The Meaning of Human Existence

The Meaning of Human Existence - Edward O. Wilson

Learning from superorganisms

Biologist Edward Wilson wrote a wonderful book in 2014, The Meaning of Human Existence. As the title suggests, Wilson approaches several existential topics from his viewpoint as a biologist and naturalist. He contends that the study of biology and pre-history is fundamental to understanding modern history and cultural evolution; and that the study of super organisms, eusocial species and ecology can teach us a lot about human nature. This post will summarise the lessons that I took from Wilson’s work, focusing more so on evolutionary complexity than on his response to meaning on existence itself.

Leafcutters and complexity

If you’re like me and curious about the behaviour of eusocial groups and superorganisms, the leafcutter ants are a wonderful place to start. As a former economist, I find their division and specialisation of labour fascinating. For example, Wilson describes how leafcutter foragers carry smaller sister-ants on their backs to fight off parasitic phorid flies. And against larger predators like anteaters, the leafcutter colony will employ large specialised defenders with ‘razor-sharp mandibles’.

Leafcutters also operate incredible assembly lines, with some ants foraging as far as 200 metres from their nest. They use vegetation, not for immediate consumption, but for the cultivation of fungi, their primary food source. Inside their nests are another caste of ants that specialise at chewing veggie fragments, which they combine with “their own fecal material as fertilizer”. An even smaller caste will use these clumps to build their gardens, with the smallest of castes tending to the fungi.

How does such complexity, specialisation, and organisation come about? Wilson gave an interesting analogy in a 2010 lecture on superorganisms with regard to leafcutter ants. He likens the queen to a ‘plant’ (or its stalk), in thinking about the propagation of genes from queen to queen. Natural selection acts on the ‘fruits’, the environmental fitness of its worker castes. And through many generations, once simple cooperatives can become highly specialised civilisations. Superorganisms are an extreme product of group behaviour, networks and multilevel selection.

Eusociality and organisation

The most complex societies in the animal and insect kingdom are typically eusocial. Eusociality refer to species that: care for their young cooperatively and through multiple generations; divide and specialise their labour; and surrender personal reproductive chances for greater reproductive success of the group (akin to altruism).

Eusociality is the ‘highest’ form of organisation. Today, we know of only nineteen instances of eusocial behaviour, ranging from eusocial insects (ants, bees, wasps and termites) to mole rats and parasitic shrimp. Then there are humans, which Wilson refers to as eusocial apes (although biologists continue to debate this classification).

Competitive advantage

While eusocial species are ‘rare’, the few that attained this status found tremendous ecological success. For instance, eusocial ants and termites account for “fewer than twenty thousand of the million known living insect species”, but “more than half of the world’s insect body weight”.

Eusociality confers a few advantages. Firstly, a centralised nest offers greater protection, and more efficient model for foraging and raising young. Secondly, the organisation and division of labour allows for increased specialisation and efficiency. Thirdly, organisation at scale allowed these groups to outperform their disorganised peers and predators.

Ants, bees, wasps and termites, for example, have achieved tremendous success at remarkably low levels of energy consumption and collective brain activity (relative to human standards at least). These superorganisms have turned simple but specialised functions into a decentralised, efficient and adaptive collective system.

Multilevel selection

Wilson refers to multilevel selection as the “grand master of advanced social evolution”. That is, multilevel selection operates on two levels: “individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups”. Groups compete with each other, perhaps through direct confrontation, or in competition for resources. Here, Wilson shares an old maxim:

“Selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members”.
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

Note: Keep in mind that the unit of heredity is the gene, and that genes tend to act within networks of genes. These gene cooperatives may confer traits to the ‘individual’, and the manner in which they interact with other groups of genes, may generate traits for the ‘group’.

The evolution of cooperation

Wilson’s maxim shares a parallel with Robert Axelrod’s work in The Evolution of Cooperation. Through the iterated prisoner’s dilemma problem, Axelrod describes how cooperation might emerge from cultural and biological processes. Axelrod shows that if interactions are ongoing and the future sufficiently valuable, then strategies like tit-for-tat can: (1) punish defection, (2) reward cooperation and (3) incentivise cooperation. And the emergence of such strategies do happen, whether through instinct and cumulative selection in ecosystems, or through intention and design in social systems.

Wilson’s maxim and Axelrod’s framework serve as reminders about the ongoing tension between cooperation and self-interest within and between groups. Cumulative selection at the individual and group level over time may result in “a balance of the opposing genes or an extinction of one of the two kinds altogether”. The success of ants and bees for example are attributed in part to their instinctive altruism and organisation.

“Humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly changing positions between the two extreme forces that created us… To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots—the outsized equivalents of ants.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

Superorganisms and human nature

It’s natural to ask what we can learn from ants, the masters of organisation. But if we’re looking for lessons of moral value, Wilson’s answer is definitive:

“Nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are unappealing, pitiful creatures… They do no work while in the nest and have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season when all fly out to mate.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

Culture and instinct

While we shouldn’t look to ants or wasps for moral lessons, I think it’s both illuminating and fascinating to compare and contrast the characteristics and histories of different eusocial species and superorganisms. After all, both humanity and superorganisms depend on cooperation, specialisation, divisions of labour and some degree of altruism for survival.

While eusocial insects rely on honed instinct, humans flourished through the transmission of culture. Unlike social insects, we’re often selfish, cooperating on the basis of mutual interest. Our cooperatives and hierarchies can degenerate, sometimes as easily as they form.

Prepared learning and the transmission of culture has been an important feature in our adaptive success. We’re not bounded to instinct in the same way that other animals are. The process of natural selection, of course, has shaped the intensity of our bias in certain areas. Wilson contrasts our fear of spiders and snakes to our arguably irrational, haphazard comfort with automobiles and firearms. Evolution hasn’t had the time to hardwire modern causes of mortality.

“The human mind did not evolve as an externally guided progression toward either pure reason or emotional fulfillment. It remains as it has always been, an instrument of survival that employs both reason and emotion. It emerged in its present form from a labyrinth of large and small steps… Each step in the labyrinth was an accident of mutation and natural selection acting on the alternative forms of genes that prescribe form and function of the brain and sensory system.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

A biased evolution

“Human nature is the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

Biology and prehistory have biased our cultural evolution in many ways. Wilson refers to the cultural convergence amongst societies in areas such as “athletic sports, bodily adornment, decorative art, etiquette, family feasting, folklore, funeral rites, hairstyles, …, [and] supernatural beings”. Evolution has wired us with “inherited propensities” to bond with familial and communal groups. Group-on-group competition and tribalism are thus a part of our violent history.

And unlike other eusocial species, we have a real gift for narratives and storytelling. Popular books, like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, and Philip Fernbach’s The Knowledge Illusion have discussed the topic at length. Wilson too describes how products of modern culture, like gossip, novels, celebrity worship and sports, have emerged from our social intelligence and the functions of social groups.

“We are devoted to stories because that is how the mind works—a never-ending wandering through past scenarios and through alternative scenarios of the future.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

Dominance and vulnerability

The dominance of eusocial species and superorganisms brings about its own ecological vulnerabilities. We can see smaller scale examples with the impact of disease on livestock and monoculture crops. But something like a collapse of honeybee populations could threaten global crop pollination, food supplies and entire ecosystems. As Wilson puts it: “perhaps, like us, with our complex cities and interconnected high technology, it is their excellence that has put them at greater risk”.

Wilson describes the challenge of understanding the interactions of flora and fauna across different levels of biodiversity (ecosystems, species and genes). Guiding policies like HIPPO for example – (H) Habitat loss, (I) invasive species, (P) pollution, (P) population growth, and (O) overharvesting – can help to summarise the common “agents of destruction”.

Parasite load

Another interesting observation from biology that Wilson raises is the tolerable parasite load. Most living plants and animals carry some number of parasites with them — tiny predators that adapted to survival and reproduction inside their host. While a burden on the host, “it would be a mistake for an individual to try to eliminate all of its tolerable parasites. The cost would be too great in time and too disruptive to its own bodily functions”. But evolution can, through the process of cumulative selection, balance these trade-offs over time.

Palaeolithic curse

“Human beings are not wicked by nature. We have enough intelligence, goodwill, generosity, and enterprise to turn Earth into a paradise both for ourselves and for the biosphere that gave us birth… The problem holding everything up thus far is that Homo sapiens is an innately dysfunctional species.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

Bureaucracy and dysfunction seem to grow with social structures of increasing scale, interconnectedness and complexity. Anyone working within a large company, university or government agency can attest to this. But is this a natural cost to growth, or an intermediary point in humanity’s cultural evolution?

