intensify aesthetic and emotional response […] with no intent to explain why the impact occurs" (238). Artists want to create; scientists want to understand creativity. Art and science do share the search for patterns and structures in small details. Mondrian’s intricate paintings of trees become more skeletal and geometrical until he moves away entirely from landscape to the lines and colored squares of abstract art, always searching for a pure, ideal aesthetic expression. Chinese writing begins as pictograms and evolves over centuries into an elegant abstraction of the original symbols.

Great themes recur in literature, including the tribe and its journeys, the hero’s quest, world’s end, a source of power, the wise seer, sexual awakening, the trickster, and the monster. The question is whether these themes are mere byproducts of mental evolution or specifically adaptive for survival. Humans are the only creatures that contemplate the meaning of life and death and the chaos of the universe. Art can “impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence" (245). It can symbolize and encapsulate the big issues of life over which the human mind struggles. This is what makes the arts true and beautiful.

Ancient cave paintings found in southern Europe depict prehistoric animals in sophisticated detail, along with the arrows and spears of the hunt. These paintings might have been part of rituals intended to create sympathetic magic that helps the tribe navigate a threatening world. Even today, animal symbols influence culture: in American sports, fans root for lions, dolphins, and bears.

The arts can use science to learn more about what appeals deeply to humans via the study of recurring motifs throughout history, brain-wave data on neurological response to various design elements, the reasons why certain faces are considered beautiful, and the yearning to explore across the river or beyond the stars.

Knowledge of the world accumulates over the generations. Kalahari Bushmen know intimately the natural world around them so that they may eat and survive, but they know only a fraction of what humanity is learning about their desert. Even today’s best naturalists know only a small portion of the ecosystems they study. The growth of knowledge will eventually allow anyone to access a complete record of a region’s natural history, from atoms to antlers and beyond. This knowledge, along with the expanding understanding of human behavior, is also available to artists, to inform and empower their works. 

Some believe ethics are handed down by God; some believe they form a kind of natural law that transcends human life and can be derived through reason. Others believe ethics descend from genetically generated preferences in the human mind; still others think ethics are a cultural construct designed to resolve disagreements and foster cooperation. Transcendental theories, whether they invoke God or natural law, have been used to justify bad treatment of others, including colonial conquest, slavery, genocide, and war. Empiricists, though, view ethics as “hereditary predispositions” that shape the various cultural codes of conduct and should be judged on how well they resolve the issues of their society. It’s possible that some form of godlike being has created the universe, but the idea of an actively involved God “who directs organic evolution and intervenes in human affairs (as envisioned by theism) is increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences" (263). It is more likely, then, that ethics emerged from evolved social preferences rather than by edict from above.

If a transcendentalist believer in God were to debate an empiricist on the source of ethics, he might declare that the existence of God is self-evident and backed by the belief of most people throughout history, that He and His laws are made present through faith, and that science has no ability to study such truths that exist beyond the material realm. What’s more, without laws imposed by God, people would have no reason to be honest or refrain from crime. Finally, life couldn’t have evolved to its current level of complexity by chance alone; it must have had a guiding hand. An empiricist might reply that religions are generally good for people but that they sometimes foster destructive actions, such as the expansion by conquest of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish societies. These forays were tribal in nature and benefited the conquering groups, incentives that function effectively without recourse to a God.

Meanwhile, continues the empiricist, if prayer really worked, everyone would pray constantly; nonbelievers are as law-abiding as believers, and cooperation feels good and true even without faith; and the evidence lies on the side of empiricism, which in time may discover the physical explanations for “spiritual” phenomena. It’s good that we celebrate together as communities, religious or otherwise, but not at the expense of hiding our true nature from ourselves. A secular transcendentalist might argue that ethics are imperatives that exist outside normal human needs, must be followed, and cannot be deduced by science. The empiricist would counter that the evidence points to the fact that ethics don’t descend from on high onto a society and its individuals but instead rise up from inherent human preferences to become social rules, then laws, and finally religious precepts.

