That's Life: The evolution of Edward O. Wilson
Bethell, Tom
"That's Life: The evolution of Edward O. Wilson"
...He spoke kindly and unhurriedly to all, nodding, agreeing, elaborating on points...
...MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55 Nonetheless, Wilson thinks that the way it happened is so simple that "it can be under-stood with just a moment of reflection...
...if lower infant mortality leads to falling populations, not rising ones—then perhaps we need to think differently about what sustainability means...
...The much-heralded translation of the genome into a nucleotide sequence, sometimes called a "decoding," turns out in retrospect to be an encoding—knowing the sequence of nucleotides doesn't tell us its meaning...
...Simon had bet him that the prices of metals would fall during the 1980s, and Ehrlich accepted "Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in...
...In the last two decades, the number of mammal species actually counted has grown by 25 percent, from 4,000 to 5,000...
...Over the eons, atoms managed to whirl themselves into everything from bacteria to people...
...Wilson never has accepted that religion and science were separate domains, with different questions and different answers (Stephen Jay Gould's position...
...They estimated the percentage of species that disappears when habitat is lost...
...Ants "far exceed human beings in nastiness,"Wilson has written...
...One thing we rarely hear is that the approach to taxonomy has been quietly politicized.To some extent, there have always been disagreements between "lumpers" and "splitters" Because it is not always easy to tell whether two creatures really do belong to different species, the disagreements have been legitimate.Two specimens are said to belong to different species if they cannot interbreed in "natural conditions" But no one is quite sure what "natural" means, nor can they with full confidence attribute a failure to reproMARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 duce to an inability to do so...
...He says, for example, that the rate of extinction now is "100 to 1,000 times higher than it was before the coming of humanity...
...One important point of agreement with Wilson's erstwhile critics on the Left is worth noting...
...So that was it—ants supposedly evolved from wasps...
...He describes himself thus: "Norman Myers is an HonoraryVisiting Fellow of Oxford University...
...Instead of his regular Alabama Baptist undertaker's suit, he was wearing an ecology-green jacket, a blue pinstriped shirt and a rust-colored tie that fell somewhere between trusty and rustic...
...Although scientists have recently found that "the biosphere is far richer in diversity than they had originally thought,"Wilson said that diversity, which took over three billion years to evolve,"is being eroded at an accelerating rate by human activity...
...Well, maybe by panspermia, in which life-forms floated in from other parts of the galaxy...
...Not that he was blaming us, of course...
...The income difference between the fifth of the worlds population in the wealthiest countries and the fifth in the world's poorest, has gone from 30 to one in the 1960s, to 74 to one today" he went on...
...But of course he was...
...It was the law of the jungle, or, as Charles Darwin himself had said: survival of the fittest...
...His sin—his heresy is to be optimistic...
...Forty years ago this year, Rachel Carson alerted a complacent world to the dangers posed by pesticides.Vilified by the chemical industry, Carson was already dying of cancer when the book was published...
...But it often seems that what he really wants, along withmany other environmentalists, is to separate man from the rest of nature—at least if he is armed with anything more than microscopes, or bows and arrows...
...If we assume that the low end ofWilson's range is closer to the truth, the 10,000 known bird species would imply that 10 bird species have gone extinct in the past century...
...Perhaps the most sustainable thing we can do is develop new technology, increase trade and spread affluence...
...If 6 billion people went back to nature, nature would be in desperate trouble...
...But it's not much to go with...
...A few years ago, Tom Wolfe jocularly referred to Wilson as Darwin II.Yet Darwin himself makes itclear in The Origin of Species that extinction (to which he devotes a chapter) is not a tragedy, but an essential ingredient of evolution...
...This was the Splitters'Victory...
...What would Darwin himself have made of these alarms about extinction...
...In the years 1985 to 2001, the global number of amphibian species grew by one third...
...Result: There are more howlers in Schneider's short article than in Lomborg's whole book...
...Darwin's theory was "nothing but the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms," Darwin himself had written—laissez-faire economics read back into nature—and he surely would have looked askance at sentimental rescue attempts...
...that per capita food production is rising rapidly even in the developing world...
...He strongly embraces the philosophical materialism that, today, is a key part of the worldview of most scientists...
...If these figures were applied to mountain lions, an area larger than the United States would be required for effective conservation," he says...
...Imagine a school principal who claimed that more and more pupils were playing hooky...
...It cannot be his recommendations in favor of renewable energy and worried about pollution...
