Modern Mind

seen,
Sociobiology,
published in 1975,
On Human Nature
(1978), and
Consilience
(1998). These books all had in common a somewhat stern neo-Darwinism, centred around Wilson’s conviction that ‘the genes hold culture on a leash.’ 42 Wilson wanted above all to bridge C. P. Snow’s two cultures, which he believed existed, and to show how science could penetrate human nature so as to explain culture: ‘The essence of the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly.’ 43 Wilson believed that biology will eventually be able to explain anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics, that all these disciplines will become blended in ever closer ways. In
On Human Nature
he expanded on
Sociobiology,
with more aspects of human experience that could be explained in adaptive terms. He described, for example, the notion of hypergamy, the practice of females marrying men of equal or greater wealth and status; he pointed to the ways in which the great civilisations around the world, although they were not in touch with each other, developed similarfeatures often in much the same order; he believes that chronic meat shortages may have determined the great religions, in that as early man moved away from game-rich areas, the elites invented religious rules to confine meat-eating to a religious caste; and he quotes the example of inmates in the Federal Reformatory for Women, Alderson, West Virginia, where it has been observed that the females form themselves into family-like units centred on a sexually active pair who call themselves ‘husband’ and ‘wife,’ with other women being added, known as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters,’ and older inmates serving as ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles.’ He points out that male prisoners never organise in this way. 44 Wilson’s chief aim all the way through his work was to show how the cultural and even ethical life of humanity can be explained biologically, genetically, and though his tone was cheerful and optimistic, it was uncompromising.
    In the second strand of his work, particularly in
Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species
(1984), Wilson’s aim was to show that humankind’s bond with nature can help explain and enrich our lives as no other approach can. 45 Besides arguing that biophilia may explain aesthetics (why we like savannah-type landscapes, rather than urban ones), why scientific understanding of animal life may enrich the reading of nature poems, why all peoples have learned to fear the snake (because it is dangerous; no need to invoke Freud), he takes the reader on his own journeys of scientific discovery, to show not only how intellectually exciting it may be but how it may offer meaning (a partial meaning admittedly) for life. He shows us, for example, how he demonstrated that the size of an island is related to the number of species it can bear, and how this deepens our understanding of conservation.
Biophilia
struck a chord, generating much research, which was all brought together ten years later at a special conference convened at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts in August 1992. Here, more systematic studies were reported which showed, for example, that, given a choice, people prefer
unspectacular
countryside landscapes in which to live; one prison study was reported that showed that prisoners whose cells faced fields reported sick less often than those whose cells faced the parade ground; a list of biota that produce psychosomatic illness (flies, lizards, vultures) was prepared, and these were found to be associated with food taboos. The symposium also examined James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which had been published in 1979 and argued that the whole of the earth biota is one interregulated system, more akin to physiology than to physics (i.e., that the gases of the atmosphere, the salinity and alkalinity of the oceans, are regulated to keep the maximum number of things alive, like a gigantic organism). Biophilia was an extension of sociobiology, a less iconoclastic version which didn’t catch on to the same extent. 46
    Second only to Wilson in the passion with which he advances a neo-Darwinian view of the world is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1987 for his 1986 book
The Blind Watchmaker,
and in 1995 he became Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. His other books were
The