by Tom Wolfe
Since so many theories of convergence were magical assumptions about the human mind in the Digital Age, notions that had no neuroscientific foundation whatsoever, I wondered what was going on in neuroscience that might bear upon the subject. This quickly led me to neuroscience’s most extraordinary figure, Edward O. Wilson.
Wilson’s own life is a good argument for his thesis, which is that among humans, no less than among racehorses, inbred traits will trump upbringing and environment every time. In its bare outlines his childhood biography reads like a case history for the sort of boy who today winds up as the subject of a tabloid headline: DISSED DORK SNIPERS JOCKS. He was born in Alabama to a farmer’s daughter and a railroad engineer’s son who became an accountant and an alcoholic. His parents separated when Wilson was seven years old, and he was sent off to the Gulf Coast Military Academy. A chaotic childhood was to follow. His father worked for the federal Rural Electrification Administration, which kept reassigning him to different locations, from the Deep South to Washington, D.C., and back again, so that in eleven years Wilson attended fourteen different public schools. He grew up shy and introverted and liked the company only of other loners, preferably those who shared his enthusiasm for collecting insects. For years he was a skinny runt, and then for years after that he was a beanpole. But no matter what ectomorphic shape he took and no matter what school he went to, his life had one great center of gravity: He could be stuck anywhere on God’s green earth and he would always be the smartest person in his class. That remained true after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in biology from the University of Alabama and became a doctoral candidate and then a teacher of biology at Harvard for the next half century. He remained the best in his class every inch of the way. Seething Harvard savant after seething Harvard savant, including one Nobel laureate, has seen his reputation eclipsed by this terribly reserved, terribly polite Alabamian, Edward O. Wilson.
Wilson’s field within the discipline of biology was zoology; and within zoology, entomology, the study of insects; and within entomology, myrmecology, the study of ants. Year after year he studied his ants, from Massachusetts to the wilds of Suriname. He made major discoveries about ants, concerning, for example, their system of communicating via the scent of sticky chemical substances known as pheromones—all this to great applause in the world of myrmecology, considerable applause in the world of entomology, fair-to-middling applause in the world of zoology, and polite applause in the vast world of biology generally. The consensus was that quiet Ed Wilson was doing precisely what quiet Ed Wilson had been born to do, namely, study ants, and God bless him. Apparently none of them realized that Wilson had experienced that moment of blazing revelation all scientists dream of having. It is known as the “Aha!” phenomenon.
In 1971 Wilson began publishing his now-famous sociobiology trilogy. Volume I, The Insect Societies, was a grand picture of the complex social structure of insect colonies in general, starring the ants, of course. The applause was well nigh universal, even among Harvard faculty members, who kept their envy and resentment on a hair trigger. So far Ed Wilson had not tipped his hand.
The Insect Societies spelled out in great detail just how extraordinarily diverse and finely calibrated the career paths and social rankings of insects were. A single ant queen gave birth to a million offspring in an astonishing variety of sizes, with each ant fated for a particular career. Forager ants went out to find and bring back food. Big army ants went forth as marauders, “the Huns and Tartars of the insect world,” slaughtering other ant colonies, eating their dead victims, and even bringing back captured ant larvae to feed the colony. Still other ants went forth as herdsmen, going up tree trunks and capturing mealybugs and caterpillars, milking them for the viscous ooze they egested (more food), and driving them down into the underground colony for the night, i.e., to the stables. Livestock!
But what steered the bugs into their various, highly specialized callings? Nobody trained them, and they did not learn by observation. They were born, and they went to work. The answer, as every entomologist knew, was genetics, the codes imprinted (or hardwired, to use another metaphor) at birth. So what, if anything, did this have to do with humans, who in advanced societies typically spent twelve or thirteen years, and often much longer, going to school, taking aptitude tests, talking to job counselors, before deciding upon a career?
