E.O Wilson

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“What If We Could Use This Technology Not To Bring Extinct Species Back To Life But To Save Species That Are Alive Today?”

March 9, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Deutsch: Flusspferd, Nilpferd, Großflusspferd · English: Hippopotamus · Español: Hipopótamo común · Français : Hippopotame · Italiano: Ippopotamo · ?????: ???????? · Lietuviu: Didysis hipopotamas · Nederlands: Nijlpaard · Polski: Hipopotam nilowy · Português: Hipopótamo-comum

There exists a band of far-flung thinkers who dream of humans repopulating and restoring the natural world via de-extinction (read here and here). It would be a regenesis, though it’s easier said than done. Even though such things aren’t currently doable, I wouldn’t say that they’re permanently impossible, not if we’re talking about the very long run. But we’re not likely digging ourselves out of our Anthropocene hole with such things.

In an excellent Five Books Interview on the topic of de-extinction, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro pours cold water on the reawakening of the woolly mammoth and other animals and birds that have bid the Earth adieu, pointing out not just the practical difficulties but also the ethical concerns. I’ve read two of the titles she chose, E.O. Wilson’s The Diversity of Life and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, both of which are certainly worth the time. 

Before getting to her selections, the author of How to Clone a Mammoth explains exactly why we can’t do just that and why we shouldn’t even if we could. An excerpt:

Question:

If we were able to bring a mammoth back, what would the purpose of that be?

Beth Shapiro:

If we pretend, for a moment, that it’s technically possible – which it isn’t – and that it’s ethically ok – which it isn’t – why might we want to bring a mammoth back to life? Well, for me there are two reasons. The first is ecological. Elephants play a very important role in their ecosystem, they’re the biggest herbivore that exists. They wander around knocking down the big things and allow the habitat – the grasslands – to regenerate themselves. There’s no reason to suspect a mammoth wouldn’t have done the same thing.

There’s a Russian scientist called Sergey Zimov who has a park in North-Eastern Siberia called ‘Pleistocene Park‘. The Pleistocene was the geological interval that existed before the current one, which is the Holocene, sometimes the Anthropocene. It was the age of Ice Age Giants and he is preparing this park for the return of Ice Age Giants and so far he has bison and horses and five different species of deer. He doesn’t have mammoths yet, but he is making up for that using large road-rolling machinery. What he’s found in this Pleistocene Park of his is that where he has these grazing herbivores – bison, horses, deer – just by virtue of wandering around on the permafrost, digging up the soil, recycling nutrients, spreading the seeds around they have actually changed that habitat. They have reestablished the rich grasslands that used to be there during the time of these Ice Age Giants, creating the habitat that they themselves need to survive. Not only are these animals there and quite happy, but he’s also noted that things like saiga antelope have come to visit the park because there’s loads of stuff for them to eat there. He argues that giant herbivores are still a missing component that would really help to push this environment over the edge. There’s a potentially compelling ecological reason to bring mammoths back to life.

The next reason is more sentimental. Few of us are willing to imagine a world without elephants, but Asian elephants are endangered. Every year there are fewer of them. Their habitat is continuing to disappear as human populations grow. We’re having trouble stopping poachers taking them for their ivory. What if we could use this technology, this same swapping out of genes technology, not to bring a mammoth back to life, but to change an elephant a little bit so that it has some of the evolutionary adaptations that a mammoth had? Say, adaptations that allow it to survive somewhere cold. Elephants are a tropically adapted species, mammoths lived in the Arctic. If we could swap out some of the elephant gene and allow elephants to live in Europe, or Siberia, then we could create new habitat for elephants where they could survive while we tried to fix whatever mess is going on in their natural habitats. What if we could use this technology not to bring extinct species back to life but to save species that are alive today and yet in danger of becoming extinct because of changes to their habitat that are often caused by us?•

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“The Only Hope For The Species Still Living Is A Human Effort Commensurate With The Magnitude Of The Problem”

February 29, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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This weekend, I tweeted a link to a 2014 Tony Hiss Smithsonian article about E.O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” proposal for combating biodiversity loss. This plan suggests we set aside 50% of the planet’s surface for non-human species, which would not only help safeguard them but us as well. There are some, like Stewart Brand, who think we’ll soon be able to de-extinct at will, but the ability to repopulate is far from certain and full of unintended consequences. Better to preserve what we have while learning to create (or re-create) even more.

