33 pages • 1 hour read
Edward O. WilsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Edward O. Wilson prefaces On Human Nature with a lengthy quote from Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s work An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “whatever pains these researches may cost us, we may think ourselves sufficiently rewarded, not only in point of profit but of pleasure, if, by that means, we can make any addition to our stock of knowledge in subjects of such unspeakable importance.” Wilson sees his work as a synthesis of previously unrelated, unmixed fields of scientific inquiry that are now, in his hands, expertly joined and expounded.
Wilson’s training and research focused on the study of insect biology and behavior, specifically the study of ants. What he proceeds to do in his text is take his scientific research and apply it to the study of the most advanced vertebrate animal on the planet: the human. On one hand, “Human nature can thus be ultimately understood only with the aid of the scientific method” (Preface, 2004). On the other hand, “the conundrum of human nature, as I and a few others saw it in this early period, can be solved only if scientific explanations embrace both the how (neurosciences) and why (evolutionary biology) of brain action” (Preface, 2004). The combination of these fields is the inevitable result of scientific and cultural progress in human learning; a holistic view is required to fully grasp human nature. As Wilson concludes: “sociobiology would facilitate a bridging discipline between the great branches of learning” (Preface, 2004).
In previous eras of academic research, the question concerning the existence and definition of “human nature” was left to philosophers, and then sociologists and anthropologists. Now, as Wilson makes clear, it is necessary to involve and centralize the work of biologists. For example, when pondering the existence of human emotion, the starting point should be biological and genetic rather than philosophical and personal: “Human emotional responses and the more general ethical practices based on them have been programmed to a substantial degree by natural selection over thousands of generations” (6). According to Wilson, progress will be made by elevating the field of sociobiology—the unity of the “hard” science of biology and the “soft” fields of cultural anthropology and the social sciences.
The question of whether nature or nurture is more important in human behavior is practically as old as the history of philosophy itself. Plato’s Republic—written more than 2,000 years before Wilson’s text, around 375 BC—focused on how to govern a city, and how best to fashion citizens into virtuous people. Plato was convinced that nurture was the key to human development and behavior. To Wilson, nurture is not to be neglected, but everything begins in nature, in the inherited, unchangeable biological makeup that each generation receives from the generation that begot them: “Biology is the key to human nature” (14).
In the contemporary milieu, this question is no longer so. Human nature is the key, and is now recognized as the determining factor in all human behavior. In fact, the “accumulated evidence for a large hereditary component is more detailed and compelling than most persons, including even geneticists, realize” (19). From a materialist perspective, the problem presents itself much like the issue of how hardware and software interact in a computer. Human culture and learned behavior are “software”—something added on and temporally removed from the initial construction of a computer, allowing it to function in a particular way according to its programming. Human biology and genetics are “hardware”—the foundation of everything that a computer can do, with only specific kinds of software being compatible with the hardware used. In other words, hardware only allows for certain kinds of software, just like human biology only allows for certain culture and learned behavior.
Another key piece of evidence in this debate is the fact that human cultures have tread similar ground across eras and geospatial locations. Wilson notes that the similarities between “the early civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mexico, and Central and South America” (89)—with their diverse architecture, craftsmanship, politics, and religion—are evidence of humans’ genetic predisposition toward certain outcomes. If human nature was largely determined by nurture, then these societies should have far fewer parallels. As it turns out, they are remarkably similar, and the best solution to this paradox is (as Wilson concludes) to say that they are the result of human nature, coded into human genetics.
The vast majority of Wilson’s text is spent arguing that human nature is grounded in the unavoidable determinism of human genetics. At the start of every human life, one inherits a “set of instructions” (53) that determines everything about them from the womb. This biological determinacy is met in maturity, however, with the question of how one will approach their self-determined goal: “to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?” (55). In “lower” animals, determinism is so ironclad that they are practically automatons; the mosquito and the fly simply follow their preprogrammed instructions on how to live out the few hours they have.
In “higher” animals—especially humans—this determination is counteracted by what we call free will. While “there is no question that certain persons have distinctive genes predisposing them” (58) toward certain behaviors or outcomes—like developing Alzheimer’s or indulging an addictive personality—it is also true that “environment plays an important role” (59) in human development. Humans inherit capacities for certain characteristics, and it is culture and habit that largely determine how these capacities are activated or suppressed. When it comes to the question of progress and how cultures should be developed, these capacities are even more amenable to self-direction.
In modern day, “civilizations have raised self-love to the rank of high culture, exalted themselves by divine sanction and diminished others” (92). Modern issues are now issues that can be self-determined. This self-determination largely relies on the attainment and dissemination of knowledge: “Science and technology expand at an accelerating rate in ways that alter our existence year by year” (96). In the end, societies will have to decide their own future in terms of which human values to cultivate and uphold.
By Edward O. Wilson