Yesterday the Chicago Humanities Festival, an esteemed local event, sponsored a dialogue between the famous biologist E. O. Wilson and the actor, writer, and science popularizer Alan “Hawkeye” Alda. (It was cosponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Scences—the AAAS.) The talk, in the large and famous Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, was preceded by a private lunch with AAAS members in the Economics Building across the street. Ed (for whom I used to teach) and Alda didn’t show up except at the end, but I managed to get two photos:

Wilson (he’s 88 now, and still running around the world and cranking out books):

Alda (right), who’s 81 and of course quite active as well. It’s heartening to see both of these guys still doing their thing as “advanced seniors”.

The hourlong discussion at the chapel was advertised like this:

In this rare public conversation, Alda engages Edward O. Wilson, one of the most celebrated biologists of our time, whose The Origins of Creativity offers a sweeping examination of the relationship between the humanities and the sciences and how both are rooted in human creativity—the defining trait of our species. Join a master communicator and the “senior statesman of science” for an eloquent exploration of creativity and its manifestations throughout human history.

Wilson and Alda took their places onstage while the Chapel organist played some lively (but loud!) tunes. (The two organs in the Chapel are magnificent, and have resonance chambers built into the walls. And the Gothic design, long and high, provides great acoustics, though not so much for speech.)

The pair was introduced by Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet who was twice Poet Laureate of the U.S. She stood in the raised pulpit to make her introduction! This was all quite funny because both Wilson and Alda are atheists (well, Alda says he’s an “agnostic”).

The event was sold out, and the Chapel holds 1700 people!:

So what did they talk about? Sadly, I was disappointed, even though Alda did a lovely reading from Wilson’s new book, recounting a story that a young San man (formerly “Bushmen”) told to others of his group around a campfire in Africa. You could tell that Alda was a skilled actor, as his reading was mesmerizing, with great pacing and intonation. But the conversation itself largely centered not on creativity, but on altruism and cooperation; and Wilson used the occasion to relentlessly push his theory that these phenomena, as well as human brain size, empathy, and creativity, were the result of selection among human groups rather than Darwinian selection acting on individuals.

Wilson has been pushing this idea for years, but almost no biologists buy it because of the problems with evolving many traits by group selection, which is inefficient compared to individual selection. If you want to see my take on this idea, read my TLS review of Wilson’s 2013 book, The Social Conquest of Earth. Wilson, it seems, believes that nearly every trait that marks us as “human” evolved on the savannah by differential survival and reproduction of hominin groups.

Much of the first half of the conversation centered on empathy, which both men agreed meant not sympathy for another, but the ability to put oneself into someone else’s shoes. (Empathy is usually required for true sympathy, but they aren’t the same thing.) And clearly empathy, part of Dennett’s “intentional stance“, would have been adaptively advantageous in early humans. If you can imagine what someone else feels or thinks, then you can more easily predict what they are going to do, and if you can do that, then you can either get along with them better or obviate their attempts to outcompete you. Either way, you gain an advantage over others, which could translate into more reproduction.

The problem is that that this advantage accrues to the individual, not to the group, although groups full of empathic individuals might survive better, and grow larger, than groups full of clueless people. But how does empathy spread through a population in the first place? Almost surely through individual selection—the form of selection that Wilson largely rejects.

Not only did Wilson claim that empathy (and also altruism) evolved by group selection, but that large brain size in humans, which started increasing several million years ago, was explained by the need for an apparatus to devise and express empathy! Well, that might be true, but there are lots of theories about why human brains got bigger, including the advent of cooking, tool use, and so on; and we have no way to distinguish among them. It’s also possible that even if the phenomena are connected, adoption of empathy was a consequence rather than a cause of the increase in brain size. We just don’t know, but Wilson stated his take quite strongly. The important thing is that there would surely be an individual selection advantage to having a bigger brain: all kinds of benefits would accrue to someone with more complex neuronal wiring. You simply don’t need to invoke an unparsimonious process to explain this trend.