Coincidentally, Aeon has published a piece by Wilson on the topic today, the first essay the great biologist has penned for the great online magazine. Among other things, he explains why 50% isn’t just a nice round number but a key one and how rising consumption won’t doom the project. An excerpt:

Today, every sovereign nation in the world has a protected-area system of some kind. All together the reserves number about 161,000 on land and 6,500 over marine waters. According to the World Database on Protected Areas, a joint project of the United Nations Environmental Program and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, they occupied by 2015 a little less than 15 per cent of Earth’s land area and 2.8 per cent of Earth’s ocean area. The coverage is increasing gradually. This trend is encouraging. To have reached the existing level is a tribute to those who have led and participated in the global conservation effort.

But is the level enough to halt the acceleration of species extinction? Unfortunately, it is in fact nowhere close to enough. The declining world of biodiversity cannot be saved by the piecemeal operations in current use alone. The extinction rate our behaviour is now imposing on the rest of life, and seems destined to continue, is more correctly viewed as the equivalent of a Chicxulub-sized asteroid strike played out over several human generations.

The only hope for the species still living is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself. To those who feel content to let the Anthropocene evolve toward whatever destiny it mindlessly drifts, I say please take time to reconsider. To those who are steering the growth of reserves worldwide, let me make an earnest request: don’t stop, just aim a lot higher.•

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“It Still Possesses All The Mammal Species That Were There 3,000 Years Ago”

May 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

E.O. Wilson is championing a goal of “Half Earth” for maintaining biodiversity, meaning we would set aside fifty percent of the planet’s land for preserves and parks where non-human species could thrive. Wonderful idea though it is, that will be a steep climb. Audacity is necessary, however. At the Biodiversity Foundation website, Wilson has republished a Mosaic piece in which he and molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll engage in a wide-ranging conversation about conservation, among other scientific matters. An excerpt:

E.O. Wilson: 

You probably haven’t heard of it, but I’ve been in from the beginning of the campaign in Alabama to create a national park of hundreds of thousands of acres. [The Mobile-Tensaw Delta] would be the most biodiverse park in America, with a tremendous variety of organisms: 350 species of fish and then, to the north, the Red Hills and the Appalachians – deeply divided terrain with relic plants and animals that were left behind during the retreat of the glacier 10,000 years ago. The people down there have just woken up to what we have.

Sean B. Carroll:

I was in Yellowstone National Park in August with Liz Hadly from Stanford University, and it still possesses all the mammal species that were there 3,000 years ago. We know this from what the pack rats put into the caves in Yellowstone – and if all the mammals are there, you can feel pretty comfortable that lots of the other things are there too.

So there’s a very old park, a very large piece of ecosystem set aside, it’s enjoyed by four million people a year, but it’s a success story. It says that the first thing you do is preserve a big ecosystem and then manage it. It can be done, and it can be managed scientifically.

It doesn’t mean everything that was ever done in Yellowstone was correct, but I was impressed when Liz explained that she knows that all the mammals that were here before European settlement are still here because she’s done the cave work to look at the microfossils. We should feel good about that: grizzly bears, bisons and wolves are in Yellowstone, and they’ve been removed from almost the rest of their entire range.

E.O. Wilson:

And if you go from the USA – which, relative to the rest of the world, is in pretty good shape in terms of biodiversity and sustainability – to the tropics, everything gets worse.•

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“Geoengineering Is Meddling On The Grandest Scale”

January 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Last month, I missed “The Age of the Anthropocene: Masters of Earth,” philosopher Stephen Cave’s excellent Financial Times piece about numerous recent books which weigh the sustainability of the human race in the face of bulging population and the environmental costs of our cleverness, which made possible the Industrial and Digital Revolutions. A piece about the perils of reengineering humans and geoengineering the environment, which riffs on new works by Diane Ackerman, Ruth DeFries and E.O. Wilson:

Ackerman takes us on a whimsical journey, at times directionless, but at others engaging and profound. Despite her resolute optimism, she is very much aware of the damage we cause, such as on the unlucky island of Guam in the western Pacific. She describes how problems began when a giant African snail, introduced to the island as a food source, spread to attack local crops; the authorities therefore introduced the carnivorous Florida wolfsnail to stop the plague — but the wolfsnail preferred the island’s indigenous snail species, 50 of which have now been made extinct, while their giant African cousin continues to destroy crops and native flora unimpeded.