The answer, Wilson knew, was to be found in the jungles of a Caribbean island. Fifteen years earlier, in 1956, he had been a freshly minted Harvard biology instructor accompanying his first graduate student, Stuart Altmann, to Cayo Santiago, known among zoologists as “monkey island,” off the coast of Puerto Rico. Altmann was studying rhesus macaque monkeys in their own habitat. This was four years before Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in the wild in East Africa. Wilson, as he put it later in his autobiography, was bowled over by the monkeys’ “sophisticated and often brutal world of dominance orders, alliances, kinship bonds, territorial disputes, threats and displays, and unnerving intrigues.” In the evenings, teacher and student, both in their twenties, talked about the possibility of finding common characteristics among social animals, even among those as outwardly different as ants and rhesus macaques. They decided they would have to ignore glib surface comparisons and find deep principles, statistically demonstrable principles. Altmann already had a name for such a discipline, “sociobiology,” which would cover all animals that lived within social orders, from insects to primates. Wilson thought about that—
Aha!
—human beings were primates, too. It took him nineteen years and excursions into such esoteric and highly statistical disciplines as population biology and allometry (“relative growth of a part in relation to an entire organism”) to work it out to the point of a compelling synthesis grounded in detailed observation, in the wild and in the laboratory, and set forth in terms of precise measurements. The Insect Societies had been merely the groundwork. In 1975 he published the central thesis itself: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Not, as everyone in the world of biology noticed, A new synthesis but The new synthesis. The with a capital T.
In the book’s final chapter, the now famous Chapter 27, he announced that man and all of man’s works were the products of deep patterns running throughout the story of evolution, from ants one-tenth of an inch long to the species Homo sapiens. Among Homo sapiens, the division of roles and work assignments between men and women, the division of labor between the rulers and the ruled, between the great pioneers and the lifelong drudges, could not be explained by such superficial, external approaches as history, economics, sociology, or anthropology. Only sociobiology, firmly grounded in genetics and the Darwinian theory of evolution, could do the job.
During the furor that followed, Wilson compressed his theory into one sentence during an interview. Every human brain, he said, is born not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience but as “an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.” The negative might be developed well or it might be developed poorly, but all you were going to get was what was already on the negative at birth.
In one of the most remarkable displays of wounded Marxist chauvinism in American academic history (and there have been many), two of Wilson’s well-known colleagues at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin, joined a group of radical activists called Science for the People to form what can only be called an “antiseptic squad.” The goal, judging by their public statements, was to demonize Wilson as a reactionary eugenicist, a Nazi in embryo, and exterminate sociobiology as an approach to the study of human behavior. After three months of organizing, the cadre opened its campaign with a letter, signed by fifteen faculty members and students in the Boston area, to the leading American organ of intellectual etiquette and deviation sniffing, The New York Review of Books. Theories like Wilson’s, they charged, “tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing
privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex.” In the past, vile Wilson-like intellectual poisons had “provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws … and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” The campaign went on for years. Protesters picketed Wilson’s sociobiology class at Harvard (and the university and the faculty kept mum and did nothing). Members of INCAR, the International Committee Against Racism, a group known for its violent confrontations, stormed the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington and commandeered the podium just before Wilson was supposed to speak. One goony seized the microphone and delivered a diatribe against Wilson while the others jeered and held up signs with swastikas—whereupon a woman positioned behind Wilson poured a carafe of ice water, cubes and all, over his head, and the entire antiseptic squad joined in the chorus: “You’re all wet! You’re all wet! You’re all wet!”
The long smear campaign against Edward O. Wilson was one of the most sickening episodes in American academic history—and it could not have backfired more completely. As Freud once said, “Many enemies, much honor.” Overnight, Ed Wilson became the most famous biologist in the United States. He was soon adorned with the usual ribbons of celebrity: appearances on the Today show, the Dick Cavett Show, Good Morning America, and the covers of Time and The New York Times Magazine … while Gould and Lewontin seethed … and seethed … and contemplated their likely place in the history of science in the twentieth century: a footnote or two down in the ibid. thickets of the biographies of Edward Osborne Wilson.
