Dance Lessons from a Scientist

This essay was inspired by a quote from the eminent scientist Edward O. Wilson, the man who coined the term "sociobiology" and wrote a book with that title.  The quote was:  "The real problem of humanity is the following:  we have peleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology".

For an optimistic appraisal of the prospects for civilization on Planet Earth, listen to senior contributing editor Prego de Nada's essay, which begins with an enlightening review of the clash between a modern scientist and members of an entrenched medievalist academia and continues with Prego's thoughts on how to surrender to the rhythms of nature.

Transcript

Getting in Step With Nature’s Dance

 Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My ongoing mission on Planet Earth:  to plant seeds of a way of thinking, a way that is based on an understanding of evolutionary processes, with the ultimate aim of helping to sustain and increase the momentum of Earth’s long arc towards prosperous and happy societies, founded on ideals of liberty and justice.

 Senior contributing editor Prego de Nada, who is a dance afficionado, has submitted the following essay about a famous scientist.  If the association of a famous scientist with dancing seems odd to you, please be patient – it will all make sense if you hang in.

 Prego writes:

 One of the more fascinating scientists in modern times was the late Edward O. Wilson.  He was a deep thinker who achieved exceptional wisdom, by way of investigating the ways of nature with scientific rigor.

 Wilson was born in 1929 and raised in the American South, living in or near several different cities in Alabama and Florida, and had a special fondness for the surrounding areas of the city of Mobile.  

 He spent much of his youth roaming in pine forests, swamps, and tidal marshes, exploring the rich ecosystems of the South, and it was these experiences that led him to a study of biology.

 He earned his bachelor and master’s degrees at the University of Alabama and then went on to complete his PhD at Harvard University.

 He spent his professional career as a professor at Harvard while living in a suburb of Boston, and retired from teaching in 1996 at the age of 67.  He continued to live in the Boston area after retirement, but spent an increasing amount of time in the South, contributing to conservation efforts and spreading the word about the importance of biodiversity.

 Professor Wilson died at the time of the winter solstice in 2021 at the age of 92, in Burlington MA.

 His landmark work was “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis”, published in 1975.  He was the man who coined the term “sociobiology”.  His work was the subject of a Fascinating! podcast essay in Season 1, titled “Learning from Sociobiology”.

 Sociobiology is evolutionary thinking at its best, so you should not be surprised to learn that Wilson faced quite a savage attack by the entrenched intelligentsia in academia, who were, and are, mostly dedicated to intelligent design thinking, support of medieval institutions, and to spreading the dogmas of Marxianity.  

 As I have previously opined, Marxianity is best understood as the last gasp of the European feudal aristocracy, even though its adherents generally believe themselves to be on the cutting edge of modernity.

 These privileged characters regarded Wilson as an invader of their turf when he proposed his “new synthesis”; they did not welcome any challenge to their authority, and regarded themselves as morally and intellectually superior beings who were charged with guiding all of humanity along the “right” path.  Very much the aristocratic ideal, wouldn’t you say?

 Probably the most reprehensible charge these wannabe aristocrats lofted at him was that he was preaching “biological determinism”.  And they used this charge as the basis for a straw-man argument against his work, and as grounds for moral condemnation, even though they knew the charge was baseless.

 This episode, and I’m sure many other such episodes, illustrates the broad applicability of a statement he made towards the end of his life:

 "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology."

 The disgraceful smear campaign perpetrated by these dogmatic academics, all the while claiming the mantle of science, illustrates that modern academia is dominated by people who allow their paleolithic emotions to trump their scientific reasoning, in defense of their medieval institutions and their roles in these institutions.  

 I suppose we should be grateful these “smart” people didn’t and don’t understand much about technology – who knows how much more mischief they could create if they did?

 Let’s review briefly the events following the publication of Wilson’s book.

 Although Wilson never claimed that human behavior is completely, or even mostly, determined by genes, that was the charge that was leveled against him. In all of his work, he explicitly acknowledged the role of culture, learning, and environment. 

 His central claim was that evolutionary pressures helped to sculpt in all animals the predispositions, appetites and tendencies that influence social behavior, including the social behavior of humans.

 He wrote: “The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool.”

 The substance and essence of his work was intentionally distorted by the intelligent design crowd, with the intention of discrediting it and preventing it from undermining their dominant position.  And the influence of these guardians of righteousness has been quite impressive, especially with the less intelligent among us, and who comprise most of the echo chamber on what we call the “left”.

 Personally, I would say that echo chambers in general are not so much “right” or “left” as down.

 Among Wilson’s more prominent critics were the eminent biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.  They seem to have regarded themselves as gatekeepers of what the general public ought to be allowed to know, because they claimed to fear that acknowledging the scientific truth might lead to the revival of politically dangerous memes, eugenics for example.

 I see a parallel between Lewontin and Gould and Dr. Zaius in the original Planet of the Apes film.  

 In the story, Dr. Zaius feared that knowledge of human nature would unleash destructive impulses, just as Lewontin and Gould feared that theories about human behavioral evolution, even though valid, might be misused by those in positions of authority to justify and promote oppression.

 In both the movie and real life, there's a belief that some truths are too dangerous to be widely known or accepted - not because they’re false, but because of their potential consequences.  And it seems perfectly clear to those putting themselves forward as our saviors that they are the ones to undertake the task of gatekeeping.

