Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Edward O. Wilson: Anthill

Well thank you thank you very much for joining us this evening and thanks as always to the Harvard Book Store for putting on these events. What a wonderful series. That's coming up. And Ed Wilson a very special welcome to you it's great to. It's great to be here and congratulations on the publishing on the publication of Anthill. Thank you Phil. One of the great privileges I've had as an editor over the years has been the task of editing and I use that word laughably at Wilson. I Vanity Fair at The Atlantic Monthly and long long ago and at the Wilson Quarterly. E.O. Wilson is a literary scientist which is part of a grand tradition why is it that scientists so often write so well. That goes back to Darwin Galileo and I'll embarrass you if I keep mentioning names. I'd like at some point though to come back to the just the idea of your writing and and and how you came to you know to be the kind of writer you are. But first a few words of of of introduction and biographical background.

You know Wilson is a professor emeritus at Harvard University and his his actual official former title is too long to read. He first came to prominent attention to public attention with his book sociobiology which argues for the biological basis of all social behavior in the course of his career he has published some 30 or 40 30 40 books 30 books two of them won the Pulitzer Prize. He has taken on topics ranging from ants up to God or maybe from your perspective from ants down to God. His work has aroused immense controversy. He once had a pitcher of water poured over his head by a member of the audience at a public event you know which I'm confident will not happen tonight. No. Go on. You know Wilson's new book departs from his previous books in one large respect. It's a novel his first work of

fiction and for a first novel I just learned it's actually cracked the New York Times bestseller list. For those of you who have who haven't read it yet you should know that it's a coming of age story about a boy down south in an area around a place called like not to be Alabama. A boy named Raphe Cody who comes to know and love his small patch patch of local earth and especially the ants and goes on to become a scientist and a lawyer and become embroiled in environmental fights over development and preservation. And in the middle of the book there's this magical novella about ants which is a narrative dramatic version of this boy's undergraduate these us. And on top of that there's a love scene. If you count the ants there's more than one love scene takes place takes place at Harvard Exactly. So I have a few questions that I'd like to ask. We'll talk about a half an hour or so and then we can throw the conversation open open to the audience and have about a half hour for

for that. So let me start with a very very foundational question I remember once years ago. You're telling a story about how it was that you came to look at the insect world as opposed to other parts of the natural world and I think it involved a fishing trip and an accident. Could you take us through that story. Glad to have first I'd like to pay their interlocutor here or a compliment on maybe written 10 a dozen fan letters in my life. One of them was a shovel man when he was on the Atlantic. So I wondered that too. Now I remember I will tell you what I thought I was you know either. Well I will tell you what it got on the bed. How did I come to work with inject. Well you know I like to say that every kid has a bug period. I just never grew out of mine. But there was a reason why did you

grow out of it and it turned out that I really never understood this until I was an adult that I would classify as such but I'm handicapped. I injured this white eye fishies when I was a boy down on the Gulf Coast. And in fact I lost a vision in the sky. So I was one I from the age of seven on and when I decided to do growing up in the beautiful woodlands of of southern Alabama and the panhandle of Florida. I wanted to do that all my life I just wanted to stay outdoors all all my life. I naturally did what all young naturalists do when that is. I started with birds and I soon discovered I was the worst bird watcher in the world. It has something to do with monocular vision. You know you really can't. Ees you can't do very well spotting and following birds and somehow it just doesn't work. We do happen to have in the

audience one of the world's foremost birders and naturalist and a real a real air of the role I hope he's sitting here Peter. All that would you would do in a fire show where you stand up no matter what right always up there i'm so you can't see I'm right. Peter you would goof sat here with us. She's truly a great naturalist and he went the bird route big time. Well I decided then that I would do something else. And I have had very good vision in the eye remaining. And I discovered I could see fine detail so soon I turned to the what I call the little things that run the earth. I started with butterflies. I had episodes with snakes and frogs and that sort of thing. But I finally turned to little things six legged things and in time I

