- Email: [email protected]
A Wilsonian worldview
Perspectives
as Van Diemen’s Land, a large island on Australia’s southern coastline, used by the British in colonial times as a penal colony. The story MacDonald has to tell concerns the ways in which medical men of the colonial era obtained human material for dissection and display, originally from convicted prisoners, but subsequently—under a localised version of the British Anatomy Act of 1832—from those many unfortunates who died on the island without family members to claim their bodies for burial. The removal of the dead from institutional mortuaries without consent was routine. Colonialism gives MacDonald’s story an additional dimension, and
an added pathos. Consuming interest in comparative anatomy meant that medical museums and other collections of so-called curiosities were enormously expanded by the colonial enterprise. The vast botanical and zoological collections housed in museums in the UK today derive in large part from the efforts of collectors who went foraging abroad, and who devised ways to send home the botanical and zoological curiosities their forays yielded. The taxonomic impetus behind these collections grew to include human variants. The unfortunate aboriginal inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land were fought, quelled, hunted, confined, and
rendered extinct by colonialists, who promptly collected their remains for museums back home. The manner in which human remains served as a scientific currency of tribute in medical relations with the home colony is well shown by MacDonald. So too are the human effects of the process, in terms of the enhanced status devolving to local collectors, and the painful bereavements of Tasmanian Aborigines. This book is full of good stories well told, and witty analysis. MacDonald’s sensitivity to slippages of language and ethics makes it a treat.
Ruth Richardson c/o The Lancet, London, UK
In brief Book A Wilsonian worldview
Edward O. Wilson: Nature Revealed; Selected Writings, 1949–2006 Edward O Wilson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp 719. US$35·00. ISBN 0-8018-8329-6.
110
In more leisurely academic times, publishing the collected works of a leading scientist was a normal accompaniment to the festschrift with which retirement was celebrated. These days, when publishing is more conscious of the bottom line, it is much rarer, but with two Pulitzer prizes to his name for earlier books, publishing Edward Wilson’s selected writings must seem like a fairly safe bet. This collection of 61 of his papers, ranging from a study of fire ants written when he was aged 19 years, to recent reflections on the demise of the biosphere and his hopes for an integration (consilience) of the sciences spans a career marked by both respect and controversy. Respect is due for Wilson’s observational and research skills as an entomologist, perhaps the world’s greatest expert on ant ecology. Respect too, for his more recent concerns over loss of biodiversity and the need for humanity to move from an exploitative relationship with the rest of living nature to one of stewardship. Controversy has swirled
around him ever since the publication, in 1975, of his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, an eco-evolutionary attempt to explore social behaviour set within a neo-Darwinian framework. Expositions and defences of sociobiology interdigitate with the ants in the first section of this collection, biodiversity, consilience, and reflections on “the human condition” occupy the second half. The sociobiology controversies of the 1970s transmuted into those over the “rebranded” sociobiology of the 1990s, with its emphasis on human evolutionary psychology, but although Wilson had already coauthored a book with the hubristic title On Human Nature he had moved on towards the grander project, on the unity of knowledge. For most scientists, it is a foundational principle that we live in a material world. The question, however, is how we are to integrate the many ways we have of understanding and describing that world, from the physicist, the biologist, the social scientist, or the artist. For Wilson the answer provided by consilience is clear—we must
strive for an epistemological as well as an ontological unity. All forms of knowledge must be reducible to biology in the first instance and physics in the last analysis. This traditional reductionist view is reflected in many of the papers in this collection. It is one that many of us, although sharing Wilson’s ontological premises, will not find easily acceptable. The rules of football are irreducible to physics and biology, even though the behaviour of pitch and ball conform to physical, indeed semi-Newtonian, principles, while the capacities of the players are shaped by their evolutionary and developmental biology. To understand why Wilson is so distressed by such epistemological diversity we might even need to explore his own psychology and upbringing—hinted at in his earlier autobiography. Meantime, I prefer the formulation of philosopher Mary Midgley—that we live in one world, albeit a big one—to the reductive and consilient Wilsonian universe.