Wilson points to the palaeolithic curse. That is, our hunter-gatherer genetic adaptations are sometimes the barrier to fostering a truly inclusive, pluralistic and technoscientific civilization. Tribal, ethnic, religious and ideological conflict remains rife to this day. The way forward is also not always obvious. Topics like economic policy, geopolitics, and our own hereditary nature are not easy to master. But modern civilization is young. I’m optimistic that we’ll get better at organising ourselves as a collective.

Sensory idiots

“In a nutshell, the evolutionary innovations that made us dominant over the rest of life also left us sensory cripples.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

I think it a humbling experience to learn about biology and ecology. It’s a reminder of the myopia in which we experience our world. Our abilities to see, hear and smell for instance are weak by animal standards. There are whole ranges of stimuli that we cannot experience. Consider for example the birds that use Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, or fish that rely on electrical fields to find and catch their prey. While we’ve overcome some of these limitations through science and technology, we cannot truly appreciate the vastness of experience and possibility. Our cultural evolution, pre-history and cumulative selection have shaped our narrow viewpoint.

“We think ourselves brilliant in our ability to detect chemicals with nose, tongue, and palate. We proudly recognize the bouquet arising from the swirl and aftertaste of a fine vintage. … Yet we are chemosensory idiots. … All paltry compared to what goes on around us in the world of pheromones and allomones.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

A detour on dogma

Years ago, the theory of inclusive fitness was a popular choice for explaining the emergence of social evolution. In contrast to the standard theory of natural selection, inclusive fitness defined individual group members as the unit of selection, not the individual genes. The theory explained how cooperation and altruism might emerge through kinship selection.

Today, the theory of inclusive fitness, according to Wilson, is limited to special cases. I won’t go into details here, but the author describes how the theory was built upon unsound assumptions and struggled to explain various field data. He recalls how extensions of inclusive fitness became ‘increasingly abstract’ and ‘remote from the empirical work’.

Wilson, along with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, showed how population genetics and direct natural selection could explain most phenomena as well or better than the theory of inclusive fitness. But this refutation attracted strong resistance from their colleagues. Since many studies were built on this theory, Wilson and co’s findings collapsed the house of cards. Many scientists found the evidence hard to accept, at least at first.

For Wilson, it was a reminder about the ease in which ideology and dogmatism can creep into our work. I’m again reminded of parallels in the social sciences. While theories like the Efficient Market Hypothesis are useful tools for learning and research, they can inhibit progress if we take these ideas to ideological extremes.

History, worldviews and meaning

“History makes little sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes little sense without biology”.
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

If we’re to understand the human condition, we’ll “need a much broader definition of history”. This should comprise of circumstances and process, of biological and cultural evolution, and its interconnections. Humanity after all is a product of history, pre-history and biology. Wilson argues that such a worldview would be most enriching. It’s also why he advocates for a liberal education that combines science, the humanities and their interconnections. He worries about academics that shuttle people ever deeper into greater specialisation. Each unable to connect the dots of knowledge or one another.

“Science and the humanities, it is true, are fundamentally different from each other in what they say and do. But they are complementary to each other in origin, and they arise from the same creative processes in the human brain. If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

From Wilson’s viewpoint, science interprets “meaning” as a product of “accidents of history”, “overlapping networks of physical cause and effect… obedient only to the laws of the Universe”. Each event shapes the probabilities and possibilities of events to follow. Natural selection of single-step mutations is perhaps the ultimate example of this.

So, meaning in a biological sense is functional. A spider spins its webs to catch prey. Whether conscious or not to its creator, this is the purpose of the web. But humans in some ways “are about to abandon natural selection”. Conscious intent and selection (or at least a sense of it) enables us to influence our progress, advancement, and meaning.

And on the meaning of human existence — well, I’ve chosen to avoid that discussion here. It remains a deeply personal question. But I’ll end the post here with Wilson’s snippet on the matter:

“So, what is the meaning of human existence? I’ve suggested that it is the epic of the species, begun in biological evolution and prehistory, passed into recorded history, and urgently now, day by day, faster and faster into the indefinite future, it is also what we will choose to become.”
E.O. Wilson. The Meaning of Human Existence. (2014)

References

Wilson, E.O. (2014). The Meaning of Human Existence.
Holldobler, B., & Wilson, E.O. (2010). The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct.
Wilson, E.O. (2010). The Superorganism – John M. Prather Lectures in Biology. Available at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1GUb9wpgtA >
Robert Axelrod. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. Selected papers from Axelrod, available at: < http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/ >

The Nature of Human Existence — Edward O. Wilson on Superorganisms, Eusociality and Human Nature