turned to those that are the most abundant on earth and then I started working on them seriously about when I was about 16 and before I went on to the University of Alabama I came from the University of Alabama by way of University of Tennessee never thinking I would head north. But the doors of opportunity opened for me here and I have been here at Harvard for fifty nine you're working on the little things that run the earth. And they do run the earth especially ants because it turns out at least from figures we have in the Amazon and I think it's not for all for want of rest of the world. That answer make up three you know two thirds of the bio mass of all the insects. You know if you wait all the you go into a habitat you weigh all the answers and you weigh all of the insects. Ants

would make up to two thirds roughly and outweigh all of the vertebrates in the localities you know mammal birds they have to use root reptile four to one. So this was a group that I couldn't miss. In fact everywhere I go Cullen anywhere I still look for ants. And wherever you are you can find them. And it's wonderful to rejoin them for brief periods of time in any part of the world. And that's what led me on the show to the end. But beyond that many aspects of evolutionary biology and social behavior and so on. Well since your book is in many respects about ants and also about human society and the links between the two of them I want I want to ask you something about that there's there's a there's

a moment in the book when this wonderful character RAF RAF Cody who in some ways he seems like a character out of will a Kaffir. And so he's applying to college and he's an improbable applicant to college. But he does get in but he writes a letter to the Admissions Dean and this is one of those you know those letters to an admissions dean that makes the admissions Deans day I think this is a very unusual letter. And and in the end here's one paragraph from it. It tracks some of what you just had to say. Answer very important in the environment RAF Cody writes. I have read if you whale the insects ants make up two thirds they weigh four times as much as all the birds mammals reptiles and amphibians put together. But as you go on to show in this book there are there are other reasons why we should pay attention to and so it's about the way they organize themselves. And I wish you could talk a little bit about that. I think human beings have a bit of a love hate relationship with the

way ants organelle themselves. Let me add at this point that this is the ant part of the knob fell in the middle it's called Chronicle the and who chronicle. And this really is a mostly of southern novel about people and how they relate to one another and how they go through over three generations going from the passage from the old Sol's to the new style and the complications that are involved across class across religious conflicts and so on. So I enjoyed rebuilding all of that for my home town of Alabama of the state of Alabama and Movil my hometown. But you know may I read the first the very brief prologue because it actually that's the best way to manage this to explain what I try to do with people in their hands together and the ecosystem the three elements of this book are.

The the people of this area and there's distinctive traits. It's an insular place. Mobile is a little backwater city and it's preserved traits that make it one of the few cities in America that have a soul. And that's how I've just finished the history of it not how I've described it. Because I can't stay away from it. But anyway this I think makes a point. Best if I wrote great at it OK. This is a story about three parallel worlds which nevertheless exist in the same space and time. They rise together they fall they rise again but in a cycle so different in magnitude that each is virtually invisible to the others. The smallest are the ants who build civilizations in the dirt. Their histories are epics. That unfold on picnic grounds. Their colonies

are like those of humans are in perpetual conflict. War is a generic imperative of most and indeed answer the most warlike of all creatures. The colonies grow and struggle and sometimes they triumph over their neighbors. Then they die. Always human societies or the second world. There are of course vast differences between ants and men but in fundamental ways their cycles are similar. There is something genetic about this convergence because of it. Ants are a metaphor for us and we for them. Homer might have written equally of ants and men. Zeus has given us the fate of winding down our lives in painful wars from abuse until we perish. Each of us thousands of times greater in space and time is the third of our world the biosphere the totality of all life plastered like a membrane over all of

