Is human intervention always detrimental to an ecosystem? Why is it more likely to be detrimental than beneficial?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
How would Charles Darwin (p. 314) interpret the rabbit-lynx dynamic that Commoner discusses? Is Commoner ultimately explaining an evolutionary system?
Do Commoner's observations about DDT confirm or challenge the assertions of Rachel Carson (p. 328)? Would Carson agree that DDT moves up the food chain?
Like William Paley (p. 311), Commoner uses the metaphor of a watch to describe the natural world. In what ways are the two watch metaphors similar? How are they different?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Examine an ecosystem you are familiar with, such as a local park or waterway. Choose five or six elements of this ecosystem and explain, using Commoner's terms, how all of these elements are related to each other.
Select one of Commoner's four laws of ecology and try to falsify it (Popper, p. 336). Think of ways that the law might not be universally applicable and, therefore, not really a "law" in the scientific sense.
Use Commoner's four laws of ecology to analyze one of the following readings: Rachel Carson's "The Obligation to Endure" (p. 328), Wangari Maathai's "Foresters Without Diplomas" (p. 363), or Vandana Shiva's "Soil, not Oil" (p. 374).
edward o. wilson
The Fitness of Human Nature
[1998]
IN HIS LONG career as a teacher, writer, and researcher, Edward Osborn Wilson (b. 1929) has become one of America's most renowned, and controversial, scientists. Trained as an entymologist, Wilson's early work on ants and other social insects helped to explain why these creatures act in ways that humans consider altruistic. His 1971 book The Insect Societies remains a classic in the field of entymology. In 1990, Wilson teamed with German scientist Bert Holldobler (b. 1936) to produce The Ants, an encyclopedic, 740-page analysis of ant behavior that won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize.
After years of scholarly work on the biological basis of insect society, Wilson began to explore ways that biology influences social behavior in other species, including human beings. In his 1976 book Sociobiology, he examined biologically based social interaction throughout the animal kingdom. The final chapter explores ways that natural selection might have influenced such human traits as love, loyalty, friendship, and faith. Sociobiology ignited a firestorm of controversy across the political spectrum. Conservatives denounced Wilson for assaulting the dignity of human beings by explaining our most cherished beliefs in biological terms. Progressives, on the other hand—led by Wilson's Harvard University colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin—felt that Wilson's ideas opened the door to racist and sexist beliefs about the nature of human beings, a charge that Wilson vehemently denied.
In 1979, Wilson received a second Pulitzer Prize for his book Human Nature, which advances the ideas about human evolution that he set forth in Sociobiology. Over the past thirty years, sociobiological ideas have become increasingly accepted by natural and social scientists alike. Current disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, population genetics, and even Darwinian literary criticism all trace their core ideas back to Wilson's initial work on sociobiology.
The selection here is taken from Wilson's 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. The word consilience means "jumping together," and Wilson uses this concept to frame his argument that a correct understanding of human biology—and of natural selection—can unify all branches of knowledge into a single, coherent area of study. By understanding the way that our minds evolved, Wilson believes, we can form better and more useful ideas about psychology, sociology, economics, politics, art, music, literature, religion, and any other area of study that involves human beings.
Wilson builds his argument in this chapter on a simple deductive proposition: if the process of natural selection has determined all complex biological functions, and the human brain contains complex biological functions, then natural selection must have determined the operations of the human brain.
What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find ready expression. It is the epigenetic rules,[166] the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture. . . .
By expressing gene-culture coevolution in such a simple manner, I have no wish either to overwork the metaphor of the selfish gene2 or to minimize the creative powers of the mind. After all, the genes prescribing the epigenetic rules of brain and behavior are only segments of giant molecules. They feel nothing, care for nothing, intend nothing. Their role is simply to trigger the sequences of chemical reactions within the highly structured fertilized cell that orchestrate epigenesis. Their writ extends to the levels of molecule, cell, and organ. . . . The brain is a product of the very highest levels of biological order, which are constrained by epigenetic rules implicit in the organism's anatomy and physiology. Working in a chaotic flood of environmental stimuli, it sees and listens, learns, plans its own future. By that means the brain determines the fate of the genes that prescribed it. Across evolutionary time, the aggregate choices of many brains determine the Darwinian fate of everything human—the genes, the epigenetic rules, the communicating minds, and the culture.
Brains that choose wisely possess superior Darwinian fitness, meaning that statistically they survive longer and leave more offspring than brains that choose badly. That generalization by itself, commonly telescoped into the phrase "survival of the fittest," sounds like a tautology—the fit survive and those who survive are fit—yet it expresses a powerful generative process well documented in nature. During hundreds of millennia of Paleolithic history, the genes prescribing certain human epigenetic rules increased and spread at the expense of others through the species by means of natural selection. By that laborious process human nature assembled itself.
2. Selfish gene: The Selfish Gene is a 1976 book by Richard Dawkins that argues for a gene- centered view of evolution. The "selfish gene" metaphor does not refer to a gene for selfish behavior, but to a view of natural selection that sees each gene in the body as a "replicator," whose primary function is to make copies of itself that survive into the next generation. Genes that contribute to an organism's ability to survive and reproduce achieve this end. The "selfish gene" theory of evolution is at odds with the organism-centered view of evolution, held by Stephen Jay Gould and others, which sees the whole organism, rather than individual genes, as the primary unit affected by natural selection.
What is truly unique about human evolution, as opposed say to chimpanzee or wolf evolution, is that a large part of the environment shaping it has been cultural. Therefore, construction of a special environment is what culture does to the behavioral genes. Members of past generations who used their culture to best advantage, like foragers gleaning food from a surrounding forest, enjoyed the greatest Darwinian advantage. During prehistory their genes multiplied, changing brain circuitry and behavior traits bit by bit to construct human nature as it exists today. Historical accident played a role in the assembly, and there were many particular expressions of the epigenetic rules that proved self-destructive. But by and large, natural selection, sustained and averaged over long periods of time, was the driving force of human evolution. Human nature is adaptive, or at least was at the time of its genetic origin. . . .