In 1977 Wilson won the National Medal for Science. In 1979 he won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for the third volume of his sociobiology trilogy, On Human Nature. Eleven years later he and his fellow myrmecologist, Bert Hölldobler, published a massive (7½ pounds), highly technical work, The Ants, meant as the last word on these industrious creatures who had played such a big part in Wilson’s career. The book won the two men Pulitzer Prizes. It was Wilson’s second.
His smashing success revived Darwinism in a big way. Sociobiology had presented evolution as the ultimate theory, the convergence of all knowledge. Darwinists had been with us always, of course, ever since the days of the great man himself. But in the twentieth century the Darwinist story of human life—natural selection, sexual selection, survival of the fittest, and the rest of it—had been overshadowed by the Freudian and Marxist stories. Marx said social class determined a human being’s destiny; Freud said it was the Oedipal drama within the family. Both were forces external to the newborn infant. Darwinists, Wilson foremost among them, turned all that upside down and proclaimed that the genes the infant was born with determined his destiny.
A field called evolutionary psychology became all the rage, attracting many young biologists and philosophers who enjoyed the naughty and delicious thrill of being Darwinian fundamentalists. The influence of genes was absolute. Free will among humans, no less than among ants, was an illusion. The “soul” and the “mind” were illusions, too, and so was the very notion of a “self.” The quotation marks began spreading like dermatitis over all the commonsense beliefs about human nature. The new breed, the fundamentalists, hesitated to use Wilson’s term, “sociobiology,” because there was always the danger that the antiseptic squads, the Goulds and the Lewontins and the INCAR goonies and goonettes, might come gitchoo. But all the bright new fundamentalists were Ed Wilson’s offspring, nevertheless.
They soon ran into a problem that Wilson had largely finessed by offering only the broadest strokes. Darwin’s theory provided a wonderfully elegant story of how the human beast evolved from a single cell in the primordial ooze and became the fittest beast on earth—but offered precious little to account for what man had created once he reached the level of the wheel, the shoe, and the toothbrush. Somehow the story of man’s evolution from the apes had not set the stage for what came next. Religions, ideologies, scholarly disciplines, aesthetic experiences such as art, music, literature, and the movies, technological wonders such as the Brooklyn Bridge and breaking the bonds of Earth’s gravity with spaceships, not to mention the ability to create words and grammars and record such extraordinary accomplishments—there was nothing even remotely homologous to be found among gorillas, chimpanzees, or any other beasts. So was it really just Darwinian evolution? Anthropologists had always chalked such things up to culture. But it had to be Darwinian evolution! Genetics had to be the answer! Otherwise, fundamentalism did not mean much.
In 1976, a year after Wilson had lit up the sky with Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a British zoologist and Darwinian fundamentalist, Richard Dawkins, published a book called The Selfish Gene in which he announced the discovery of memes. Memes were viruses in the form of ideas, slogans, tuners, styles, images, doctrines, anything with sufficient attractiveness or catchiness to infect the brain—“infect,” like “virus,” became part of the subject’s earnest, wannabe-scientific terminology—after which they operated like genes, passing along what had been naïvely thought of as the creations of culture.
Dawkins’s memes definitely infected the fundamentalists, in any event. The literature of Memeland began pouring out: Daniel C. Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, William H. Calvin’s How Brains Think, Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal, The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (with a foreword by Richard Dawkins), and on and on. Dawkins has many devout followers precisely because his memes are seen as the missing link in Darwinism as a theory, a theoretical discovery every bit as important as the skull of the Peking man. One of Bill Gates’s epigones at Microsoft, Charles Simonyi, was so impressed with Dawkins and his memes and their historic place on the scientific frontier, he endowed a chair at Oxford University titled the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science and installed Dawkins in it. This makes Dawkins the postmodern equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dawkins is now Archbishop of Darwinian Fundamentalism and Hierophant of the Memes.
