[R-G] [Review] Evolution For Everyone

[Richard Menec]

[I hope Wilson read Peter Kropotkin and his landmark 'Mutual Aid', which 
offers hundreds of examples where cooperative behaviour has played a much 
more significant role in the evolution of species than has 
competition....RM]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/06/arts/web-0407idbriefs7A.php

Book Review: Evolution For Everyone

By Natalie Angier

Published: April 6, 2007

Evolution For Everyone; How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think 
About Our Lives.
By David Sloan Wilson.
390 pages.
$24.
Delacorte Press.

Just as in the classic clashes of nature, where every mutational upgrade in 
a carnivore's strength or cunning is soon countered by a speedier or more 
paranoid model of antelope, so the pitched struggle between evolutionary 
theory and its deniers has yielded a bristling diversity of ploys and 
counterploys. The heavyhanded biblical literalism of creationist science 
evolves into the feints and curlicues of intelligent design, and the casual 
dismissiveness with which scientists long regarded the anti-evolutionists 
gives way to a belated awareness that, gee, the public doesn't seem to 
realize how fatuous the other side is, and maybe it's time to combat the 
creationist phylum head on. And so, over the last few years, scientists have 
unleashed a blitzkrieg of books in defense of Darwinism, summarizing the 
Everest of supportive evidence for evolutionary theory, filleting the 
arguments of the naysayers or reciting, yet again, the story of Charles 
Darwin, depressive naturalist extraordinaire, whose increasingly pervasive 
avuncular profile has lofted him to logo status on par with Einstein and the 
Nike swoosh.

David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University, 
takes a different and decidedly refreshing approach. Rather than catalogue 
its successes, denounce its detractors or in any way present evolutionary 
theory as the province of expert tacticians like himself, Wilson invites 
readers inside and shows them how Darwinism is done, and at lesson's end 
urges us to go ahead, feel free to try it at home. The result is a 
sprightly, absorbing and charmingly earnest book that manages a minor 
miracle, the near-complete emulsifying of science and the "real world," 
ingredients too often kept stubbornly, senselessly apart. Only when Wilson 
seeks to add religion to the mix, and to show what natural, happy symbionts 
evolutionary biology and religious faith can be, does he begin to sound like 
a corporate motivational speaker or a political candidate glad-handing the 
crowd.

In Wilson's view, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has the 
beauty of being both simple and profound. Unlike quantum mechanics or the 
general theory of relativity, the basic concepts behind evolutionary theory 
are easy to grasp; and once grasped, he argues, they can be broadly applied 
to better understand ourselves and the world - the world both as it is and 
as it might be, with the right bit of well-informed coaxing. Wilson has long 
been interested in the evolution of co-operative and altruistic behavior, 
and much of the book is devoted to the premise that "goodness can evolve, at 
least when the appropriate conditions are met." As he sees it, all of life 
is characterized by a "cosmic" struggle between good and evil, the 
high-strung terms we apply to behaviors that are either cooperative or 
selfish, civic or anomic. The constant give-and-take between me versus we 
extends down to the tiniest and most primal elements of life. Short 
biochemical sequences may want to replicate themselves ad infinitum, their 
neighboring sequences be damned; yet genes get together under the aegis of 
cells and reproduce in orderly fashion as genomes, as collectives of 
sequences, setting aside some of their immediate selfish urges for the sake 
of long-term genomic survival. Cells further collude as organs, and organs 
pool their talents and become bodies.

The conflict between being well behaved, being good, not gulping down more 
than your share, and being selfish enough to get your fair share, "is 
eternal and encompasses virtually all species on earth," he writes, and it 
likely occurs on any other planet that supports life, too, "because it is 
predicted at such a fundamental level by evolutionary theory." How do higher 
patterns of cooperative behavior emerge from aggregates of small, selfish 
units? With carrots, sticks and ceaseless surveillance. In the human body, 
for example, nascent tumor cells arise on a shockingly regular basis, each 
determined to replicate without bound; again and again, immune cells attack 
the malignancies, destroying the outlaw cells and themselves in the process. 
The larger body survives to breed, and hence spawn a legacy far sturdier 
than any tumor mass could manage.

As with our bodies, so with our behaviors. Wilson explores the many 
fascinating ways in which humans are the consummate group-thinking, 
team-playing animal. The way we point things out to one another, for 
example, is unique among primates. "Apes raised with people learn to point 
for things that they want but never point to call the attention of their 
human caretakers to objects of mutual interest," Wilson writes, "something 
that human infants start doing around their first birthday." The eyes of 
other apes are dark across their entire span and thus are hard to follow, 
but the contrast between the white sclera and colored iris of the human eye 
makes it difficult for people to conceal the direction in which they are 
looking. In the interdependent, egalitarian context of the tribe, the 
ancestral human setting, Wilson says, "it becomes advantageous for members 
of the team to share information, turning the eyes into organs of 
communication in addition to organs of vision." Humans are equipped with all 
the dispositional tools needed to establish and maintain order in the 
commons. Studies have revealed a deep capacity for empathy, a willingness to 
trust others and become instant best friends; and an equally strong urge to 
punish cheaters, to exact revenge against those who buck group rules for 
private gain.

Of course, even as humans bond together in groups and behave with impressive 
civility toward their neighbors, they are capable of treating those outside 
the group with ruthless savagery. Wilson is not naïve, and he recognizes the 
ease with which humans fall into an us-versus-them mind-set. Yet he is a 
self-described optimist, and he believes that the golden circles of we-ness, 
the conditions that encourage entities at every stratum of life to stop 
competing and instead pool their labors into a communally acting 
mega-entity, can be expanded outward like ripples on a pond until they 
encompass all of us - that the entire human race can evolve the culturally 
primed if not genetically settled incentive to see our futures for what they 
are, inexorably linked on the lone blue planet we share.

Toward the end of the book he offers a series of evolutionarily informed 
suggestions on how we might help widen the geometry of good will, beginning 
with the italicized, boldface pronouncement that "we are not fated by our 
genes to engage in violent conflict." Our bloody past does not foretell an 
inevitably bloody future, and violent behaviors that make grim sense in one 
context can become maladaptive in another. "The Vikings of Iceland were 
among the fiercest people on earth, and now they are the most peaceful," he 
observes. "In principle, it is possible to completely eliminate violent 
conflict by eliminating its preferred 'habitat.'" For their universal appeal 
and basal power to harmonize a crowd, he recommends more music and dancing 
and asks, "Could we establish world peace if everyone at the United Nations 
showed up in leotards?" He also believes that the world's religions should 
be tapped for their "wisdom." This is a fine idea in the abstract, but given 
current events and the fissuring of the world along so many theo-sectarian 
lines, I wish we could forgo the sermon and just strike up the band.

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