Central to ethics is the dilemma of whether to cooperate or defect. Cooperation aids survival; defection usually doesn’t: "Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave birth to the moral sentiments" (276). They manifest in such feelings as guilt, shame, outrage, and empathy, and become enshrined in cultural codes of patriotism, justice, compassion, redemption, and others. The downside to these sentiments is suspicion and mistreatment of outsiders and the misappropriation of ethical sentiments to benefit elite groups. As agriculture developed, ruling classes arose to exploit food surpluses; they handed down laws, including decrees from their gods, rulings that always happened to benefit the rulers. Today, ethics—especially politics, which are essentially applied ethics—is a mishmash of tribalism, equalitarianism, and xenophobia.

It’s hard to consider ethics rationally, because so many emotions and vested interests are involved. As a result, the field of ethics is the least scientifically informed of all the humanities. It would benefit from thorough studies of the genetic precursors to moral sentiments, research into how those attitudes contribute to the evolution of cultural codes of conduct, insights into how moral feelings conferred survivability on our ancestors, and evidence on which moral feelings are pliable and which are inflexible. Such wisdom might help humanity to better navigate its fast-changing future.

Religions appeal to tribal instincts. They often begin as cults, grow to powerful size, and preach that their worshippers are at the center of things. Religions contain secret rituals and miracles; they compete against other religions. Gods and creation myths reduce the fear of chaos and death by bringing meaning, purpose, and the promise of an afterworld to worshippers. Religious systems recur continuously in all cultures, which suggests that religious feelings are innate.

Though progress has been made in demonstrating the genetic roots of ethics and morals, the proof for similar underpinnings of religious belief is much less developed. Religious feeling is so fundamental that, should the empiricist assertion be disproven that religions arise from innate human tendencies, the split between science and the arts will become final. Much evidence does comport with the empiricists’ view. Obeisance to gods strongly resembles submission to dominant members of other highly social mammalian species. Group cooperation within religions reflects their tribal nature. Gods typically are male, the dominant gender. One tempting reward offered by religion is the possibility of transcendence, of a mystical union with the godhead. The yearning for, and joys from, this experience are vastly more appealing than the mundane pleasures of empirical thought. Those who try to walk both paths “will never acquire both in full measure" (286).

As science has advanced and the idea of God as a humanlike personal deity has come into question, religions have responded by making God more abstract and less corporeal. Some scientists are intrigued with the possibility that a Theory of Everything—all the laws of physics wrapped together in a comprehensive set of equations—that might reveal something godlike in the foundations of the universe, though they are likely to be disappointed. The essential dilemma is that humans “evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another" (286). We want and need a sense of the sacred, of the transcendent; an arid science won’t do. Instead, scientists already have presented humanity with a creation story that begins with simple atoms and evolves toward human civilization in an unbroken genetic chain billions of years long. For religion to remain relevant, they can adapt the stories told by science into a poetry that inspires the human yearning for meaning. 

The social sciences, which study the human condition, are beginning to make use of the detailed discoveries of the natural sciences, specifically the materials that make up people and their nervous systems. The natural sciences, having analyzed the building blocks of nature, are now tackling the larger question of human nature. Thus, the natural and social sciences are crossing the same frontier from opposite directions and meeting in the middle. Much of the book is devoted to “gap analysis” of the blank areas of human knowledge. The most important of these gaps are “the final unification of physics, the reconstruction of living cells, the assembly of ecosystems, the coevolution of genes and culture, the physical basis of mind, and the deep origins of ethics and religion" (293).

The world is fast becoming flooded with information. Leaders of the future will be those who can make sense of it all, synthesize it, and make wise choices. Professionals from the liberal arts who understand science and can put together new and more promising approaches to meaning and purpose for humanity can lead the way. In the past few centuries, humans have entered into two Faustian bargains: the Rachet of Progress and conscious genetic evolution. The Ratchet of Progress is the growth of technological power that brings greater prosperity to the world while at the same time causing problems, including environmental damage and large-scale warfare.