Earth. The biosphere has its own epic cycles. Humanity one of the countless species forming the biosphere can perturb it but we cannot leave it or destroy it without perishing ourselves. The cycles of the other species can be destroyed and the biosphere corrupted. But for each careless step we take our species will ultimately pay an unwelcome price. Always. So that's basically the message and introduces the three characters. So my question to you is what you've just read is it. Those are themes in many ways that run through your entire body of work and the people in your book speak about them in their own characters and so on. What what made you turn after 30 books to fiction and how much second presses and how much of this is drawn from your own

life how much of you is in RAF Cody. I'd say the Boyhood is close. The first novelist I think generally are expected to be autobiographical when they're writing you know. So I write that wrap up to the time you get to college closely parallels my life but wrath falls under the spell of his mother's from the patrician a patrician family and he falls under the spell of the wealthy. Something from a Philistine uncle who is determined that Rafi L. Sims is named after the great admiral of Confederate Admiral Safary all Semmes Cody is going to be take his place. You know as the male heir of the mobile sims and he doesn't think that Raphael is going to do this mucking around in the Piney Woods wanting to be a Ranger So he gives him

support to go in these good mothers married a redneck. You have to call the tremendous problems and you wait. So he promises young wrath of a free ride to the university. You can get into and then any providing you also go to law school. A good German Uncle Cyrus or determine that Raf is going to get that kind of background he hopes it will bend him in the right direction. Well so RAF is. Me up to the childhood all the childhood you know childhood experiences and then deviates powerfully. So that I get was able limbs to develop and study and and learn a lot on my own so I used up my childhood and then I devoted a lot of them. I used up a lot of my relatives.

Are they still with my. Yeah. And fortunately most of them are gone but my Aunt Nellie is becomes the she becomes and it just the she's the family genealogist and blabber mouth and so on and on. So that when I've been asked are you going to write another novel especially about that part of the world I actually know I've used up all my relatives. And that's basically the. The thrust of it in terms of connection to reality the real reality however and human the human story and I try to recreate the southern culture as it has made this transition. Through of through and part way out of racism into what it is today and what it's like today to describe what it's like today. But the real ism comes in the natural history I don't think any author has ever in the novel described the natural world as it really is in

the detail to bring it to life. And this is what we must do. I think increasingly in the future most novelists take their character through. Will they take them through the dark woods to the lighted cabin. They have them thrash their way and find their way outside of the out of the marsh where they discovered the body of the murdered person. The one and you never know. You know it's just a dark wood to show us the grove of Sycamore or just this or that. No we are a biological species in a biological world. And we really have got to start thinking of ourselves more realistically that way. That's old Ralph. He is a child of nature who understands that and cares deeply and he devotes and fashions his own life accordingly to save a part of nature that leads him into actually tremendous conflict in the board room of the

developing company developer country a company that's about to destroy a priceless piece of old growth for it brings them into conflict with a radical right religious fanatics of that area and so on. But this is a novel. Why would I write a novel. Well because I thought I could you know first. But there's another reason. And that is that that message that I just read in the prologue. I've kept it tried in so many ways to get it across with nonfiction and different styles and lecturing and. Finally it dawned on me that people respect nonfiction but they read now people want a story and they will read novels. And this is one way to get to them so this is what I call my belief Sunday strategy.

And I've I've given you a long winded you know not a not at all it but I didn't mention the thousand pound alligator. Well we'll come to that. But I'll tell you one thing if I'm rattling on too long you're just remember you fell into the trap of interviewing a person who is both a Harvard professor and a southerner. That's what southern of the such what we do for a living. Or the more aptly put That's what we do on those hot summer nights out on the veranda sipping Limon Ade or sweet tea. And you wait. Here's the novel was another way to get the message across and do it I hope the play's all that it doesn't spoil the story. And this is I'm going to give you an imitation I know I don't have one recent lecturer at Harvard show. Bear up if you've already heard it this is Billy Sunday. My imitation of this famous revenge evangelist of the 1920s

trying to save souls and fight sin. And he tries everything he can he's going to throw everything he's got into fighting sin. So consider that I'm fighting extinction of species an ecosystem. OK Billy Sunday. Odd how you hate seeing them. I hate that so much. I go no bite it till I can't move my arm no more. And when I cain't move my arm no more. I'm not going to bite it and when I got no more teeth we're going to gum it. That's gummy get it. Have you got them have you got the novel bug now. The What The. Have you got a bee in your bonnet.