...THE DORKING©OF BJORN LOMBO GREENDOM'S GREAT AND 0000 ARE COMPETING TO FIND EPITHETS FOR THE AUTHOR OF INfTMIPIIG!lfNVIAONMfNIAlW1 B Y MATT R I D L E Y At the Christmas cabaret in the politics department of Aarhus University in Denmark last year, all the cast members joined together at the end to sing a song about one of the associate professors...
...Tear-gassed the critters...
...In talks, he sometimes refers to the biosphere as "the creation...
...How many are alive today...
...There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain," concluded the official, independent study of the subject...
...No fewer than nine new species ofprirnates were discovered in the 1990s...
...Having argued that we should find a way to live sustainably on the planet, they ought to be pleased that 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 Bjorn Lomborg—young, blond, piano-playing, but basically a statistics nerd—may not be back soon...
...Hopeless...
...What species have gone extinct...
...The rich grow richer," he said at one point (pausing for a beat...
...Imbued with good will, a "conservation ethic" and the power to act, they will make the right ! choices in the end.To that extent he turns out to be an optimist after all...
...He drifted away from the church, abandoned his Christian faith...
...See "That's Life," page 54...
...Mayr, 98, is still puttering about at Harvard to this day...
...If you do not believe me, look up the statistics...
...Gaia cries out...
...Molecules in motion are all that exist, in other words, and it follows from that premise that all of life—from the ants that Wilson loves to study, to Homo sapiens—is "self-assembled...
...He found science and soon "tasted the sweet fruit of intellectual rebellion" You might say that he left Eden of his own accord...
...Shoot, shovel and shut-up" is said to be the wisest course for the owner who plays host to such dangerous visitors...
...The Polynesian seafarers "broke the crucible of evolution," he writes.Wilson elsewhere says that he wants to "reconcile humanity and nature...
...that all measures of air pollution are falling almost everywhere...
...No data at all just a circular assumption: If 40,000 species go extinct a year, then 40,000 species go extinct a year...
...Among the elect...
...And what else lay deeply hidden within my soul...
...In the first case, Schneider's response "completely misunderstands what we have done," according to Harvard meteorologist Richard Lindzen, the original author of work on the "iris effect" and upper level cirrus clouds...
...He is also a scholar of broad education, able (and eager) to explain technical matter to a wide audience, and a talented writer who makes bold excursions into contiguous disciplines...
...He was indicting others, unnamed: money-grubbing, Caterpillar-operating, profit-seeking, ditch-digging, land-clearing, SUV-driving consumers...
...The environmental movement raises most of its funds through direct mail, paid advertising and news coverage...
...In the other he said 20 percent of energy use, when he meant 20 percent of electricity generation...
...We have only begun to explore life on Earth," he says...
...But what we have learned in the years since has to some extent undermined what we thought we knew Since February 2001, what Francis Crick famously termed the "central dogma" of molecular biology—the idea that information flows in one direction only, from genes to the heritable traits of the organism—has suffered a serious setback...
...In their book Facts not Fear, Michael San-era and Jane S. Shaw examined the well-studied record of wildlife in North America and found that since the early nineteenth century "only a few animal species actually became extinct...
...In 1990 Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager from the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich...
...While there, browsing in a bookshop, he came across a profile in hired magazine of the late Julian Simon, an economist who claimed, with graphs, that on most measures the environment was improving, not getting worse...
...That thought grew, and soon became a "ruinous fracture" within what had seemed a perfect jewel...
...He is very good at what he does—earnest, conscientious, industrious, driven...
...The reason so many environmental trends are benign is not because of legislation, let alone protest.Apart from the ozone layer and city smogs, where campaigns probably did accelerate change, most improvements have been brought about more by innovation, development and growth than by government action...
...And it does seem tailored to today's fashions...
...In late February he was appointed by the Danish government to run a new institute for environmental economic assessment.This caused uproar among environmentalists, because Lomborg has now succeeded Monsanto as the official chief villain of the world environmental movement...
...with their sterile castes, million-daughter queens, division of labor, major and minor workers, dwarf gardeners, weavers, soldiers, slave hunters, termite wars and their "hard-wired" levels of"defense spending...
...Wilson, however, takes the side of the species against all such Victorian theorizing...
...Has it proved to be a satisfactory substitute for God...