Whether humans have continued to evolve in a particular direction during the last several thousand years is unknown, though there are a few shifts, largely because some populations with differing racial characteristics have grown in population faster than others. As well, several minor traits have increased, including rounder heads, wider ability to digest milk, disease resistance, and heat-stress resistance in desert areas. Homogenization has increased as different racial groups migrate and interbreed, which causes average differences between groups to decrease but variations within them to increase.

Humans have passed through three eras in their evolutionary history. The first, up until recently, was the passive, unknowing participation in the ongoing natural selection of traits that confer survivability. Lately, medical science has begun to mute the effects of genetic defects such as sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and Tay Sachs disease, creating a second genetic era during which the genes for these ailments survive and persist in the gene pool without lethal effect. This era will quickly be replaced by a third era, volitional evolution, when gene therapies remove defects and parents are tempted to “improve” their children with genes for greater intellectual, athletic, and artistic ability, alternative sexual orientation, and the like. This second Faustian bargain humanity must soon confront. As for the Ratchet of Progress, the bargain that humans have made with technology already has begun to alter the environment and kill off more species than at any time since the Yucatan meteor destroyed most of life 65 million years ago.

A debate rages as to whether we are part of a delicate ecosystem, finely adapted to an undamaged environment that should be protected, or are separate from nature and have dominion over it and are exempt from its laws. The exemptionalist view is willing to accept environmental degradation as the price of progress, while the old-fashioned natural view recognizes human fragility and dependence on the rest of Earthly life.

In the early 1990s, Biosphere 2, a hermetically sealed set of mini-environments meant to support human life anywhere, ran into multiple problems, including falling oxygen levels, widespread deaths of sample plants and animals and overgrowth of others, and related problems. The human volunteers got through to the end and realized that creating self-sustaining human-compatible environments is vastly harder than it looks.

The growing human population will quickly become unsustainable, especially if the world industrializes to the level of the US, which “would require two more planet Earths" (308). Aquifers, the underground sources of fresh water for much of the planet, are slowly being sucked dry, fisheries are over-harvested, and worldwide temperatures—in Earth’s history tightly connected to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels—have risen along with the rise in manmade CO2. Across the ages, great civilizations have overgrown their resources and collapsed catastrophically. Recently, overpopulated countries such as Rwanda and Burundi in Africa and Haiti and El Salvador in the Western Hemisphere have suffered massive dislocations and, in Rwanda, a large-scale massacre of over half a million people.

Many technological fixes exist or are on the drawing boards. As they relieve the stress, however, the natural tendency is for the population to expand to fill in where the stresses are lowest. Techno-fixes also require constant servicing; any large failure of the artificial supports that prop up the environment can cause a calamity. The population will continue to rise for some time, and the Ratchet of Progress will continue, heedless. Thus, the exemptionalists and the environmentalists must work together to create the conditions for sustainable development while reducing human impact on the environment.

The two most important changes to make are decarbonization, or the shift from coal, oil, and wood to solar, wind, and fusion power; and dematerialization, or the reduction in the size of material objects used by humans. Granted, economic prescriptions for free markets, low taxes, property rights, and the rule of law are proven to work well at building prosperity, but these recommendations fail to consider the growing overuse of resources. Full-cost accounting would subtract environmental losses from the calculations to make them more realistic.

Worldwide biodiversity has suffered losses, much of it concentrated in tropical regions, including the Philippines, Madagascar, and Ecuador, where clearing and burning, overharvesting, and introduction of destructive exotic species annually reduces tropical forests by an amount the size of Ireland. Focused efforts in such regions can do the most to protect biodiversity for the least cost. To people who claim that the world can live with fewer species, the reply is that those species “cleanse our water, enrich our soil, and create the very air we breathe" (322) as well as provide important medicines, and without them, their ecosystems may collapse. Recreating lost natural environments would require tens of thousands of rescued species and their required micronutrients, bacteria, and precise temperature and humidity cycles. This would be as difficult as trying to recreate an entire animal from scratch.

Much progress has been made in human knowledge, and vastly more remains to be discovered. A common language of learning, far from stifling creativity, will enlarge it. Humanity has the power to ruin the world, but people can use science to solve the problems if they work together.