This parable of incompetent meddling explains why many people profoundly object to the idea of geoengineering — attempting actively to manipulate the climate. Essentially, geoengineering is meddling on the grandest scale, such as spraying sulphur particles into the atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption. It would be the definitive Anthropocene act, either innovating our way out of our problems or — just as likely — blundering into much worse ones.

Mindful of the law of unintended consequences, Wilson is sceptical of, for example, trying to re-engineer the human genome to make us better fitted for the future. Although we are flawed and have made quite a mess for ourselves, he argues that our imperfections and inner contradictions are also the source of the creativity that will lead to solutions. DeFries tells another nice story of incompetent meddling: an attempt in 1957 in the southern US to kill an invasive species of aggressive fire ants by using insecticides. This resulted in the eradication of native ant species, thereby clearing the way for the hardier fire ants to expand. The great naturalist, and ant-man, EO Wilson, described this at the time as the “Vietnam of entomology.” Now, in The Meaning of Human Existence, he gives his own take on the state of our species and the pros and cons of meddling.

Mindful of the law of unintended consequences, Wilson is sceptical of, for example, trying to re-engineer the human genome to make us better fitted for the future. Although we are flawed and have made quite a mess for ourselves, he argues that our imperfections and inner contradictions are also the source of the creativity that will lead to solutions.•

 

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“What Can We Learn Of Moral Value From The Ants?”

October 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Dwight Garner’s lively New York Times Book Review piece about the latest volume, a career summation of sorts, by Edward O. Wilson, a biologist who has watched his aunts ants have sex:

“The best natural scientists, when they aren’t busy filling us with awe, are busy reminding us how small and pointless we are.’Stephen Hawking has called humankind ‘just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.’ The biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book, which is modestly titled The Meaning of Human Existence, puts our pygmy planet in a different context.

‘Let me offer a metaphor,’ he says. ‘Earth relates to the universe as the second segment of the left antenna of an aphid sitting on a flower petal in a garden in Teaneck, N.J., for a few hours this afternoon.’ The Jersey aspect of that put-down really drives in the nail.

Mr. Wilson’s slim new book is a valedictory work. The author, now 85 and retired from Harvard for nearly two decades, chews over issues that have long concentrated his mind: the environment; the biological basis of our behavior; the necessity of science and humanities finding common cause; the way religion poisons almost everything; and the things we can learn from ants, about which Mr. Wilson is the world’s leading expert.

Mr. Wilson remains very clever on ants. Among the questions he is most asked, he says, is: ‘What can we learn of moral value from the ants?’ His response is pretty direct: ‘Nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating.’

He explains that while female ants do all the work, the pitiful males are merely ‘robot flying sexual missiles’ with huge genitalia. (This is not worth imitating?) During battle, they eat their injured. ‘Where we send our young men to war,’ Mr. Wilson writes, ‘ants send their old ladies.’ Ants: moral idiots.

The sections about ants remind you what a lively writer Mr. Wilson can be. This two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction stands above the crowd of biology writers the way John le Carré stands above spy writers. He’s wise, learned, wicked, vivid, oracular.”

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“Half Earth Is The Goal”

September 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

E.O. Wilson has a bold plan for staving off a mass extinction of life on Earth: radical biodiversity ensured by demarcation. The evolutionary biologist wants humans to “rope off” half the planet for non-human species. Tony Hiss, the longtime New Yorker writer who did some wonderful work for that publication (like this and this) has an article in Smithsonian about Wilson’s bold proposal. An excerpt:

Throughout the 544 million or so years since hard-shelled animals first appeared, there has been a slow increase in the number of plants and animals on the planet, despite five mass extinction events. The high point of biodiversity likely coincided with the moment modern humans left Africa and spread out across the globe 60,000 years ago. As people arrived, other species faltered and vanished, slowly at first and now with such acceleration that Wilson talks of a coming “biological holocaust,” the sixth mass extinction event, the only one caused not by some cataclysm but by a single species—us.

Wilson recently calculated that the only way humanity could stave off a mass extinction crisis, as devastating as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, would be to set aside half the planet as permanently protected areas for the ten million other species. “Half Earth,” in other words, as I began calling it—half for us, half for them. A version of this idea has been in circulation among conservationists for some time.

“It’s been in my mind for years,” Wilson told me, ‘that people haven’t been thinking big enough—even conservationists. Half Earth is the goal, but it’s how we get there, and whether we can come up with a system of wild landscapes we can hang onto. I see a chain of uninterrupted corridors forming, with twists and turns, some of them opening up to become wide enough to accommodate national biodiversity parks, a new kind of park that won’t let species vanish.”•

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“I Believe Ants Are Wonderful Indicators Of Ecosystem Health”

May 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Biologist E.O. Wilson, who watches his aunts ants have sex, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Would you agree with Isaac Asimov’s quote, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny…”? 