...Animals and plants are disappearing at an increasing rate, Wilson claims, and humans are responsible for these "mass extinctions," this "accelerated destruction of the natural environment"An event not to be missed, obviously...
...Wilson says nothing about the perverse incentives of communal ownership, and despite his wide reading seems not to have come across Garrett Hardin's influential article, "The Tragedy of the Commons" He defends the Endangered Species Act, without noting that it endangers species by threatening to deliver up to government control any spot of land where such species alight...
...MacArthur and Wilson suggested between 25 and 50 individuals are needed to ensure the persistence of a population, but Martin now says the minimal number ranges from 10,000 to one million...
...Scienti icAmerican devoted 11 pages in January to an unattractive attempt to blacken his reputation...
...Give money to the World Conservation Union, for instance...
...In older textbooks, before environmentalism became a political cause, we were told that 99.9 per-cent of all species that have ever existed on Earth went extinct before man appeared on the scene.The suspicion was that all species eventually went extinct...
...National Research Council, the World Bank and United Nations agencies...
...Recently, a defendant was accused of"monopolizing the market for ready-made pizza dough inside Salt Lake City limits," Smith said...
...Maybe the whole world was also "totally physical...
...This singular entity he called Gaia, after Gaea, or Ge, a vaguely personal goddess of early Greece,"Wilson writes, adding that he sees "considerable merit in looking at life in this grand holistic manner...
...An increasing number of scientists have vested interests in pessimism, too...
...Years ago, in his lab at Harvard, Wilson showed me his ant armies, penned up behind clear plexiglass...
...Hairy harridans, earnest bespectacled ecos and bright, young college students—they are so quiet and deferential these days—clutched their coats and patiently awaited the great man...
...Now look where this little trick of arithmetic has got Myers...
...If 6 billion people have both more food and more forest than their 3 billion parents did...
...But given the complexity of ant colonies, with their castes of assembly-line workers cutting up leaves and turning them into fungi, and when you consider how little we know about the mechanisms that make these things happen, saying that "just a moment of reflection" is all that's needed really is ideology dressed up as science...
...When Martin Luther King, Sr...
...He hoped to avoid the impression that, with his Cambridge credentials, he was preaching mere ideology dressed up as science...
...58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002...
...That's it...
...Decrying what he calls the "Lomborg scam," Wilson is dismayed by "the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expanded to combat it in the media" But it was precisely the nondeployrnent of scientific talent that allowed the exaggerated claims of endangered species to be promulgated in the first place...
...Charles Mann and Mark Plummer say that five birds disappeared as a result of commercial hunting and forest clearing east of the Mississippi and around the Great Lakes...
...In 1993, Aaron Wildaysky and Julian Simon examined those figures, and concluded they were based on "pure guesswork"The principal source turned out to be a 1979 book The SinkingArk, written by Nor-man Myers...
...In Harvard faculty meetings, Watson "radiated contempt in all directions...
...The pessimists argue that Lomborg's good news might lead to complacency But Ehrlich's counsel of despair is far more dangerous...
...Quite early in his career, Wilson discovered the pheromones with which ants communicate, for which he might have won the Nobel if that prize existed in biology...
...Hard to believe there wasn't an echo here of the simultaneous embrace of political diversity...
...It's interesting that Wilson's first step was to embrace the philosophy (materialism) that determined how nature was to be "read...
...The magazine refused Lomborg the right to reply in the same issue, refused to post his response on its Web site SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN immediately, and threatened him for infringement of copyright when he tried to repro-duce their articles, with his responses, on his own Web site...
...if renewable resources such as whales are more easily exhausted than nonrenewables such as coal...
...Instead, are they beside themselves with fury...
...Even when humans are really not the guilty party, he finds grounds for preferring some species to others...
...He was quietly smiling to himself, glad of the full house, but his head was ducking down modestly—no excess of vanity here.Wilson was dressed with a little more display than usual...
...In The Future of Life, after an introductory "Letter to Thoreau," Wilson mentions the British scientist James E. Lovelock, who argues that the entire biosphere should be thought of as a kind of super-organism surrounding the planet...
...When we come to Wilson's statistics of biodiversity, things get a little murky...
...And the poor grow poorer...
...He rides a bicycle and approves of Den-mark's punitive car taxes...
...The contrast between doom-laden estimates and actual measurements is nowhere better displayed than in Wilson's latest book...
...Our fault...
...When the United Nations panel on global warming produced new estimates of the rise in temperature by 2100, they gave a range of 1.4 degrees to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit...