That's probably the wrong metaphor for you isn't it well actually I. Ant metaphor next time please. Anyway the I hate saying this in the presence of a representative of my publisher. But this is first only last. I'm back to nonfiction. I'm going right back up. OK. And what about the movie. Oh yeah well there's always a first for that. Well every novelist dreams of a movie. I thought maybe there might be one of these far out sort of much harder for the kind who lurk around Harvard who would consider making a movie out of my biggest volume which was a five hundred seventy eight page monograph entitled fide goalie in the New World on analysis of mega diverse genus of Vange.

I've received no feelers. However I have been invited out to Sundance by Robert Redford a wonderful man. We spent two days getting acquainted and he's expressed an interest in it. Wait in that you know he's expressed an interest in this. Oh yes it's all right. And so just as you like to consider it so he's just now finished and I guess will be in theater before long his movie on the Lincoln's conspirators. So I would I hope to hear from him but there are others who are. We have other feelers from other I think it would make an excellent movie. And I if I signed for any of it all I'm going to say is that Woody Allen will not play one of the you know. Well there's a character here that you could play. Well there's a character here that you could play. I said I hope you're saying Fred Norval.

Well OK drill me all this there's Fred. There's Fred Norval and then there's also Bill Needham. Oh yes. Now here you know here's how Bill Needham is described in his late 50s leave the age aside but he had to learn the lean hawk like looks one expects to find in a veteran field biologist. But almost never actually does He spoke in a low carefully modulating voice and enjoyed pronouncing scientific names in the exact original Greek or Latin. His imperturbably calm measured manner had a passion within you could play that role. Maybe but I actually modeled it on a friend of mine in a Florida State University. Which is where RAF Cody Noah ends up and ends up going and of course are shuttle people that have been present living down there including the one that the reporter of the journalist and there are all Bill Robin who is modeled on

show they know who they are and you know I joke with them and I just say anything that between that and any resemblance of course is complete coincidence complete point of action. None of them would sue me anyway. I mentioned at the at the outset that I that I'd love to hear a little bit more just about not writing how you learned to write. I'm guessing probably that there's a lot of childhood reading that is reflected somehow in this. Just stylistically. Who are the novelist that you admired. Was any any were any of them in the back of your minds while you were writing but if you could talk a little bit about that. Well I'll admit that I'm a John D McDonnell fan I read novels and occasionally but they're mainly novels I read like the Jack Aubrey series and Patrick O'Brien and I've read everything Patrick O'Brian

overrode everything a John David Gunn of southern Florida crime novelists never wrote. But I read when I do that is to put me to bed. You know I just read about him with 10 of the 11 not for any other purpose. And I don't think they influenced me very much. But like all undergraduates I had my own law my own not powerful transformative writers notably among whom would be Sinclair Lewis. And his. And then of course in my age in my generation my college years of that was for those of you who were not alive at that time. This was I think between roughly between the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Spanish-American War.

But the raid no this was the early 50s late 40s and it was Philip Wylie. I didn't love that man's style. You know that's our natural teenage rebellion. He was he was a highly favored best seller The author of the time very influential but of writers who had flowed. No I had too much time and too much concentration on scientific literature. You know building doing research. And when I started writing this novel I have I have one of the best editors in America. That's what really helped me. His name is Robert Weil drop Bob while I've been north. And he's been called by many one of the 10 best editors in America. And when I repeated that in front of the president of WW Norton at last night's pin international guala. The.