There turns out to be one serious problem with memes, however. They don’t exist. A neurophysiologist can use the most powerful and sophisticated brain imaging now available—and still not find a meme. The Darwinian fundamentalists, like fundamentalists in any area, are ready for such an obvious objection. They will explain that memes operate in a way analogous to genes, i.e., through natural selection and survival of the fittest memes. But in science, unfortunately, “analogous to” just won’t do. The tribal hula is analogous to the waving of a wheat field in the wind before the rain, too. Here the explanatory gap becomes enormous. Even though some of the fundamentalists have scientific credentials, not one even hazards a guess as to how, in physiological, neural terms, the meme “infection” is supposed to take place. Although no scientist, McLuhan at least offered a neuroscientific hypothesis for McLuhanism.
So our fundamentalists find themselves in the awkward position of being like those Englishmen in the year 1000 who believed quite literally in the little people, the fairies, trolls, and elves. To them, Jack Frost was not merely a twee personification of winter weather. Jack Frost was one of the little people, an elf who made your fingers cold, froze the tip of your nose like an icicle, and left the ground too hard to plow. You couldn’t see him, but he was there. Thus also with memes. Memes are little people who sprinkle fairy dust on genes to enable them to pass along so-called cultural information to succeeding generations in a proper Darwinian way.
Wilson, who has a lot to answer for, transmitted more than fairy dust to his progeny, however. He gave them the urge to be popular. After all, he was a serious scientist who had become a celebrity. Not only that, he had made the bestseller lists. As they say in scholarly circles, much of his work has been really quite accessible. But there is accessible … and there is cute. The fundamentalists have developed the habit of cozying up to the reader or, as they are likely to put it, “cozying up.” When they are courting the book-buying public,
they use quotation marks as friendly winks. They are quick to use the second-person singular in order to make you (“you”) feel right at home (“right at home”) and italicized words to make sure you get it and lots of conversational contractions so you won’t feel intimidated by a lot of big words such as “algorithms,” which you’re not likely to tolerate unless there’s some way to bring you closer to your wise friend, the author, by a just-between-uspals approach. Simple, I’d say! One fundamentalist book begins with the statement that “intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do (an apt description of my present predicament as I attempt to write about intelligence). If you’re good at finding the one right answer to life’s multiple-choice questions, you’re smart. But there’s more to being intelligent—a creative aspect, whereby you invent something new ‘on the fly’” (How Brains Think by William H. Calvin, who also came up with a marvelously loopy synonym for fairy dust: “Darwinian soft-wiring”).
Meantime, as far as Darwin II himself is concerned, he has nice things to say about Dawkins and his Neuro Pop brood, and he wishes them well in their study of the little people, the memes, but he is far too savvy to buy the idea himself. He theorizes about something called “culturgens,” which sound suspiciously like memes, but then goes on to speak of the possibility of a “gene-culture coevolution.” I am convinced that in his heart Edward O. Wilson believes just as strongly as Dawkins in Darwinian fundamentalism. I am sure he believes just as absolutely in the idea that human beings, for all their extraordinary works, consist solely of matter and water, of strings of molecules containing DNA that are connected to a chemical analog computer known as the brain, a mechanism that creates such illusions as “free will” and … “me.” But Darwin II is patient, and he is a scientist. He is not going to engage in any such sci-fi as meme theory. To test meme theory it would be necessary first to fill in two vast Saharas in the field of brain research: memory and consciousness itself. Memory has largely defied detailed neural analysis, and consciousness has proven totally baffling. No one can even define it. Anaesthesiologists who administer drugs and gases to turn their patients’ consciousness off before surgery have no idea why they work. Until memory and consciousness are understood, meme theory will remain what it is today: amateur night.