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 daily accretion of minutiae that makes up the lives of most scientists? In a word, perhaps. Is it to allow the editors, normally 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 to use the review of a book with a biological purview as a launching point for a discussion of larger metaphysical topics, but to emulate E.O. Wilson himself. In addition to devoting a lifetime to studying the social environment of ants, Wilson applied his scientific experience to develop insights about human social behavior–a perfect example of consilience between the natural sciences and the humanities.

Wilson’s use of the word consilience, which has the same root as reconciliation, implies that there lies a rift between the humanities and the natural sciences. Certainly, greater specialization and division of academic disciplines into smaller and smaller subfields, each with its own esoteric language, is at least partially responsible for this breakdown. But there still remains a more fundamental rift between the humanities and the sciences because of the perception–present on both sides–that the reductionist methods and limited scope of empirical science necessarily restrict scientists from contributing anything useful to greater discussions of politics, culture, purpose, or moral values.

As mentioned in the prospectus of The Colossus, it is precisely this perception that the editors wish to combat. Scientists have much to offer by the broad application of their trademark tools of skepticism and reason, which are in great want in politics today. In addition, scientific understanding of life and the universe is growing to the point that fields normally unconcerned with raw empiricism must adapt their central dogmas to be consistent with scientifically accepted views of nature. Freud’s theory of mind was criticized as unfalsifiable and therefore only pseudo-scientific, but Freud could not have imagined that we would one day be able to determine the exact biochemical and genetic causes of certain mental disorders. But just because altered neurotransmitter levels influence one’s state of mind does not mean that the disorder cannot manifest itself with imagery of one’s parents, one’s childhood, or through recurring dreams about cigars or snakes. A better scientific reassessment of a traditionally non-empirical field just makes the narrative more complete.

Completeness of narrative–Wilson’s “unity of knowledge”–provides a unifying motivation in the sciences, as all discoveries must fit into a common empirical framework. Thus, physicists hope that experimental support of the superstring theory will explain our entire physical reality. By contrast, the lack of such a unifying framework is, by definition, the cause of fragmentation and disagreement in humanist fields.

Wilson would argue that transcendental idealism–the pursuit of ideal truths or forms that exist outside of human experience, which pursuit so many scientists dismiss as pointless drivel–can and should be absorbed into an empirical narrative, because these ideals cannot be understood except through human interpretation. As applied to moral values, which this essay will discuss, Wilson sums up the transcendental vs. empirical argument in a conversation. The transcendentalist claims that God–or some supernatural spirit in the universe–has bestowed moral values to humans that are beneficial to them out of love for God’s creations. The empiricist replies that the existence of God, besides being unprovable, is irrelevant, as moral values can be shown to have evolved precisely because they are beneficial to the species. If empiricism can give us a rational basis for moral values, it is better to build those values from empirical principles, rather than on something unprovable.

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. The evolution of consciousness allowed humans to connect with other humans and provide a common context for further cooperative innovation.

We might observe that even though consciousness may have evolved as a side product of natural selection, it is possible for humans to make non-optimal choices that do not favor one’s reproductive success. In the non-human world, the pressure of natural selection means that what is–the situation as it exists–is what ought to be. A lion cannot one day decide to become vegetarian for ethical reasons, because the lion has evolved to fulfill, unconsciously, a function: keeping the gazelle and antelope populations down.

The onset of consciousness, then, is the loss of humans’ ability to instinctively know their place in the world of existence. (It’s no coincidence that in the story of the Fall from grace, Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and promptly gained shame, covering themselves with clothes.) The human struggle is to regain that sense of place. We are uniquely capable of changing our social and physical environments (what is) but we are incapable of knowing whether the changes will succeed (whether it ought to be). The history of the conflict between competing moral systems is a giant experiment in cooperation, whose purpose is to determine what combination of individual restraints will best benefit the whole.

Wilson argues that group selection (getting many people into the same boat) and self-interest (making sure that the boat as a whole does well) drive the propagation of moral values such as altruism. Seemingly self-injurious altruistic choices actually help the entire species in the evolutionary battle of survival. We do follow the same biological imperative as the rest of life, but with the onset of consciousness, we have lost consonance with that larger principle of group self-interest. Moral values thus restrict a person from making choices in pure, individual self-interest, but when the rules are followed by a group, the group as a whole benefits.

Moral values are thus always rooted in biological imperative – often in a non-zero-sum game that benefits all individuals in a group in exchange for restrictions on individual behavior. With the vantage point of hindsight, we can recognize that moral values surviving the test of time do so because because they allow a group to be more successful.

But just as vestigial organs such as the appendix might have had some evolutionary value in the past but no longer do, we can identify some moral values that may no longer be beneficial to a society under constant flux. Slavery, for example, was morally acceptable for thousands of years, but today’s societies – the successful ones – have determined that slavery weakens their ability to compete. The winnowing of obsolete moral values can be viewed in the same way as harmful genetic mutations: removed when they hurt fitness, but persisting when beneficial, or drifting when neutral.