...In 1996, six new mammals were found in a single three-week period...
...Since then, India has doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, increased its cultivated land acreage by only 5 percent and begun to export food...
...They were the ivory-billed woodpecker, the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the heath hen and the Bach-man's warbler...
...if the prices of copper, wheat and natural gas are going down, not up...
...It is the bully now...
...if there are 20 times more carcinogens in three cups of organic coffee than in daily dietary exposure to the worst pesticide both before and after the DDT ban...
...An expert on the fauna of southern Africa, Martin is unaware of any species in that vast area that has gone extinct in the last 35 years and he suspects that some authors in this field—he politely names no names—have been "deliberately alarmist in their estimates...
...The press corps became an uncritical publicity machine, and before you knew it biodiversity was on the front page...
...See "The Borking of Bjorn Lomborg, page 52...
...Well, no, he didn't say that last bit...
...New species are still coming to light at a steady pace...
...Myers's share of the Volvo prize was worth $130,000...
...Fossil ants turned out to be members i of living groups.Then, in 1967,Wilson him-self discovered the remains of a couple of worker ants, 80 million years old, embedded in New Jersey amber...
...No doubt the ratio has improved since then, but the task is still overwhelming...
...It cannot be Lomborg's politics that annoys them...
...What can this mild statistician have said to annoy these great men so...
...He works as an independent scientist, undertaking research projects for the U.S...
...Over the years, however,Wilson has skirted modern-day liberalism, and politics is something he would prefer to avoid...
...Consider the treatment meted out to the late Julian Simon for having the temerity to be right...
...Priorities, anyone...
...Painting by Peter Schouten from The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples by Tim Flannery...
...It may seem to be a paradise, but in reality it's a "killing field of biological diversity...
...They could find none...
...If we simply count the number of extinctions actually observed during the past century in well studied "focal" groups such as birds and flowering plants, the annual rate is only 10 to 100 per million,"Wilson writes...
...Lomborg is also criticized for his effrontery in challenging the widely accepted figure that 40,000 species go extinct every year...
...Lomborg did...
...During his immersion baptism, Wilson reflected on how "totally physical" the experience was...
...Stan-ford University's Stephen Schneider, high priest of global warming, even berates Cam-bridge University Press for publishing it...
...If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week" He told me there were only 20 people in the world who knew enough to identify and classify ants—one for every thousand species, perhaps...
...The immediate future therefore is fraught with difficulty and is "best conceived of as a bottleneck of overpopulation and rising per capita consumption" Science and technology,"combined with a lack of self-understanding and a Paleolithic obstinacy," have brought us to "our present crisis...
...Maybe the pair under observation weren't in the mood...
...We are now living at a time when genes "for" any trait whatever, whether physical, behavioral or psycholob ical, can be posited as a causal mechanism...
...As he wrote in Biophilia,"no equations, photons or computer-readouts [are] needed...
...Along with about 500 others, I paid my $5 and went to hear the two-time Pulitzer prizewinner, myrmecologist, Harvard professor and prodigious salesman of speculative biology...
...Irritated, Lomborg went back to Denmark and set his students to the exercise of finding the flaw in Simon's statistics...
...But this is much too low, because the causes of extinction intensified throughout the 20th century" But it is precisely the reality of those causes—human encroachment and the destruction of habitats—that is in dispute...
...What the affair reveals is how far environmentalists now are the establishment, accustomed to doing the criticizing, not being criticized...
...He had a pie thrown in his face when he spoke in Oxford last September...
...His parents divorced when he was eight, and he soon became an eager amateur naturalist and col-lector of insects.At the age of 14 he told the minister of his decision "to be baptized and born again of my own free will" In his office that day, the Rev.Wallace Rogers was sitting there dressed in sports clothes and smoking a cigar.There was something disturbing about that hint of a Sundays-only facade, that lack of total commitment...
...He has served asVisiting Professor at universities from Harvard to Stanford and is a foreign member of the U.S...
...Then the Polynesians put ashore, in A.D...
...would call Wilson's description of Hawaii "nativist" and "anti-immigrant" In his search for solutions, Wilson is inclined to repose faith in non-governmental organizations, which have lately gained power in international bodies...
...The nucleotide sequence does not suffice to tell us what a gene does, and the task ahead has grown enormously in complexity...
...If a newly designated species could be shown to occupy a small enough range, any disturbance of that range could be said to threaten a species with extinction...
