E.O. Wilson at Microsoft
I recently read Ridley’s The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
It turns out that Wilson is cited extensively in “The Red Queen” and is a giant in the area of science where evolutionary theory overlaps with study of human nature. He’s been teaching at Harvard for 50 years and won several awards for his research. He’s an unabashed secularist, but far more Baconian that authoritarian, so I was very interested. It’s all very relevant to Microsoft and Google business, BTW, but that’s a topic for later.
He started by relating his upbringing in the Baptist South. I immediately pegged him as the didymous (twin) of J. Vernon McGee; he has the same rich drawl and I imagine McGee looks the same. He talked about how he’s been touring the country with evangelicals, forming a sort of alliance to preserve biodiversity.
Very early, he went to great lengths to differentiate himself from evangelicals. He doesn’t want anyone to mistake him for a believer, and to make the point he set up a (IMO straw man) definition of “evangelicals” as people who believe that the creator needs to “interfere” periodically, while he is more of an emanationist in the Pythagorean sense. He sees people who try to rationalize the two as “wimps”, which I think is rather arbitrary and silly (presupposing lack of sentience in the “emanated” takes a leap of faith equal to the converse).
But once he cleared the “we differ on completely stupid and irrelevant metaphysical points” air, he got down to the areas of agreement. As I’ve blogged before, these are remarkable and huge. Basically, if evangelicals disagree with him on any of his latter points, they would be hypocrites (and in the past, have been). Perhaps this is why he’s getting so much cooperation from evangelicals. His statistics about vanishing biodiversity are alarming.
It was eye-opening for me. I always assumed that, with the advent of conservationist and “green” movements, we had reversed the tide and that species extinction was a sin of our past ignorance more than a reality of today. Not so. I always assumed that technology, liberty, and free flow of information would be sufficient to make sure the right thing is done. Not so.
Separate but (very) related, I recently saw a stat about human languages since the invention of printing press. One would assume that the printing press and other communication technologies would have made it possible to preserve human languages for posterity. Surprisingly, one major effect of better communication technology was to remove a lot of the regionalization of language, which made it possible for people to “compare” and choose languages more easily. Since the invention of printing press, 50% of languages in use at the time have died off, and language is far more homogeneous now.
This also ties with the story of the Picts and Edward Curtis. The Picts and Druids were wiped off the face of the earth around 1000 years ago. It was the fate of many previous races; but happened right around the time that such events became reprehensible and mostly ceased to happen. It can be considered tragic in the sense that, had they hung on for a few hundred more years, they might be with us today. But far more tragic to me is the fate of a whole slew of Native American Tribes. Edward Curtis settled in Seattle just 120 years ago, and made it his life’s work to record the lives of the various Native American tribes around the country who were slowly dying off. He took photographs and audio recordings, funded by Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan. Most of the tribes he recorded have gone completely extinct (at least in terms of Y haplotype and MTDNA), and his work is the ONLY recorded history of their existence, customs, and lives. You can look at this and laud the technology that made it possible to give them a crude approximation of immortality; or you could lament the conditions which made it possible for them to vanish with nary a trace. But regardless of which attitude you take, you have to admit that they wouldn’t even exist today without the selfless work of a single man: Edward Curtis.