The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson

A small cohort of colleagues received invitations from the Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences: “Please read Edward O. Wilson’s controversial new book, The Social Conquest of Earth. Use it as a springboard to produce an essay about general education.” The journal provided scant guidance other than that the ideals and observations kindled by reading The Social Conquest should enable contributors to generate challenging deliberations about a curriculum—a general education—that reaches well beyond disciplinary majors and professional concentrations that are intended to launch careers in commerce or the academy. The Wilson colloquium, the invitation explained, should consist neither of book reviews and critiques in the usual sense nor of defenses or denunciations of Wilson’s views on “group versus kin selection.” Nor should it focus exclusively on Wilson’s declaration that the “myths” of the humanities and religion cannot explain any of three fundamental questions: Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

The journal did invite the contributors to consider some fundamental general education issues. Can general education serve as a leveling device, that is, as a means to raise among all of our students an understanding of the world about them and their place in it? Can we identify the humanities and sciences necessary to nurture such a task? Just what is it that education should nurture for undergraduates and their faculty?

“Mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity,” Wilson writes in The Social Conquest. Perhaps not. Yet for many people, folklore and stories, philosophy and ethics, history and theology, are at least as important to their understanding of who they are and who they should be as is the biological relationship of our genes to our emotions and behaviors. Where is the common ground for the humanities and the sciences?

The goal of the following colloquy is not to sort out once and for all the relationships among the humanities and the sciences or the chicken-and-egg question of nurture versus nature. The goal here is to consider what it might mean or perhaps should mean for educators to accept responsibility for the content and for the explicit explication of goals of a well-crafted general education. What is it that we want students to learn? What kinds of inquiries should students be making in order to understand, in Wilson’s trilogy, where they come from, what they are, and where they are going? Every undergraduate is or ought to be interested in the answers. Does general education as it is practiced today provide legitimacy for classroom, laboratory, studio, and field investigations that will support such a quest?

With a statement that yields important context on his views of what we know and where that knowledge comes from, Wilson contributed an essay on general education to his Harvard colleagues that said in part:

What was once perceived as an epistemological divide between the great branches of learning (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities) is now emerging from the academic fog as something far different and much more interesting: a wide middle domain of mostly unexplored phenomena open to a cooperative approach from both sides of the former divide. Already disciplines from one side of this middle domain, for example neuroscience and evolutionary biology, have connected with their closest neighbors, such as psychology and anthropology, on the other side.

The middle domain is a region of exceptionally rapid intellectual advance. It, moreover, addresses issues in which students (and the rest of us) are most interested: the nature and origin of life, the meaning of sex, the basis of human nature, the origin and evolution of life, why we must die, the origins of religion and ethics, the causes of aesthetic response, the role of environment in human genetic and cultural evolution, and more.

To set the stage for the essays that follow, Wilson contributed an Op-Ed piece originally shared in 2012 in the New York Times Opinionator.

Wilson is the Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. The colloquium essayists represent diverse fields...