From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Dec 30 1998 - 03:18:41 MST
Well, since you ask... :)
Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge
By Edward O. Wilson, Little, Brown, 374pp, $A24.95
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
By Richard Dawkins, Allen Lane, 337pp, $A39.95
Darwinism Today chapbooks
By sundry authors, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 50-70pp, $A12.95 each
The Enlightenment, that wonderfully hopeful, doomed European age of
critical and encyclopaedic reason, perished 200 years ago with the French
Revolution and the rise of egocentric Romanticism. Our own century of
science, for good and ill, has been a sardonic re-run of the first
Enlightenment. Impressive scholars like Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson
now wish to prevent its second fall, arguing with a certain desperation
that we still might get it right this time around.
Wilson is a world authority on insects, and more controversially the
founder of sociobiology, the Darwinian doctrine that genes, bodies, minds
and cultures evolve together. Dawkins is the superb explainer of science
who coined that celebrated and much misunderstood term, `the selfish gene'
- and another important concept, the `meme'. That's his proposed unit of
culture which propagates from brain to brain like a virus or indeed a
useful computer program.
The allure and embattled significance of this renewed Enlightenment seems
pitched against two foes, themselves enemies: a redemptive environmental
holism with roots in sublime mystery, and the ruinous cupidity which gladly
rapes the planet's future in the name of no creed beyond the short-term
bottom line.
Wilson is an ardent reductionist - that is, he holds that our
explanations of nature and humanity will be reduced ultimately to the
austere laws of physics and mathematics. He deplores the woolly and
ill-informed thinking of New Agers, but is (no doubt to their astonishment)
a prophet of `biophilia', reverence for global biological diversity. And
Dawkins, for all his steely atheism and even more devoted reductionism,
urges union between science's relentless curiosity and the expressive,
searing power of the arts. This hoped-for synthesis is aptly caught in
Wilson's term `consilience' - the unity of knowledge, a conjectured
coherence in diverse realms of understanding, especially a deep consistency
between testable sciences and artistic domains of feeling.
The first Enlightenment considered the mind an open slate made afresh
with each generation, so humankind might be perfected by purified thought.
It failed because its dream of clarified reason ran into the wilful
passions of stubborn humans. It's even arguable, as Wilson admits, that it
had a `dark-angelic flaw', its noble idealism leading directly to this
century's totalitarian nightmares. The Darwinian variant is more
open-eyed. Wilson and colleagues claim we are shaped by `epigenetic
rules', which are our standard brain pathways and regularities in mental
development, the tool-kit `by which the individual mind assembles itself'.
But the linkage between genes and culture is flexible. We weave our own
patterns, but on a loom built by evolution: in a word, human nature.
That loom endures because its cloth is suited to the world we live in.
Wilson's deepest assumption, unprovable and perhaps absurdly ambitious, is
that our brains and bodies echo fundamental motifs in the cosmos. The
world is always already unified, even if we are not smart or sensitive
enough to learn its grammar. So Wilson is an admitted reductionist. `I
plead guilty, guilty, guilty. Now let us move on...' While his grasp of
theory in the humanities is insecure, out of date, even naive, I find that
ambition admirable.
Dawkins, too, is besotted by diverse yet unifiable knowledge and its
continuing promise. The tragedy of our time is the shattering of that
Enlightenment link between science, law and poetry. When Newton teased
white light into a spectrum by passing it through a prism, the poet John
Keats deplored the `unweaving' of the rainbow. For Keats, it reduced the
rainbow's glory to nothing more than a lab experiment. Yet that assessment
is itself a vulgar and unimaginative error.
In his customary clear and, yes, poetic voice, Dawkins leads us into a
world hugely grander than anything known to the Romantics - much of it
opened to us in this splendid unweaving. The Enlightenment impulse does
not break down and unweave in drunken revelry, for the sake of harm. It
re-weaves, builds up secular cathedrals - the entire vast, ancient cosmos
itself - for the admiration of our hearts and minds. Its goal is
consilience. Its enemy is not appropriate scrutiny, but gullible or
arrogant mystification. While Dawkins is scathing about the usual suspects
- astrology, the New Age, superstition - more valuable in both Dawkins and
Wilson is their humane search for communal cooperation in a world built
from the blind scurrying of selfish genes.
Is the tide turning back toward a recovered Enlightenment? One
indication that it is, at least among the hungrily reading public, is a
series of small stocking-stuffers based on talks given for the Darwin@LSE
program at the London School of Economics. These briskly apply
evolutionary theory to diverse and often hair-raisingly controversial
topics. Still, compare these gift-sized volumes with another new marketing
venture, individual books from the Bible (prefaced by such unlikely
explicators as literary bad boy Will Self) selling for a third the price.
Those ancient prophets still hold the pulling power.
Kingsley Browne, in Divided Labours, suggests that, as a gene-shaped
group, women really do, after all, have different work skills and
priorities from those of men. Colin Tudge's Neanderthals, Bandits and
Farmers whips through the traumatic founding of agriculture. Shaping Life,
by John Maynard Smith, shows that simple chemical diffusion guides genes in
building our bodies. In The Truth About Cinderella, Martin Daly and Margo
Wilson summarise their scary case, based on evidence and theory, for a
special Darwinian bond between parents and their genetic children (you're
about 100 times as likely to be abused or killed by a step-parent). These
claims, and the theories behind them, remain immensely contentious. The
old Enlightenment philosophers would have been aghast, but might have
knuckled down to the hard task of adjudicating the evidence. Perhaps we
shall have the courage to do the same.
Damien Broderick
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