E.O. Wilson:

Asimov was a genius in science fiction with an amazingly wide-ranging imagination. However, I don’t recall that he made many original discoveries in science, if any. So, if this not too presumptuous, it maybe true that the first thing that passes the mind is: “Hmmm…there is something different here” but quickly the successful scientist learns and thinks enough to say, “a-ha! I think…”

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Question:

Mr. Wilson, what do you think about genetic engineering and its potential impact on biodiversity? 

E.O. Wilson:

A decade ago I made a special study of genetically modified organisms, including crops, and their potential impact on the environment. I don’t believe that what I concluded has changed a great deal. It is that while some risk occurs, it is not profound and it is over weighed by potential good.

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Question:

How devastating would the collapse of the bee population be to the world’s ecosystem?

E.O. Wilson:

Unless we solve the colony collapse syndrome and build up new stocks of honeybees, the result will be a severe loss to agriculture, costing as high as billions of dollars.

Question:

What is presumed to be behind the large losses? Pesticides? Climate change? Thanks for your answer.

E.O. Wilson:

A recent study conducted by a team of experts could find no primary cause of the collapse syndrome. The best they could conclude was that multiple causes are at work, including pesticides and inbreeding. Obviously there is an urgency to deeper studies of the problem.

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Question:

Ants are probably one of the most important invertebrate taxa ecologically, and they certainly deserve more recognition then they get. It is clear that ants are capable of colonizing disturbed environments more effectively than some other insect groups. Despite this talent for dealing with rough environments, do you believe that ant species richness/diversity is a particularly useful measure of forest/ecosystem health?

E.O. Wilson:

I believe ants are wonderful indicators of ecosystem health. There are so many species in most environments, as many 300 in some tropical rainforests, each with its own specialization and requirement of a healthy environment, that even just the presence or absence of a particular species tells us a great deal about whats happening to the local environment.•

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Ant-sploitation from 1977:

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“Many Of The Most Successful Scientists In The World Today Are Mathematically No More Than Semiliterate”

April 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of E.O. Wilson new WSJ essay, in which he acknowledges that scientists aren’t as adept at math as they are thought to be, a mistaken belief that has thinned the discipline’s ranks:

“For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without advanced math, how can you do serious work in the sciences? Well, I have a professional secret to share: Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.

During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright undergraduates turned away from the possibility of a scientific career, fearing that, without strong math skills, they would fail. This mistaken assumption has deprived science of an immeasurable amount of sorely needed talent. It has created a hemorrhage of brain power we need to stanch.”

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“They Suggest That Evolution Has Equipped Humans To Solve Tragedies Of The Commons”

June 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Steven Pinker has an essay Edge in which he counters evolutionary scientists who support group selection theory. The opening:

“Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare of the person and his or her kin? If so, does the theory of natural selection have to be revamped to designate ‘groups’ as units of selection, analogous to the role played in the theory by genes?

Several scientists whom I greatly respect have said so in prominent places. And they have gone on to use the theory of group selection to make eye-opening claims about the human condition. They have claimed that human morailty, particularly our willingness to engage in acts of altruism, can be explained as an adaptation to group-against-group competition. As E. O. Wilson explains, “In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals.” They have proposed that group selection can explain the mystery of religion, because a shared belief in supernatural beings can foster group cohesion. They suggest that evolution has equipped humans to solve tragedies of the commons (also known as collective action dilemmas and public goods games), in which actions that benefit the individual may harm the community; familiar examples include overfishing, highway congestion, tax evasion, and carbon emissions. And they have drawn normative moral and political conclusions from these scientific beliefs, such as that we should recognize the wisdom behind conservative values, like religiosity, patriotism, and puritanism, and that we should valorize a communitarian loyalty and sacrifice for the good of the group over an every-man-for-himself individualism.

I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not.”

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“Wars And Genocide Have Been Universal And Eternal”

June 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

E.O. Wilson thinks war is our genes, though I’ve never felt like going to war with anyone. Perhaps it’s a genetic defect I possess. From the biologist’s new Discover article, “Is War Inevitable?“:

“Once a group has been split off from other groups and sufficiently dehumanized, any brutality can be justified, at any level, and at any size of the victimized group up to and including race and nation. And so it has ever been. A familiar fable is told to symbolize this pitiless dark angel of human nature. A scorpion asks a frog to ferry it across a stream. The frog at first refuses, saying that it fears the scorpion will sting it. The scorpion assures the frog it will do no such thing. After all, it says, we will both perish if I sting you. The frog consents, and halfway across the stream the scorpion stings it. Why did you do that, the frog asks as they both sink beneath the surface. It is my nature, the scorpion explains.

