E.O. Wilson's talk last night

Nancy W. and I went to hear E.O. Wilson speak about his new novel, Anthill, last night.

I jotted down some of the many interesting things he had to say, several of which related to things we've talked about in our group.

• "Kin selection" is no longer a tenable theory. This relates to altruism, which we discussed at the last meeting. (I think. I meant to, anyway.) Altruism is a problem for evolutionary biologists, because why would we do things--like share resources--that increase someone else's fitness at the expense of our own? I looked up kin selection theory on Wikipedia: " ...(A) gene that prompts behaviour which enhances the fitness of relatives but lowers that of the individual displaying the behavior, may nonetheless increase in frequency, because relatives often carry the same gene; this is the fundamental principle behind the theory of kin selection... Evolutionary psychologists have attempted to explain prosocial behavior through kin selection by stating that “behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection.” " But, now current evolutionary biologists like Wilson are saying that evolution doesn't work this way. Instead, he says that individual selfishness drives altruism (which is the same thing Pinker is saying).

• I think Wilson said altruism has developed only about 20 times in the history of life.

• Competition between groups of humans is what drives the evolution of what we tend to think of as the highest human qualities, the most "noble" qualities. I think he's saying that a lot of things such as love and altruism and honor are actually things that help your tribe defeat the neighboring tribe. For millenia we tended to behave in these positive ways about our in-group. Pinker (see that website that Karen sent) sees that with modernity we have been able to extend who we see as being in "our" group, and that because of this, and contrary to what it looks like, there is less violence as time goes on.

• Along the same lines--I think--one of the most remarkable things that Pinker explained in The Blank Slate was "...without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all." (p 268) So it's competition over resources, and strife, basically, that has driven us to be the conscious beings we are.

• Humans are tribal in nature. Religion is a manifestation of tribalism. A group's creation story is the story of how they came about and why they are the chosen group of the Creator. (I have often thought that one of Jesus' missions was to try to "extend the tribe"--i.e. think of more and more people as "us"--hence the stuff about loving all your brothers and sisters and helping people like Samaritans (an outgroup from the Jewish point of view). (I think Christians who raise Christianity as some sort of superior belief system are missing one of Jesus' main points, personally.) I think Karen Armstrong saw a similar widening of the circle and extending social justice in the religious movements around 800 B.C. by the way.

• The human condition: we have

Paleolithic emotions
Medieval institutions
but Godlike technology