genesis (Edward Wilson)

 

Edward O. Wilson; Genesis : the deep origin of societies, written by  Edward O. Wilson; illustrated by Debby Cotter Kaspari., [2019]

p.9

All questions of philosophy that address the human condition come down to three: 

      what are we, 

      what created us, and 

      what do we wish ultimately to become. 

The all-important answer to the third question, the destiny we seek, requires an accurate answer to the first two.   By and large, philosophers have lacked confirmable answers to the first two questions, which concern the deep prehuman and human past, thereby remaining unable to answer the third question, which addresses the human future. 

   As I now approach the end of a long career studying the biology of social behavior in animals and humans, I've come better to understand why these existential questions defy introspection by even the wisest of thinkers, and, more importantly, why they have been so easily enslaved by religious and political dogma.  

p.10

   For most of history, organized religions have claimed sovereignty over the meaning of human existence.  For their founders and leaders the enigma has been relatively easy to solve.  The gods put us on Earth, and they told us how to behave.  

   Why should people around the world continue to believe one fantasy over another out of the more than four thousand that exist on Earth?  The answer is tribalism, and, as I will show, tribalism is one consequence of the way humanity originated.  Each of the organized or otherwise public religions as well as scores of religion-like ideologies defines a tribe, a tightly knit group of people joined by a particular story.  The history and moral lessons it contains, often colorful, even bizarre in content, are accepted as basically unalterable and, more importantly, superior to all competing stories.  The members of the tribe are inspired by the special status the story gives them, not just on this planet but on all other of the multitude of planets in each of the trillion galaxies estimated to compose the known universe. 

   And best of all, cosmic faith is the bargain price asked for guaranteed personal immortality.  

pp.10─11

   In  The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin brought the whole subject into the purview of science by suggesting that humanity descended from African apes.  Shocking as that was at the time, and still unacceptable to many, the hypothesis has none-the-less proved correct.  An understanding of how the great transition from ape to human occurred has been steadily improved since, chiefly by a consortium of researchers in five modern disciplines:  paleontology, anthropolgy, psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience.  As a result of the combined labors of scholars in these disciplines we have today an increasingly clear picture of the real creation story.  We know a good deal about how humanity was born, and when, and how.

p.11

   This factual story of the creation has turned out to be vastly different from that first believed not just by theologians but also by most scientists and philosophers.  It fits the evolutionary histories of other, nonhuman lines, of which seventeen (17) have so far been found to possess advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.  These are the subjects of the sections immediately to follow.    

   (Wilson, Edward O., author.

Kaspari, Debby Cotter, illustrator. 

Genesis : the deep origin of societies / Edward O. Wilson; illustrated by Debby Cotter Kaspari.

other titles:  Deep origin of societies 

[2019]

subjects:  animal behavior. | behavior evolution. | behavior genetics. 

LCC QL751 .W55 2019

DDC 591.5──dc23

https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050101

                               ) 

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