...There is something rotten in the state of environmentalism...
...Perhaps mindful of those who might have thought that this was the bad old Wilson of the sociobiology controversy, dating back to the 1970s, Wilson established at the outset that he was . . . how to say . . . one of us...
...Here are five of the six-teen: the Darling Downs hopping mouse, the big-eared hopping mouse, the short-tailed hopping mouse, the Alice Springs mouse and the long-tailed hopping mouse...
...And they were wasp-like...
...It was a fascinating hour as he told me about those creatures who were bustling about without paying us any heed...
...Here it is...
...H. L. Mencken said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" Remember acid rain in the 1980s and declining sperm counts in the 1990s...
...Yet the Scienti ficAmerican articles are devastating, not to Lomborg, but to his critics...
...So there is an arbitrary element to classification, but it has been exploited, politically, by those who knew what they wanted...
...MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53 That's Li The Evolution of Edward 0. Wilson B Y T 0 M B E T H E L L 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 Nowadays, famous authors don't just come to town and sign their books.They charge admission for the privilege...
...His 1975 book, Sociobiology: the New Synthesis, which extended Darwinian insights about bodies to behavior, had caused a tremendous stir...
...Answer: Destroy 90 percent of the habitat, and you lose 50 percent of the species.This casual rule of thumb, which Wilson terms an "Iron Law," was then extended from islands the size of a house to the Brazilian rain forest...
...In 1996, he Matt Ridley is the author of Genome and other books.A version of this story first appeared in The Spectator of London...
...He was telling us not just that we had sinned, but that we somehow could not help sinning...
...Nor will it do to claim that these successes came from green pressure...
...Most of us, I suspect, were willing to believe whatever we were told, as long as it reflected badly on the human race...
...No sanitation, no clean water, rampant disease and periodic starvation...
...With the phrase paleolithic obstinacy, you could feel the little shiver of pleasure running through the audience...
...He may be just about the best known scientist in America today, and his new book is called The Future of Lyle...
...It actually predicted that 15 to 20 percent of all species would become extinct by the year 2000...
...It took a while to repeat the experiments, but by 1996 Lawrence Slobodkin was able to write in Nature that other studies had shown that the species/area formula was "useless for explaining or predicting actual cases" Estimates of extinction rates depend on assumptions about the size of a "minimum viable population," MVP in the jargon.The ecologist Rowan Martin points out that the trend has been to increase that number, and today, he says, we are "in an era of MVP hyperinflation...
...CNN, CBS, Time and The New York Times all quoted only the higher figure...
...In the Scientific American critique, four leading environmental scientists lam-basted Lomborg...
...He and the late Robert MacArthur, a Princeton biologist, actually hired exterminators to destroy living things on small 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 mangrove islands off the coast of Florida...
...By the time of his lecture, however, that figure had risen to 300,000...
...And no doubt he made many converts that night and sent as many disciples forth as missionaries to the Ecosphere...
...Today we talk blithely of rape genes with-out so much as a peep from the Cambridge communards...
...He knew that we expected to hear bad things about our-selves, and he did not disappoint...
...So Lomborg wrote a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which not only endorses most of Simon's claims, but goes further, providing an immense compendium of factual evidence that the litany of environmental gloom we hear is mostly either exaggerated (species extinction, global warming) or wrong (population, air and water pollution, natural resources, food and hunger, health and life expectancy, waste, forest loss...
...His materialism had to be across the board, with religion itself explained from the bottom up, from atoms to genes "to human spirit" But he has found himself still "troubled by emotions...
...Here he was at last, lanky chap heading to the podium, 72 years old but still lean and fit, hank of hair bouncing on his forehead...
...Alone among the solar planets, Earth's physical environment is held by its organisms in a delicate equilibrium utterly different from what would be the case in their absence...
...Gross exaggeration became the norm in the last year of the Carter Administration, when the Global 2000 Report was published...
...Natural selection "almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life," he writes...
...Lomborg does not own a car...
...preached at Harvard in 1984, Wilson attended the service at the Memorial Church...
...The great and the good of greendom are competing to find epithets for him: "willful ignorance, selective quotations, destructive campaigning," says E. O. Wilson, guru of biodiversity...
...Titanis: a predatory bird of 400 kilograms that stalked Florida and Central America until 13,000 years ago...
...Antitrust policy today uses an analogous strategy, Fred Smith said...