Wilson then said he was going to give the audience an equation about how group selection worked, and my heart sank as I imagined him trying to spout math. Fortunately, he said just this: “Within groups, selfish individuals outcompete altruistic ones. But altruistic groups outcompete selfish ones.” The audience applauded loudly, but of course didn’t realize that that is one of the big problems of group selection. Not only is the turnover of individuals within groups faster than the turnover of groups themselves (via splitting and extinction), but once you have a group of all altruists, it’s unstable to the invasion of selfish individuals who gain but do not give. One selfish person in an altruistic group will begin breeding like rabbits compared to the others. It’s thus quite problematic to assert that some many aspects of human behavior and morphology evolved by selection among groups rather than among individuals. If you want to read a comprehensive critique of the problems with group selection, you couldn’t do better than Steve Pinker’s Edge piece, “The false allure of group selection.”

Creativity entered the conversation in only one way. Alda asked, quite reasonably, if it were possible for there to be any rapprochement between science and the humanities/arts. Wilson’s answer was intriguing but, to me, unsatisfying. What he did say that edified the audience was that we are an “audiovisual” species: we depend on sight and hearing more than on our other senses. We belong, said Wilson, to one of the few animal groups that are like that, which include birds, crickets, and frogs. Most animals, he added, depend on chemicals to communicate (think ants), or sometimes electrical stimuli.

To Wilson, this mandates a revolution in the arts and humanities, for our arts are based on only these two senses, and we neglect the way other animals can communicate—ways based on their different evolutionary pathways. Wilson added, noting that this may anger many in the audience (after all, it was a “humanities” festival), that “the difference between art and science is that art has no roots.” By that he meant that science, especially science involving human behavior, has “roots” in evolution, so we can investigate behavior using that framework. Art doesn’t take into account any evolutionary roots, although it could be approached that way (there are, for example, people who do “Darwinian analysis of literature”). And I’m sure that one could discover stuff about the arts from an evolutionary standpoint: why do humans like certain types of painting or music? Perhaps evolution can make some contribution there.

The problem is that that is a form of analysis, and not the form of art itself, which involves imagination. What would arts and humanities firmly based on evolution be like? How would they differ from ancient and modern art, music, and literature? What would have changed in, say, Picasso or Tolstoy? Wilson didn’t say. But he’s long espoused an absorption of art into science, in the way an amoeba engulfs its food. So while I agree that science can have a some role in understanding art, I don’t think that “giving art roots” is going to change its creation.

Wilson did try such a fusion, for I gather (according to Alda) that Wilson wrote a novel from the point of view of ants. That’s creative and fun, but since we don’t really know what the consciousness of an ant is like, we’re hardly at the point where we can do something like this accurately. It’s a form of science fiction that, while informed by science, is not going to revolutionize the arts in toto. This is a one-off, a niche genre.

At the end there was about ten minutes for questions from the audience, and most weren’t that interesting. One woman asked Wilson, since she thought he wrote so poetically, which poets he most admired. And sadly, he gave no names, but just went on about how reading poetry could help improve one’s prose. I wanted to hear names!

Alda pitched Wilson softballs, which is fine because this was a conversation, not an interrogation. And Alda was also funny, cracking jokes and being entertaining. He’s also clearly up on evolutionary biology and theories about human behavior, though he didn’t seem to know much about group selection—or, if he did, he chose to avoid it.

I like Ed: he helped get me into Harvard (long story) and I was a t.a. for two years in his Bio 1 class. Despite his huge fight with my advisor Dick Lewontin about sociobiology, Wilson was always nice to me: a real Southern gentleman (he hails from Alabama). But, as I’ve said before, I cannot understand why he seems to be staking his reputation on the claimed importance of group selection. Some of his colleagues have told me that Ed feels as if his career has been incomplete without a “big idea”, and group selection has become that idea. But Wilson is immensely famous, and rightfully so: for his scientific work, his books, his popularization, and his efforts to conserve wildlife. He doesn’t need a big idea! And it makes me sad to see him pushing a broken-down view of evolution—one rejected by a large majority of biologists—as a way to cap his career. So be it.

What bothered me more was that the audience filed out of Rockefeller Chapel thinking that group selection was the be-all and end-all of evolution. I resisted asking Ed a question, as I didn’t want to go after him in public and it simply wasn’t the time or place, but I wish that there was a banner over the exits that said “Individual selection, not group selection!”