E. O Wilson Throws Down the Challenge.

My book, Apes, Ants, and Ancestors, is a response to this challenge by E. O. Wilson to draw a “new mythos” based on the “facts of evolution.”

For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately fled first the rocks and trees and then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality. They will continue to plead, in company with the psalmist, Now Lord, what is my comfort? They will find a way to keep the ancestral spirits alive.

. . . We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved.

—Edward O. Wilson, Consiliance (1999)

[Read commentary on Wilson’s new book by clicking on it in the upper right – then read posts chronologically from the top down]

Tags: E. O. Wilson