...Because the guides of human nature must be examined with a
complicated arrangement of mirrors, they are a deceptive subject,
always the philosopher's deadfall. The only way forward is to study
human nature as part of the natural sciences, in an attempt to
integrate the natural sciences with the social sciences and
humanities. I can conceive of no ideological or formalisric shortcut.
Neurobiology cannot be learned at the feer of a guru. The consequences
of genetic history cannot be chosen by legislatures. Above all, for
our own physical well-being if nothing else, ethical philosophy must
not be left in the hands of the merely wise. Although human progress
can be achieved by intuition and force of will, only hard-won
empirical knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make
optimum choices among the competing criteria of progress.
The important initial development in this analysis will be the
conjunction of biology and the various social sciences-psychology,
anthropology, sociology, and economics. The two cultures have only
recently come into full sight of one another. The result has been a
predictable mixture of aversions, misunderstandings, overenthusiasm,
local conflicts, and treaties. The situation can be summarized by
saying that biology stands today as the antidiscipline of the social
sciences. By the word "antidiscipline" I wish to emphasize the special
adversary relation that often exists when fields of study at adjacent
levels of organization first begin to interact. For chemistry there is
the anridiscipline of many-body physics; for molecular biology,
chemistry; for physiology, molecular biology; and so on upward through
the paired levels of increasing specification and complexity.
In the typical early history of a discipline, its practitioners
believe in the novelty and uniqueness of their subject. They devote
lifetimes to special entities and patterns and during the early period
of exploration they doubt that these phenomena can be reduced to
simple laws. Members of the anridiscipline have a different attitude.
Having chosen as their primary subject the units of the lower level of
organization, say atoms as opposed to molecules, they believe that the
next discipline above can and must be reformulated by their own laws:
chemistry by the laws of physics, biology by the laws of chemistry,
and so on downward. Their interest is relatively narrow, abstract, and
exploitative. P.A.M. Dirac, speaking of the theory of the hydrogen
atom, could say that its consequences would unfold as mere chemistry.
A few biochemists are still content in the belief that life is "no
more" than the actions of atoms and molecules.
It it easy to see why each scientific discipline is also an
antidiscipline. An adversary relationship is probable because the
devotees of the two adjacent organizational levels-such as atoms
versus molecules-are initially committed to their own methods and
ideas when they focus on the upper level (in this case, molecules). By
today's standards a broad scientist can be defined as one who is a
student of three subjects: his discipline (chemistry in the example
cited), the lower amidiscipline (physics), and the subject to which
his specialty stands as antidiscipline (the chemical aspects of
biology). A well-rounded expert on the nervous system, to take a
second, more finely graded example, is deeply versed in the structure
of single nerve cells, but he also understands the chemical basis of
the impulses that pass through and between these cells, and he hopes
to explain how nerve cells work together to produce elementary
patterns of behavior. Every successful scientist treats differently
each of the three levels of phenomena surrounding his specialty.
The interplay between adjacent fields is tense and creative at the
beginning, but with the passage of time it becomes fully
complementary. Consider the origins of molecular biology. In the late
i8oos the microscopic study of cells (cytology) and the study of
chemical processes within and around the cells (biochemistry) grew at
an accelerating pace. Their relationship during this period was
complicated, but it broadly fits the historical schema I have
described. The cytologists were excited by the mounting evidence of an
intricate cell architecture. They had interpreted the mysterious
choreography of the chromosomes during cell division and thus set the
stage for the emergence of modern genetics and experimental
developmental biology. Many biochemists, on the other hand, remained
skeptical of the idea that so much structure exists at the microscopic
level. They thought that the cytologists were describing artifacts
created by laboratory methods of fixing and staining cells for
microscopic examination. Their interest lay in the more "fundamental"
issues of tine chemical nature of protoplasm, especially the newly
formulated theory that life is based on enzymes. The cytologists
responded with scorn to any notion that the cell is a "bag of
enzymes."
In general, biochemists judged the cytologists to be too ignorant of
chemistry to grasp the fundamental processes, while the cytologists
considered the methods of the chemists inappropriate for the
idiosyncratic structures of the living cell. The revival of Mendelian
genetics in 1900 and the subsequent illumination of the roles of the
chromosomes and genes did little at first to force a synthesis.
Biochemists, seeing no immediate way to explain classical genetics, by
and large ignored it.
Both sides were essentially correct. Biochemistry has now explained so
much of the cellular machinery on its own terms as to justify its most
extravagant early claims. But in achieving this fear, mostly since
1950, it was partially transformed into the new discipline of
molecular biology, which can be defined as biochemistry that also
accounts for the particular spatial arrangements of such molecules as
the DNA helix and enzyme proteins. Cytology forced the development of
a special kind of chemistry and the use of a battery of powerful new
techniques, including electrophoresis, chromatosraphy, density-
gradient centrifugation, and x-ray crystallography. At the same time
cytology metamorphosed into modern cell biology. Aided by the electron
microscope, which magnifies objects by-hundreds of thousands of times,
it has converged in perspective and language toward molecular biology.
Finally, classical genetics, by switching from fruit flies and mice to
bacteria and viruses, has incorporated biochemistry to become
molecular genetics.
Progress over a large part of biology has been fueled by competition
among the various perspectives and techniques derived from cell
biology and biochemistry, the discipline and its antidisclpline. The
interplay has been a triumph for scientific materialism. It has vastly
enriched our understanding of the nature of life and created materials
for literature more powerful than any imagery of prescienrific
culture.
I suggest that we are about to repeat this cycle in the blending of
biology and the social sciences and that as a consequence the two
cultures of Western intellectual life will be joined at last. Biology
has traditionally affected the social sciences only indirectly through
technological manifestations, such as the benefits of medicine, the
mixed blessings of gene splicing and other techniques of genetics, and
the specter of population growth. Although of great practical
importance, these matters are trivial with reference to the conceptual
foundation of the social sciences. The conventional treatments of
"social biology" and "social issues of biology" in our colleges and
universities present some formidable intellectual challenges, but they
are not addressed to the core of social theory. This core is the deep
structure of human nature, an essentially biological phenomenon that
is also the primary focus of the humanities.
It is all too easy to be seduced by the opposing view: that science is
competent to generate only a few classes of information, that its
cold, clear Apollonian method will never be relevant to the full
Dionysian life of the mind, that single-minded devotion to science is
dehumanizing. Expressing the mood of the counterculture, Theodore
Roszak suggested a map of the mind "as a spectrum of possibilities,
all of which properly blend into one another ... At one end, we have
the hard, bright lights of science; here we find information. In the
center we have the sensuous hues of art; here we find the aesthetic
shape of the world. At the far end, we have the dark, shadowy tones of
religious experience, shading off into wave lengths beyond all
perception; here we find meaning."
No, here we find obscurantism! And a curious underestimate of what the
mind can accomplish. The sensuous hues and dark tones have been
produced by the genetic evolution of our nervous and sensory tissues;
to treat them as other than objects of biological inquiry is simply to
ami too low.
The heart of the scientific method is the reduction of perceived
phenomena to fundamental, testable principles. The elegance, we can
fairly say the beauty, of any particular scientific generalization is
measured by its simplicity relative to the number of phenomena it can
explain. Ernst Mach, a physicist and forerunner of the logical
positivists, captured the idea with a definition: "Science may be
regarded as a minimal problem consisting of the completest
presentation of facts with the least possible expenditure of
thought."
On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