The response I got back was 10 then and then I had to say well I heard that but I said I will if I if I would work with it on the other night if I knew them and I had a really terrific guy and and Bob Barr kept saying to me while I was doing this you know he said Ed you've got to read other novelist you've got to read Faulkner you have to read Harper Lee and so on. And I said no I wanted you know win or lose to plan their fall I wanted my own style of writing you to go into this you know I want to be completely me I didn't want to be influenced by any of them. So I will hereby declare I have never read a novel by a Southern author. I wrote of Southern book without doing that. I once read a short story by Eudora Welty and thought it was well I thought it was a poor short story

and then just to tell a story. I thought only had my opportunity to meet Harper Lee and she apparently has a wreck loose of the same magnitude as JD Salinger. But since much of my work in the home in around mobility when down to do research but also for conservation work has focused on a magical area called the Red Hills. It's an unromantic name but it's an area of of deep ravines in the sides and bottoms of which are ice age trees and plants ice age by which I mean during the advance of the last glacier. The Northern Appalachian Flora and some of the falloff moved south very slowly century by century and the advance of the ice and some of it stayed in deep cool ravines

as it went. As the ice would back up and show this was an area unexplored by biologically for the most part and of course like everything else almost the other thing else down the earth under threat from developers and loggers. But the theme of the book too is these priceless areas that are could go under before the conservation movement gets strong enough but right now that there's a conflict developing it's a Rall part of the world in terms of the conflict between developers and and and the growing rapidly growing conservation movement show. I've been doing I've been working with the Nature Conservancy and other groups there to make sure that that Red Hills area somehow comes into private or at least our public benevolent public ownership. And it turns out by coincidence. So is Harper Lee's shoot when you know that area is just er. 50 miles from from Monroeville

Monroeville is where she stays that's where she was born enough where Truman Capote he was born. So when that was mentioned to her she said she'd like to get together with me so everybody would joggle you know someone will get to see Mark really. She's had a stroke She's 84 and maybe she would come maybe she would not. And we gathered we had read of photo op would have been great. She didn't show. Then she said oh I'll join you for lunch later she's of the message in show and she said I'll join you at the Bledsoe plantation where we're having supper evening meal in the south is called supper. And the Bledsoe plantation has a history. Forget it. Anyway the present owners invited us to have supper and with a small group we did and she didn't come but she sent message by way of her friend of hers sorry she would not come she

gave no reason. Her friend said Well you know she has good days bad days and she's always like that she always says she will come and then often she does not. How did I get into this. I thought was it was the last out of the deal but the deal. The real good Southern story. How I came close but I didn't get to meet Harper Lee. I'm going to ask about get his verdict. Oh oh oh. We heard and saw these two drop this is that what you think you are just right. Maybe they are slow editions of the book and mention this is again Peter auld in my French speaking and to be asked about the status the ivory billed woodpecker by Peter auld in the sort of like having Einstein

asking you to explain relativity. But I see it's a personal question open as Peter well knows the Arkansas law ivory bill sighting created tremendous CTR and then fizzled out for reasons I won't go into now but it's apparently an honest mistake and we thought well at the end of the Ivory Bow. But no. Another group from Oregon University apparently the law apparently in from Oregon claim that they had definitely seen the ivory bill in the Choctaw Hatchie river floodplain forest and as you all know the Choctaw Hatchie is just east of the Perdido river and west of the Apalachicola. And vision that we. Runs across the panhandle of Florida and it's close don't you bracketed on both

side by Douglas flood plain forest with Cypress just the kind of habitat ivory bills would be and so on. This group has drawn my drawings. They said was the ivory bill they looked good. They've made a recording which I've heard and the recording says. BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG. I think that's unique to the ivory bill is it not for that region and any rate they have drawings of old photographs of holes it could be an eye rebuild pole. So they came to me and they said would you sponsor an article that we rode right on the basis of that evidence. I don't think I ever told you the story Peter. No you didn't well it's interesting. You know be a US a sponsor in a scientific journal because we think we really have a solid. And my answer was No because after Arkansas after the Arkansas debacle I mean people are going to have to have.