...I arrived early and that turned out to be a good idea.The Press Club auditorium, large as it is, soon filled up.The rather furry-looking audience reminded me of nothing so much as a Neu'Ilrker cartoon by Koren...
...In his description of bird species,Wilson notes that at one point an "unexpected revolution in field studies opened the census to a flood of new candidate species...
...In his book,Wilson said that "about 272,000 species have been described worldwide...
...It was better in Danish...
...Wilson also made an astute feint in the opposite direction, reassuring us that he was "not your standard Harvard liberal professor...
...He has received the UNEP Environment Prize, the Volvo Environment Prize, and, most recently, the 2001 Blue Planet Prize...
...Original Sin was built into our genes...
...In the 1960s,Wilson himself did some of the research on which the present claims are based...
...Let me define the market, and I'll find you the monopoly," says the ambitious prosecutor...
...Then tell us their rate of disappearance...
...He even has had the nerve to criticize James D. Watson in print...
...He is leftish, concerned about world poverty and no fan of big business...
...If molecules assembled themselves into ants (or any other animal), we really don't know much about how that happened, step by step...
...They are "answerable to unpaid independent governI ing bodies," he writes, meaning they have been captured by enviros...
...With huge advertising budgets and ready access to the media, it can dominate the news, terrify multinational companies and expect to be invited into policy discussions at the highest levels...
...Asked how many students attend the school, he says 1,600 have been counted, but the true number could be 16,000, or 160,000.You would think: Bet-ter get an accurate count first...
...How remarkable it is that, whereas the evolutionists of old were in thrall to the Victorian idea of progress, today's evolutionists (and Wilson is a leading exponent of that philosophy) have become quite pessimistic about our future...
...It is in their estimates of future extinctions that Wilson and allies feel free to crank up the numbers...
...Ultimately, however, Wilson truly is establishmentarian in that he both shuns extreme measures and trusts the wise men of the world to do the right thing...
...Once upon a time it had been "as close to Eden as any land that ever existed" No mosquitoes, no ants, no stinging wasps, no venomous snakes or spiders...
...About 2,000 new species of flowering plants are added every year...
...Those genes, you see, had evolved back in those primeval savannas when our ancestors faced the brutal choice: Kill or be killed...
...Good man...
...went the refrain, "Don't just get lost out in the world...
...Other animals were severely reduced in numbers, but then they recovered, notably the bison...
...After his talk he stayed on for an hour at least, signing every book brought to him by those who formed a long and patient line circling around the auditorium...
...In their 1990 treatise Ants, Wilson and his Harvard colleague Bert Holldobler devoted 750 outsize pages to the mindless little creatures and their ways, and for that they won a Pulitzer instead...
...At times Wilson comes close to implying that it has not...
...It had the following outcome:The number of designated species rose, but it became much easier for the doomsayers to claim that a given species had gone extinct, or was on the verge of doing so, or would do so if the bulldozers in a particular place weren't stopped...
...Again and again, before insulting him, the critics concede through gritted teeth that he has got his facts right...
...In Life magazine, he saw pictures of Robert Oppenheimer and admired the man...
...Anyway, that Wilson, the sociobiological bete noir, has died and been reborn.The new man at the podium knew his catechism, and he recited a verse or two for our edification...
...At the end of 11 pages, the Scienti icAmerican critics have found two certain errors in Lomborg's work...
...In the second, Eigil Friis-Christensen, Director of the Danish Space Research Institute, says that Schneider "makes three unsubstantiated statements regarding our studies on the effect of cosmic rays on global cloud cover...
...Wilson is reasserting his faith in a principle (natural selection) that more or less has to be true, given the premise of materialism...
...Then came Ernst Mayr's Systematics and the Origin of Species, and science became what Wilson called "the new light and the way...
...Not to be outdone, Wilson says it is "entirely possible" that we could lose half the world's species by the end of the 21st century...
...Mussels are what the enviros "are playing games with now," he says...
...But its rapid progress encouraged Wilson to believe that with "an exact knowledge of its own genes, collective humanity in a few decadescan, if it wishes, select a new direction in its evolution and move there quickly...
...Recently, there was a report that 10,000 tigers are privately owned in the United States, perhaps twice the number still at large in Asia...
...He acknowledges the "ruined environment" of the socialist countries and is familiar with the land-buying and rights-purchasing strategies of such groups as the Nature Conservancy...
...So this was a modern-day, fire-and-brimstone sermon that made us feel good—good about ourselves...