Knowing that moral values are a result of group selection, we can extend Wilson’s argument by classifying them into subgroups based on function. One category of moral values confers immediate biological benefits. For example, take the following thought experiment. 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. All of the Jewish kosher laws fall into this category, and it is not difficult to see how hygienic food preparation improves the biological chances of the group that follows them. 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.

Another category of moral values relates to a societal framework fostering a cooperative environment, making possible the specialization and division of labor, not to mention leisure time, that are the root of civilization. For example, we have taboos against murder or theft that preserve our mutual trust, 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.

To the extent that a cooperative framework allows a society to thrive and expand, these moral values will propagate as well. The political scientist Robert Axelrod showed how non-zero-sum strategies (of which participation in a cooperative society is an example) tend to win the long-term evolutionary game; in turn, the historian Robert Wright showed that human participation in the growth of non-zero-sum games leads to more and more complex societies.

We can create 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. Once disparate rules of behavior are brought under the umbrella of an all-powerful God, those rules survive together. Just as different organisms cooperate and thus benefit within an ecosystem, so could different but complementary ethical ideas, in this case, by integrating themselves into an overarching ethical meta-idea of God.

Another reason that meta-values succeed at shepherding groups of subordinate beliefs is by the paradox of lessening personal authority. We can imagine that if a tribal wise man claims that his rules are not in his own interest, but the will of the gods, he makes it less likely that someone will just knock him down and take his position as arbiter of moral values. By seeming to lessen his personal role, a leader backed by religion actually increases his personal authority. Authority is increased even more 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 we have 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 mental and emotional health. Once the conscious perception of the self evolved, it too became an agent of selection pressure, as it is inextricably tied to the human organism’s overall well-being.

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 we see that 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 belief in God unified all other values, and entered the third category of meta-values.

No matter your view on the existence of God, religion is a phenomenon primarily concerned with human activity. As such, it will survive or fall based on the benefits it confers to society. Even as communism suppressed religion, instilling in its place a belief in the State as supreme, the moral ideals communism valued were established as the hypothesis for an experiment: that these values were superior to and would eventually outcompete other value systems. We should not, however, take the failure of “godless communism” as support for God’s existence; rather, we should examine what about the value system of liberal capitalism – itself secular and tolerant of differing beliefs in God – allowed Western society to prosper.

As Wilson notes, the argument for morals by empirical origin – that moral values arose from humans, for humans’ benefit – is independent of the existence of God. We 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 for us 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.

But just as this view of religion may never be appreciated by dedicated transcendentalists, even some empiricists object to this empirically justified explanation for the existence of moral values. For them, the barest acknowledgment of a system that does not de facto exclude the possibility of God invalidates the entire hypothesis.

In the June/July 2004 issue of Free Inquiry, Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and ardent secularist, argued in a piece entitled “What Use is 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 wasteful and parasitic; it siphons time and effort from otherwise productive human activity.

But Dawkins ignores the possibility 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 two centuries during the Dark Ages.

Naturally, our 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 also “just-so stories” – the sole empirical outcome the historical data has to offer – but for us to say that religion is successful because it is beneficial and beneficial because it is successful is to use the same methodology that evolutionary biologists, such as Dawkins, deem perfectly valid to describe the unique strategy that the cuckoo, say, has evolved in laying its eggs in the nests of other, unwitting bird species.

Since the origin of moral values has a basis in biological imperative, 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 set of meta-rules that can appeal to all people, regardless of their belief in God?

If these common meta-rules–archetypal forms of moral good–do exist, this would argue for the existence of an objective, or transcendental, moral good. Because of the biological basis of moral values, Wilson argues that morals are empirical–determined by humans, for the benefit of humans; therefore, there are no transcendental moral values. But the biological imperative is common to all humans, not to mention all life–what could be more transcendental than this? We may interpret this as a merging of the transcendental and empirical ideas of moral values: a true consilience.

The unwritten, underlying prescription is that humanity’s activity is best directed toward the betterment of humanity. This law is followed in the non-sentient world without reason or even awareness of the law so followed. But human consciousness divorces us from the rest of nature by concealing awareness of this biological imperative. In losing consonance with nature, humanity has been forced to determine–empirically–rules by which to succeed as a species. The drawback to consciousness is that individuals are free to make choices that hurt the species as a whole. But the potential beneficial outcome is that individuals can agree to moral rules that allow humans to cooperate in a societal fabric that can only thrive when knit with the common thread of these values.

The story of biological evolution is one of constant competition. Even participation in non-zero-sum games, supposedly win-win situations, is usually part of a larger, external zero-sum game, such as competition against another tribe of humans, or for natural resources. Perhaps the next step in the evolution of moral values will be to enlarge the circle of cooperation to include all humanity, instead of limiting cooperation to within the circles drawn by nationalistic borders. And beyond that, perhaps we will further enlarge the circle to include all life on this Earth, with which we share the very matter of our being – perhaps we will learn to cooperate with the Earth and the entire biosphere, rather than just with other humans on how best to succeed at the Earth’s expense.