Good videography. And you know solid irrefutable evidence. They agreed that they should just wait now. This is summer. Wait until winter because there are enough deciduous trees that the leaves will fall you can see deeper into the forest. I was two years ago when to pass the word. Now another winter passed no word Peter tell us is the ivory billed woodpecker extinct. 1 0 0 6 0 0. Yeah well you ask we have quite you know thanks for telling me that I thought that would be the answer. I remember the one time I met Roger Tory Peterson you were a good friend of I'm sure and said this was years ago year before he died I said Izzy I read Bill what's the status of the Iberville he has when we're gone. Too bad. Any rate doesn't enter in that

young Rath who as that they not could be tracked has pretty good forest in the output stream that goes into the chuck of the All those are atrocious. That's a very realistically described as he dreams someday of seeing an ivory bill till it's worth keeping the dream alive isn't it. Yeah that's right. 0 0 0. 0 I could explain that to you precisely. I have not only read Walden but many times and in the course of writing a book called The Future of life I open the book with a letter to the wall to Henry David Thoreau and I pronounce it I pronounce it floral because that's the insider's way of pronouncing it way the family pronounced it apparently. And I spent lots of

time there and it was a thorough society so this is of that's one book I read. Education Sorrell describes how outsiders cabin. If you cannot call it a cabin shack you know it was pretty humble. He saw a war going on and there were red hands. And fight a black Ensign battle. And he said it was off and they were killing each other. It was a vote for Russell T he said that made the recent battles over in Concord and Lexington look like mere skirmishers. And he wondered what was going on in this war what was going on. Ironically because he was one of the great abolitionist himself was ant slavery. The residents were the slave

makers and the black ants were the species they victimize that is if you could call it almost like domestic animal because a different species and all summer long. If you watch for it you will see slave rage going on. There are a number of species of slave making ants here in New England and I've actually done a lot of research on them and also work out a pheromone language the slave makers use to communicate one another with one another during their raids on them. On the hand they were they they attacked and furthermore I discovered what you call the propaganda substances of the Xanth release alarm pheromones that alarmed the other the other species but to which they are immune it's sort of like attacking a readout before with extremely loud noise the way we captured Noriega. But like most Americans were deaf to that kind of music show that

you know it that's the answer to that it's an interesting bit of natural history I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah. The question has to do with Raf's father who is at both sympathetic and not sympathetic character he has rough edges but he also has admirable qualities you know. And the question has to do with where does he come from. You know he comes he's a redneck. In the history I've just finished I take you know history of the area and take some pleasure in working out the history of the rednecks where they came from. And I could spend the rest of the evening on this very this favorite subject. These are the rednecks at the time of the civil war that is up to all of the people of the South. We're three quarters of descended from people from the Celtic edge. So call

the more rebellious areas of the state of Scotch Irish or Irish. The Hebrides of Scotland and the highlands of parts of England. The very areas it'd been in rebellion pretty much against the crown for all that time and in fact they have arrived in that area through South Carolina Tennessee in part because in the 17 hundreds of the British government encourage them with land grants. Leave the British Isles in calm and settle. And so they came over and they were they brought these Celtic qualities with them. They were raw edge front years when for the most part they were freeholders but some of them then got into the plantation business and began the great tragedy of slavery because that's how you made big money during the cotton boom. And they had the qualities that most historians agree. I know you're not

supposed to stereotype ethnic groups but you can do it safely I'm one of them around me anyway. They tend to be too stressed on honor over law. They are very fiercely independent. They are quarrelsome. They believe in the code of honor. They are quick to challenge when they feel that they're insulted or code of honors is insulted. They are they believe highly in gallantry and bravery they are reckless. They do not like people telling them what to do. They love guns. And the so on. And if that's that's a bitter stereotype. In fact there's a tremendous amount of truth to it and thus arose the redneck culture of the area. They were very well off until

finally all the tragedy of slavery caught up with the South. It was it was a Greek tragedy it was inevitable once we went through that we started on that path. Then there could be only one solution. Churchill once referred to it its great history as a civil war. That this was the noblest and most inevitable conflict of which we to that time have record. And thus they went into the war. And when they did the cotton industry continued. But it couldn't only be continued by white and black becoming sharecroppers. They no longer could own slaves and they all had to work the land themselves and the sharecropper system was cruel and debilitating and there produced a large population of rural whites who you find at the lowest