...The study of global warming has brought them fame, funds, speaking fees and room service...
...Its message—that we took orders from our genes—was said by Harvard's flourishing left-wing community to be racist and sexist.At the level of public relations, at least, Wilson eventually won that battle, without much in the way of evidence having been produced on either side.To some extent, theculture itself shifted over to Wilson's side...
...But that is rank guesswork—why not 10 times lower...
...The discovery that there are far more proteins than genes "nullifies the exclusiveness of the gene's hold on the molecular process of inheritance," Barry Commoner pointed out in a recent Harper's...
...Many people now work to improve the environment at a local level with optimism that they can make the world a better place.To be constantly told by the high priests in the big pressure groups that all is doom and gloom is no help...
...Lomborg's crime is to rain on their parade...
...Wilson identifies Myers as "a major scholar in biodiversity studies," and cites him in a recent attack on Bjorn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist...
...Mice are no doubt still hopping in Australia, but maybe not on Darling Downs...
...Eight hundred million people live in "absolute poverty" (Glory be...
...In two cases, Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of misquoting sources and promptly does so himself...
...The famously unreliable Paul Erhlich, with whom Wilson increasingly shares awards and platforms, left the Global 2000 Report in the dust by estimating, in 1981, that by the end of the 20th century half the Earth's species would be gone...
...You get the drift...
...By 2000, "ten thousand valid species were securely established in the world register...
...For all three, a steady supply of peril is essential fuel...
...He trots out the argument about the pharmaceutical benefits that might be derived from critters yet unknown, but I suspect that his heart really isn't in such cost-benefit analysis...
...Lacks even a preliminary understanding of the science in question," says Norman Myers, guru of extinction...
...that oil, gas and minerals are not running out nearly as fast as was predicted in the 1970s, and so on...
...Maybe 10,000 times higher...
...In The Future of Life, Wilson says that 16 of the 262 mammals native to Australia "are known to have vanished since the arrival of the European settlers...
...The number was first used in 1979 by the British scientist Norman Myers.Yet what was the evidence for it...
...In college (the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa) he read Schrodinger's What Is Life?The great scientist argued not only that life was indeed entirely physical, but that biol-ogy could be wholly explained by the principles of physics and chemistry...
...published an obscure but brilliant article on game theory, which earned him an invitation to a conference on "computable economics" in Los Angeles (and an offer of a job at the University of California...
...Q.E.D...
...He warns us, for example, that Hawaii is only "deceptively beautiful...
...He "leans toward deism" The hunt for evolution in the past has yielded so little that it was perhaps not surprising when Wilson turned (in his 1998 best-seller Consilience) to evolution in the future...
...But he seems unenthusiastic about property-rights solutions to environmental issues, perhaps because he knows what his allies on the left would say about that...
...The editor of Scientific American, apparently without irony, condemns Lomborg for his "presumption" in challenging "investigators who have devoted their lives" to the subject, as if seniority defined truth...
...Birds...
...We're talking Survival of the Fittest here, remember...
...Experts had come to recognize the possible existence of large numbers of sibling species...
...But this casts doubts on the estimated losses...
...So we don't know, perhaps to within two orders of magnitude...
...And probably with Enron connections...
...Recently, the National Press Club in Washington was the venue, and Edward O.Wilson was the attraction for such an event...
...What Wilson calls "volitional evolution" may have to be postponed for a few decades...
...Here is what Myers actually said: "Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this man-handling of the natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of one million species, a far from unlikely prospect.This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average rate of 40,000 species per year...
...So we live now with those anachronistic but hard-to-resist little gadgets built into us, inside each cell.They just keep urging and inducing us to do those things which we ought not to do and to leave undone those things which we ought to do...
...At that point, he had no reason to think that the facts of biology obliged him to accept materialism as a belief system...
...You might think environmentalists would welcome such news...
...Good news?You would think so, but racially fussy enviro-purists sniff at these mongrel big-cats with their uncertain "blood lines...
...This is very threatening to lots of people's livelihoods...
...The major culprits, the "arch-destroyers," turn out to be Wilson's much admired ants, who reside now in Hawaii in rather excessive supercolonies of millions of workers.They "eat or drive out a large part of the other insects in their path," and the impact of their destruction "has rippled up the food chain" He calls this an "abnormal acceleration of the Darwinian process," but he doesn't say why it's abnormal, unless we assume that humans, somehow don't belong...
