When informed of the founding of The Colossus, “an online journal of the politics and metaphysics of science,” many asked about the overarching purpose of the journal. (“Sounds accessible,” remarked an acquaintance in the editing profession.) Is it to take a step back and look at the overall picture resulting from the quotidian accretion of minutiae that comprises the lives of most scientists? In a word, perhaps. Is it to allow the editors, nominally caged by empirical methods, tools, and the necessity of transferring liquids from container to container, to be instead caged by their own frenzied speculations? Absolutely. Is it to show the humanist world that scientists, too, have read Aristotle, Augustine, and Adam Smith, or at least can bullshit relatively convincingly about them? All this and more.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the theme of The Colossus is by example. In this case, a nested example: in reviewing E.O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, I hope not only use the review of a book with a biological purview as a launching point for a discussion of larger metaphysical topics, I hope to emulate E.O. Wilson himself, who from a lifetime of study of the social environment of ants has drawn insights about human behavior reflective of his concern for humankind.

By consilience, Wilson means no less than the unification of the natural sciences and the humanities. Having authored On Human Nature and Sociobiology, the two books that introduced the language of evolutionary biology to the fields of psychology and sociology, Wilson is no stranger to grand visions of unification.

The approach to consilience requires experts in the humanities and in the sciences to not only appreciate but understand their counterparts. This joining of forces was recently demonstrated in a conversation between Wilson and philosopher Daniel Dennett that appeared in Seed magazine (the “science couture” magazine of which Wilson is managing editor, thus precluding him, at least for the time being, from being associated with this publication).

Dennett and Wilson agreed that consilience between the humanities and the natural sciences will center around a better understanding of human evolution, particularly the evolution of consciousness. We are at the point where further advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence may allow us to understand the biological underpinnings of culture.

Understanding that the empirical methods introduced to humanistic fields such as psychology must necessarily be biological in nature, Wilson draws in Consilience a broad arc from our biological origins, tracing a path from the genetic evolution of our brains, to the role of natural selection in predisposing our brains toward a shared human culture, and finally, to the question of whether ethical values can be addressed through the lens of a humanities consilient with the natural sciences.

Wilson’s basic argument is that moral values confer an evolutionary benefit on the humans that subscribe to them; thus, certain ethical values propagate in the cultural sphere if they allow their adherents to propagate in the biological sphere. Throughout the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution leading to the modern human, the exigencies of living in a nasty, brutal natural world produced a selection pressure for humans to evolve a brain predisposed toward cultural rules binding humans to one another. Consciousness arose from an evolutionary need to connect with other humans and provide a common context for further cooperative innovation.

Even though consciousness may have evolved as a side product of natural selection,

(introduce concept of “biological imperative.” perhaps distinguish between wilson’s “it is (normative) true because it is efficient” vs. chesterton’s “it is efficient because it is true”)

One category of moral values confers immediate biological benefits. Thus, of two tribes of ancient humans, each identical except for the fact that one tribe has a cultural prohibition against eating shellfish, the tribe that eats fewer bad oysters will have the longevity to propagate this otherwise arbitrary taboo. These values will tend to prosper along with the tribe that adopts them – a cultural/ethical version of the evolutionary “just-so story” of the survival of the fittest, because the fittest survive.

Another category of moral values relates to a societal framework that fosters a cooperative environment, making possible the specialization and division of labor, not to mention leisure time, that is the root of civilization. For example, taboos against murder or theft preserve trust between neighbors, without which a group of warriors out to bring down a woolly mammoth might never be able to go much beyond watching their backs, each worrying that some ignoble sneak might spear him while he wasn’t looking, and steal his wife and property. Incest taboos, common across every human culture almost to the point of being written into the human subconscious, possess a clear benefit to the genetic fitness of a group.

To the extent that a cooperative framework allows a society to thrive and expand, these moral values will propagate as well. The historian Robert Wright has already shown how non-zero-sum games (of which participation in a cooperative society is an example) tend to win out over other other social frameworks, producing more and more complex societies.

Yet a third category of moral values are meta-rules whose function is to knit together the other values and ensure that they are heeded. If disparate rules of behavior are brought under the umbrella of an all-powerful God, those rules survive together. (Not only people, but memes play non-zero-sum games as well.) Before empiricism became a widely accepted mode of thought, personal authority must have played a role in passing values on to succeeding generations – hence, Chesterton’s revered, mystical “old man with a spear.” But couldn’t anyone knock down the wise man and take his position as arbiter of tribal values? Not so easily if these powers come from God. And especially not if God is powerful and pragmatic (and thus empirical) as well, and foretells when days get shorter, when the planting and harvesting seasons begin, when the herd migrates, and in general, allows the tribe to prosper.

These meta-values – which, as has been noted, concern the nature of God and why He should be worshipped – also play a role less cynical than merely insuring that the remainder of the moral code be followed. They may be just as important for a person’s spiritual health.

Imagine the first proto-human to receive the spark of consciousness. The very first existentialist, he may have literally died of angst; not knowing why none of his neighbors understood him, and then seeing his parents die and realizing his shared morbid fate, left to ponder the possibility of a lonely, meaningless existence, he may well have committed suicide by losing the will to live. Who knows how many times this may have happened, each independent conscious spark briefly smoldering and then fizzling out in the cold, dark night of evolutionary history.

But one of these proto-humans might have received the spark of consciousness and decided that there was something to live for, something greater, something lasting beyond his own death. Certainly it was nothing like a concept of the afterlife as heaven or hell, but it was a concept of something greater than himself; and it gave him a reason to live, as well as a reason to be happy.

