Professor E.O. Wilson died. He was 92 years old.
As the obituary notes, his scientific arguments have generated a lot of praise and criticism too. I lack the ability to make sense of them all.
What I know for certain is that one of Wilson's sentences is a wonderful distillation of many problems that we face as humans. Wilson wrote:
All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.
What an awesome sentence that is! We do not know what we are and we do not agree on what we want to be.
Wilson extended his deep dive into how ants behave in order to understand how humans behave. He wrote:
Civilization appears to be the ultimate redeeming product of competition between groups. Because of it, we struggle on behalf of good and against evil, and reward generosity, compassion, and altruism while punishing or downplaying selfishness. But if group conflict created the best in us, it also created the deadliest. As humans, this is our greatest, and worst, genetic inheritance.
Group conflict. We immediately sense the importance of that phrase, especially after our experiences over the past six years.
He summed up the result of our greatest, and worst, genetic inheritance:
We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.
People like E.O. Wilson wrote on scientific insights in a language that was simple enough for many of us like me to understand. In the contemporary world in which rational and logical thinkers are drowned out by flame-throwing ratings-grabbers, I worry that we will miss out on the younger and newer versions of the likes of Wilson. And that certainly is "a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."
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