War, often accompanied by genocide, is not a cultural artifact of just a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture. Archaeological sites are strewn with the evidence of mass conflicts and burials of massacred people. Tools from the earliest Neolithic period, about 10,000 years ago, include instruments clearly designed for fighting. One might think that the influence of pacific Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, has been consistent in opposing violence. Such is not the case. Whenever Buddhism dominated and became the official ideology, war was tolerated and even pressed as part of faith-based state policy. The rationale is simple, and has its mirror image in Christianity: Peace, nonviolence, and brotherly love are core values, but a threat to Buddhist law and civilization is an evil that must be defeated.

Since the end of World War II, violent conflict between states has declined drastically, owing in part to the nuclear standoff of the major powers (two scorpions in a bottle writ large). But civil wars, insurgencies, and state-sponsored terrorism continue unabated. Overall, big wars have been replaced around the world by small wars of the kind and magnitude more typical of hunter-gatherer and primitively agricultural societies. Civilized societies have tried to eliminate torture, execution, and the murder of civilians, but those fighting little wars do not comply.”

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More E.O. Wilson posts:

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“The Drive To Join Is Deeply Ingrained”

April 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

E.O. Wilson, who goes to picnics just for the ants, has an article in Newsweek which examines how humans are similar to tribal insects in regards to social networking. An excerpt:

“The drive to join is deeply ingrained, a result of a complicated evolution that has led our species to a condition that biologists call eusociality. ‘Eu-,’ of course, is a prefix meaning pleasant or good: euphony is something that sounds wonderful; eugenics is the attempt to improve the gene pool. And the eusocial group contains multiple generations whose members perform altruistic acts, sometimes against their own personal interests, to benefit their group. Eusociality is an outgrowth of a new way of understanding evolution, which blends traditionally popular individual selection (based on individuals competing against each other) with group selection (based on competition among groups). Individual selection tends to favor selfish behavior. Group selection favors altruistic behavior and is responsible for the origin of the most advanced level of social behavior, that attained by ants, bees, termites—and humans.”

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Atom Ant intro, 1965:

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“Darwin’s Dice Have Rolled Badly For Earth”

November 20, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

E.O. Wilson wondered if we’re programmed to do away with ourselves in his 2005 Cosmos article, “Is Humanity Suicidal?” An excerpt:

“Unlike any creature that lived before, humans have become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the composition of the world’s fauna and flora.

Now in the midst of a population explosion, this species has doubled in number to more than 6 billion during the past 50 years. It is scheduled to double again in the next 50 years. No other single species in evolutionary history has even remotely approached the sheer mass in protoplasm generated by humanity.

Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. It was a misfortune for the living world in particular, many of our scientists believe, that a carnivorous primate and not some more benign form of animal made the breakthrough.

Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial, intent on private space beyond minimal requirements and oriented by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond the family and tribal levels comes hard. Worse, our liking for meat causes us to use the Sun’s energy at low efficiency.” (Thanks TETW.)

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“It’s doomsday”:

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“An Ant Colony Possesses A Kind Of Accumulated Intelligence”

May 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “Invasion,” Tom Junod’s 2010 Esquire piece about his house being besieged by an army of those tiny colonists known as ants:

“A few years ago, I interviewed the great biologist E. O. Wilson right before he and his colleague Bert Hölldobler published their magnum opus, The Superorganism. The book, a study of ant societies, was an exploration of the notion that ants are such organized organisms that they almost don’t count as individual organisms at all but rather as cells of the colony they serve. The colony is the superorganism, and as Wilson told me, ‘an ant colony is far more intelligent than an ant.’ I’ll say. An ant by itself is an inoffensive creature, at worst a crunchy annoyance, smidgeny and obsessively clean and, above all, dumb, with a pindot of a brain. An ant by itself is not going to get any ideas… the problem being that it’s rarely by itself, that it’s representative of something, and that what it represents not only has ideas — it has designs. Wilson’s book proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out — what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you — is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.” (Thanks Atlantic.)

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Ant-sploitation horror movie trailer from 1977:

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