So belief in the existence of God, or of spirit, or in any case, of something greater, unseen, and eternal, may have been the very first moral value. And indeed, it has direct biological benefit; for those cursed with consciousness and thought, it provides a reason to live, a sense of belonging, of place. In this respect it more properly belongs to the first category, by providing immediate biological benefit, but over time, the values relating to God unified all other values, and entered the third category of meta-values.

It is important to note, as Wilson does, that the argument for morals by empirical origin – that moral values arose from humans, for humans’ benefit – is independent of the existence of God. One may argue that God actually did proclaim, “Thou shalt not eat shellfish,” or just as easily that some concerned tribesman, perhaps one of the very first empiricists, seeing his neighbors completely debilitated shortly after the consumption of an ill-smelling oyster, told his family and friends that he had seen a vision in which a powerful voice commanded him not to eat shellfish. Being ignorant of Vibrio vulnificus or the germ theory of pathogenesis, his tribe settled for his explanation. (We may even imagine the other case, in which another concerned tribesman, facing a lack of appropriate game meat, told his compatriots that a mystical cloud had issued forth, commanding him, “Thou shalt eat shellfish!” but that this nascent religion quickly died out after a few really warm months.)

It is also interesting to note that the two scenarios above – the actual existence of a God bellowing orders from above, and God as self-propagating package of human-created rules by which a tribe is better equipped to survive the wild – are indistinguishable from the point of view of evolutionary success. Even if God doesn’t exist, that certain religions or sets of moral values have propagated through time indicates that they are of some evolutionary, biological benefit to their adherents.

In the June/July 2004 issue of Free Inquiry, Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and ardent secularist, argued in a piece entitled “What is the Use of Religion?” that religion is a byproduct of a much simpler evolutionary adaptation: our willingness to learn new information on authority. Human society is lubricated by individuals’ ability to learn; in youth, most of one’s learning takes place by unquestioning belief in what one’s elders impart. Thus, it is very easy for a priestly caste – especially when this caste is responsible for most of society’s educational institutions – to instill irrational belief in something unprovable. Religion therefore serves to maintain the priestly caste in a position of power, interpreting the inscrutable motives of an unseen god or gods.

There is no question that religious hierarchies undergo corruption, as is the case with any human gathering in which a clear power dynamic is established – which is generally any facet of human society. Religion, by Dawkins’ interpretation, is merely one way to cement an inequitable power relation, by giving the ruling class a divine mandate and by fear of punishment in the afterlife, in addition to whatever temporal punishments may be applied. Dawkins further argues that religion is wasteful; it siphons time and effort from otherwise productive human activity.

But Dawkins ignores two important points. The first is that inequitable power relations abound in human endeavor, regardless of whether a punishing God is invoked. In Nonzero, Wright uses early Polynesian kingdoms to show that tribal societies and chiefdoms are more likely to best their competitors when they have a Big Man in charge. The Big Man may be the best warrior, or the best at maintaining interpersonal relationships, but as Big Man, his contribution to the tribe is primarily through the efficient organization of tasks requiring large group contributions, and also by representing the tribe in dealings with other tribes. In a society lacking currency and the accurate pricing of a free market, the Big Man approximates Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” by using his authority to institute a command economy responsive to what the Big Man perceive is needed for the good of the whole tribe.

Inequitable power relationships are also an inevitable product of the natural human aspiration for status, through the acquisition of food, goods, or even leisure – the last usually from innovation facilitating the acquisition of the first two.

If stratification is a natural feature of society, then religion cannot solely be blamed for inequity. While religion may give a ruler added authority, history abounds with examples of incompetent rulers deposed even without upsetting the prevailing religious order. The Mandate of Heaven given to Chinese emperors allowed them to rule with absolute authority; but when the empire’s fortunes turned the corner into questionable **, the emperor was perceived to have lost heaven’s mandate; the hapless emperor, by losing his head, could allow the empire to receive a new one.

For a Western example, one need look no farther than Julius Caesar, who, after assuming a godlike mien, was proven to be all too human by his senators, who thought their power relationship too inequitable.

Power relationships in human society are naturally inequitable, and religion cannot be solely blamed for maintaining inequality. The clearest example of this is the American republic, arguably secular, and demonstrably the most inequitable society in the world.

The second point Dawkins ignores is that religion, through its unifying benefits on a society, does confer benefits to the entire group (in addition to the individual benefits that accrue to the ruling class). Religion, by crossing tribal boundaries, provides a unity that transcends simple kin selection, tribalism, and even nationalism, thus enlarging who can be defined as “us” in the eternal evolutionary fight against “them.” Conversion to Christianity was largely responsible for the pacification of the Vikings, the dominant military power in northwestern Europe for much of the Dark Ages.

Naturally, the question is whether the group benefits outweigh the “wasted” energy and time, but the fact that religion has persisted throughout history, and has often been strongly associated with the rule of some of the most powerful empires in history, shows that there must be some evolutionary benefit. One might argue that these are “just-so stories” – the sole empirical outcome the historical data has to offer – but to say that religion is successful because it is beneficial and beneficial because it is successful is to use the same methodology as evolutionary biologists, such as Dawkins, use in describing the unique strategy that the cuckoo, say, has evolved in laying its eggs in the nests of other, unwitting bird species.

If the origin of moral values has a basis in biological imperatives, allowing tribes who adopted them to survive and expand more effectively than their (relatively) amoral neighbors, what happens as biological imperatives change? What happens when new forms of cooperation or new technologies change the playing field so that what once was a successful rule becomes an encumbrance, a justification for discrimination, or worse, an obstacle to our biological progress? And what happens now that we have become aware of our own trajectory and evolution? Lastly, is there a new set of meta-rules that can appeal to all people, regardless of their belief in God?

Transcendental vs. empirical. “God”’s moral code is not arbitrary, it is what is beneficial for local groups of humans. What is beneficial for humanity as a whole? What can unite all humans into single “us”? Does this require another, external, alien “them”?