Steven Rose [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 368 July 8, 2006
as Van Diemen’s Land, a large island on Australia’s southern coastline, used by the British in colonial times as a penal colony. The story MacDonald has to tell concerns the ways in which medical men of the colonial era obtained human material for dissection and display, originally from convicted prisoners, but subsequently—under a localised version of the British Anatomy Act of 1832—from those many unfortunates who died on the island without family members to claim their bodies for burial. The removal of the dead from institutional mortuaries without consent was routine. Colonialism gives MacDonald’s story an additional dimension, and
an added pathos. Consuming interest in comparative anatomy meant that medical museums and other collections of so-called curiosities were enormously expanded by the colonial enterprise. The vast botanical and zoological collections housed in museums in the UK today derive in large part from the efforts of collectors who went foraging abroad, and who devised ways to send home the botanical and zoological curiosities their forays yielded. The taxonomic impetus behind these collections grew to include human variants. The unfortunate aboriginal inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land were fought, quelled, hunted, confined, and
rendered extinct by colonialists, who promptly collected their remains for museums back home. The manner in which human remains served as a scientific currency of tribute in medical relations with the home colony is well shown by MacDonald. So too are the human effects of the process, in terms of the enhanced status devolving to local collectors, and the painful bereavements of Tasmanian Aborigines. This book is full of good stories well told, and witty analysis. MacDonald’s sensitivity to slippages of language and ethics makes it a treat.
Ruth Richardson c/o The Lancet, London, UK
In brief Book A Wilsonian worldview
Edward O. Wilson: Nature Revealed; Selected Writings, 1949–2006 Edward O Wilson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp 719. US$35·00. ISBN 0-8018-8329-6.
110
In more leisurely academic times, publishing the collected works of a leading scientist was a normal accompaniment to the festschrift with which retirement was celebrated. These days, when publishing is more conscious of the bottom line, it is much rarer, but with two Pulitzer prizes to his name for earlier books, publishing Edward Wilson’s selected writings must seem like a fairly safe bet. This collection of 61 of his papers, ranging from a study of fire ants written when he was aged 19 years, to recent reflections on the demise of the biosphere and his hopes for an integration (consilience) of the sciences spans a career marked by both respect and controversy. Respect is due for Wilson’s observational and research skills as an entomologist, perhaps the world’s greatest expert on ant ecology. Respect too, for his more recent concerns over loss of biodiversity and the need for humanity to move from an exploitative relationship with the rest of living nature to one of stewardship. Controversy has swirled
around him ever since the publication, in 1975, of his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, an eco-evolutionary attempt to explore social behaviour set within a neo-Darwinian framework. Expositions and defences of sociobiology interdigitate with the ants in the first section of this collection, biodiversity, consilience, and reflections on “the human condition” occupy the second half. The sociobiology controversies of the 1970s transmuted into those over the “rebranded” sociobiology of the 1990s, with its emphasis on human evolutionary psychology, but although Wilson had already coauthored a book with the hubristic title On Human Nature he had moved on towards the grander project, on the unity of knowledge. For most scientists, it is a foundational principle that we live in a material world. The question, however, is how we are to integrate the many ways we have of understanding and describing that world, from the physicist, the biologist, the social scientist, or the artist. For Wilson the answer provided by consilience is clear—we must
strive for an epistemological as well as an ontological unity. All forms of knowledge must be reducible to biology in the first instance and physics in the last analysis. This traditional reductionist view is reflected in many of the papers in this collection. It is one that many of us, although sharing Wilson’s ontological premises, will not find easily acceptable. The rules of football are irreducible to physics and biology, even though the behaviour of pitch and ball conform to physical, indeed semi-Newtonian, principles, while the capacities of the players are shaped by their evolutionary and developmental biology. To understand why Wilson is so distressed by such epistemological diversity we might even need to explore his own psychology and upbringing—hinted at in his earlier autobiography. Meantime, I prefer the formulation of philosopher Mary Midgley—that we live in one world, albeit a big one—to the reductive and consilient Wilsonian universe.
Steven Rose [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 368 July 8, 2006