...New hereditary variations arise, "some survive and reproduce better than others, and as a result organic evolution occurs"That's it...
...We're here, and how else did it happen...
...The prestige of the academy would revive if there were a few more Wilsons out there...
...He is vastly knowledgeable about natural history in general, in addition to being a worldexpert on insects...
...The media, too, prefers pessimism...
...Wilson is blind in one eye, has difficulty hearing in the high frequency range, and has had to cope with mild dyslexia...
...In one he used the word catalyze instead of electrolyze...
...It lies not just in the petty factual dishonesty that is rife within the movement (Stephen Schneider once said, "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have"), but in the very philosophy that lies at the heart of greenery, the belief in constraint and retreat...
...Lomborg's book is "nothing more than a diatribe," says Lester Brown, serial predictor of imminent global famine...
...Bjorn, when will you come back...
...That's a "distinct possibility," says Wilson...
...Man is part of nature, and it follows from Darwinian premises that attempts to interfere with natural selection by introducing our own, rather artificial criteria could upset the economy of nature...
...The few remaining specimens increased to over 130,000 in the 20th century...
...Sperm counts are not falling...
...Classical liberal" may not be a bad description, and it is one that he doesn't mind...
...One of us...
...And just as the acceptance of progress may have encouraged belief in biological evolution, so, today, the intelligentsia's repudiation of progress may be quietly undermining that faith...
...Until recently," Wilson and Holldobler wrote, "the search for the ancestry of ants always ended in frustration...
...When a decade later Simon won easily, Ehrlich refused a rematch and promptly called Simon an imbecile in a speech...
...The most arresting statistic Lomborg produces is this: It is well known that meeting the Kyoto treaty on carbon dioxide reduction will buy at most six years of delay to global warming by 2100.Yet the annual cost of that treaty, in each year of the century, would be the same as the cost—once—of installing clean drinking water and sanitation for every human being on the planet...
...He speaks with an accent that is just a little bit South-ern, and there's a slight blurredness to his sibilants...
...The present biodiversity is "synthetic," he writes, the vast majority of its plants and animals having originated elsewhere.Wilson disparages the "immigrant" species, which "can be seen with monotonous frequency elsewhere" They are slowly wiping out the original denizens of Eden...
...He spoke for a full hour about "the issue closest to my heart—the reconciliation of humanity and nature" He wondered if we had asked ourselves "how we will be remembered a thousand years from now "We hadn't, but of course we fully expected the verdict of posterity to be unfavorable...
...Ehrlich, who in contrast won a "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation, is the man who argued in 1967 that, with the world on the brink of starvation, the West "should no longer send emergency aid to countries such as India, where sober analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population...
...population growth is falling faster (in percentage and absolute terms) than anybody predicted even 10 years ago...
...Born in 1929,Wilson was an only child, grew up on the Gulf Coast, and attended Pensacola's First Baptist Church...
...If we could reproduce just one of those steps in the lab, using inanimate parts, headlines would trumpet the achievement...
...It was the first Protestant service he had sat through in 40 years.When he heard the medley of old-time gospel hymns, he "wept quietly...
...Used chain saws...
...He was a publisher's dream author...
...The biosphere, meanwhile, is hurting...
...Because they change in outward appearance every three or four miles, it's easy to argue that different species are endangered all along the shoreline...
...Liberals (one hopes...
...He doesn't seem to realize that it is particularly in countries where property rights are insecure that species are threatened...
...400, and most of the "endemic forms" are now gone...
...In the intervening years, the environmental movement has turned from David into Goliath...
...National Academy of Sciences...
...The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Fred Smith, who has spent years studying the stratagems of environmentalists, says that groups who use environmentalist arguments to cloak an anti-growth agenda operate with this maxim: "Let me define the habitat and I'll find you the endangered species...
...No need to spell it out...
...But it has not been established that they are so different that they are incapable of reproducing...
...The number of species actually counted "comes to somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 mil-lion right now, but the estimates of the actual numbers out there range up to 100 mil-lion species and beyond,"Wilson says...
...Above all, he seems to be a scientist from an earlier and more civil time, before the phrase "college professor" acquired derogatory overtones, before the academy became the refuge of charlatans, quota-fillers and experts-aboutnothing...
...That sounds bad—until you read the list...
...Earlier in the 20th century, the word "instinct" functioned in much the same way, to explain all unlearned behavior...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 2