 Once again we see an unavoidable dilemma resulting from emphasizing consequentialism over free inquiry.  How does one gatekeeper, and not another, gain the authority to keep gates, and who is it that oversees the gatekeepers?  It’s clearly an invitation to the abuse of power, disguised as concern for just plain folks.

 Perhaps we Earthlings should dismiss the idea of gatekeepers when it comes to the spread of scientific knowledge.  That trick never works, as Rocky was fond of saying to Bullwinkle.

 In the same interview, published in 2009 by The Atlantic, where he made his statement about paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology, where he was discussing the meaning of human existence, he made another statement which I believe can be improved upon.

 His statement was “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.”

 Professor Wilson should have listened to himself more carefully.  The world is not being “run”, nor will it be “run”, any more than an anthill is being “run”.

 And do you recognize anyone amongst the current panoply of world “leaders” who fits the description of wise, critically thinking synthesizer, someone able to put together the right information at the right time?

 Just as the ant colony has a life of its own, so does Earth’s socioeconomic system – let’s call it the sociome, because it’s a parallel phenomenon with the biome; and just as in the ant colony, order emerges from the behavior of the individuals who comprise the sociome; order is not something that is imposed by a leader.

 We are not living our existence in a play by Euripides, where a deus ex machina swoops in at the right time and sets things right.  We are living our existence in the natural world, and events in the natural world will always and forever unfold in ways that are unpredictable and uncontrollable, and in defiance of those who have cultivated delusions of control.

 If we genuinely wish to achieve long life and prosperity, the trick will lie in getting in step with nature; by becoming familiar with the ways of nature, and learning how to fall into nature’s rhythms.

 So, if you agree that we are creatures with paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology, what steps do we need to take to cultivate long life, prosperity and happiness on our planet?

 First – we must work with, instead of fighting, our instincts.  These instincts evolved for a reason, and we need to honor those reasons instead of condemning them as a relic of our animal past. 

 We are in fact animals, but we don’t want to believe that we are animals, because so much animal behavior can be so “bad”.  And also of course because so many of us believe that we, unlike mere animals, have an immortal soul.

 The good news is that nature and animals are not as “bad” as some of us think.  We notice the predation and we notice the parasitism in what we characterize as the “natural” world, and we generally do not want such things to be a part of our social processes; but we don’t notice the symbiosis in the natural world, which is widespread in spite of our failure to see it.  

 And it is symbiosis that provides us with a model to emulate as we cultivate social processes.  Symbiosis illustrates the saving grace of the positive-sum game.

 And never fail to be mindful of the fact that nature has endowed our species with the ability to evolve culturally as well as physically.  If we cultivate broad and deep understanding, we can then choose to pursue a moral course and to try to persuade others to do likewise.

 Second, we must gradually withdraw all forms of support, especially financial, from our medievalist institutions and let them survive on their own or wither on their own.  

 What was Wilson referring to as “medievalist institutions”?

 He was using “medieval” as shorthand for rigid, archaic, hierarchical, and tradition-bound social structures. Specifically, he meant:

 Nation-states: He saw the persistence of sovereign, competitive states as a kind of medieval holdover in an era of global interdependence.

Organized religion: In particular, dogmatic religious institutions that resist scientific understanding.

 Political hierarchies: Systems of authority based on inherited or entrenched power rather than adaptive, rational governance.

 Tribalism and ethnocentrism: Institutionalized ways of organizing society around in-groups and out-groups, which he saw as maladaptive in a globalized world.

 We cannot do much about our evolved emotions other than to recognize when they are inappropriate and not act on them when they are; but we can do something about our institutions.

 We must stop fighting the natural social construction of a system where institutional structures are in a constant state of evolution, and focus our cultivation efforts on social processes rather than on social structures, which are always temporary in any case.

 We must not seek power over others, and we must withhold our support from those who do.  Regimentation imposed from the top down cannot match the order that emerges spontaneously in an atmosphere of freedom from coercive control.

 We must recognize something like the Golden Rule as the guiding principle around which social order and cooperation can evolve, if we will just let it.

 And it’s the same with the technology which stems from scientific discovery.  The development of technology will find its own course, and the only proper role of government is to insure that social costs are internalized.

 We can just let ourselves get in step and in unison with nature’s rhythms, and if most of us are dancing to the same beat, we will be in step with each other without having to impose some sort of artificial solidarity, with the theme of us vs. them.

 Thanks to Prego for this essay.

 I do hope Prego is not getting overly optimistic about the prospects of his proposal to dance with nature; from the Vulcan point of view, it appears that many Earthlings get way too much pleasure out of choosing a group of people to hate, justifying themselves with declarations of piety, and then spewing venom and hatred on a more or less continuous basis.  

 We observe these Earthlings seeking out reasons to justify feeling offended and reasons to justify their illusion of moral superiority.  They perceive patterns in random anecdotes, attribute agency to these phantasms, and then create a just-so story around which to caricature their enemies.

 Fascinating!  We will never understand why so many of you find such pleasure in this sort of thing.

 Good luck, Earthlings.

 I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel.  You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.

 Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.

 Theme music:  Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.

 Live long and prosper.

 Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.

 Savor your experiences.

 Treasure your memories.

 Anticipate a happy and rewarding future.

 And respect nature’s wisdom.