point of their evolution depicted dramatically and painfully and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Photographs by Walker Evans and James Algy's description. But many of them also went into the towns and cities. And as Rick Bragg of a recent British Southern writer has brilliantly described it in his book The most they ever had are they have this combination of qualities which I have put into Raphael sim Cody's father Ainslie Cody which is inner nobility strong code of honor personal but with crudity and recklessness and love of guns that of contrasts who strongly with a more patrician Sims who had made their fortune before the Civil War and now occupied

wealth and power in the city of Mobile. Great how are we doing. You are always a human species doing or how is what's relevant with respect to what you decide to do with the book in silly and right. And you know that that will give you an idea of how it would do it. Actually a knife in the 1970s was of a very bad time for the American intelligentsia and chattering class because at that time the social sciences sciences were pretty well dominated by the view that the brain is a blank slate. The Bliss is a blank slate. If you and I will go into it except to say that this is the diametrical obvious opposition to what the biologists were developing and cognitive psychologists as well at that time in the 70s and geneticists there were a whole range of already of very

substantial evidence that in fact there is a human nature and we knew many of the qualities of it. Some of us shelled out on human nature. And since that time of course we've now taken the subject too. Down to the level of human genetics to brain science to genetic paths of genetic program pathways and human behavior come to understand that the traits that our make up human nature probably have been a adaptive significance that dates back hundreds of thousand to millions of years and that they represent predispositions. Not you know if you're unmovable instincts as you would have been in animals especially insects. So all of this has evolved into and absorbed into parts of genetics brain science and also given rise to the

subdiscipline of evolutionary psychology which is a spinoff of Sellafield biology. I don't know if that's the answer to you but I think there may be a second part to the question which is this. So the first part is just what was it that you were. What were the ideas that you were advancing. But as I remember conciliate it's there's another part to it which has to do with well once we understand the implications of what makes us tick in a certain way what does that tell us about the way we should organize ourselves as a society. I think that maybe the other part of the question will end and and how are we doing on that. Well that's a good answer and so for some reason. There were people in the lecture will not many but who believe that just to talk about it was dangerous because it would give people ideas that maybe there are there were differences between sections that were different we ration

and that which you know and that was it. I've I'm familiar with the it illogical suppression of free speech and ideas. We spent a lot of time at the pin international gala last night listening to stories from Burma. Particularly were focused on the repression of real ideas and how in China and the people who are now in prison because the great dream didn't want to have certain ideas talked about. Well that's what happened to a substantial degree at that time. And I think all that's long since forgotten. And what was the question again. Well you know come on if we and if we understand your ideas about how society. Oh yes of course what are we to make of it.

Well yes the you know I have a went on and wrote other books including conciliation and develop the whole concept of the unification of disciplines on into the social sciences. I might add that the decision was made yesterday Incidentally just to pin it or nationalism is preeminently a literary organization. And but I attended a meeting yesterday when it was decided that there would be a pin Prize for science writing and that sort of help shows that you know we're opening up we're beginning to meet. Now why should we know about these things for the same reason that a doctor should know something about human anatomy and physiology before he pressed Schwab's medicine. Precisely the same I mean if we have a structured brain and a propensity to behave

in certain ways and you know we are of almost absurdly irrational in our behavior I like to say that our problem is due to the fact that we have Paleolithic emotions be evil institutions and godlike technology in the sheer stream a dangerous combination. So what we need to know is why we have these Paleolithic emotions why we cling to medieval issue Two-Shoes. And you know of with absurd faithless tribalism and so on we need to know why we are the way we are before we can begin to find a better life if we keep making it a war fare of idiology and religions. Then we're really going to be in deep trouble because our our technology really allows us to destroy not only each other but the whole world. And that's one reason

that I keep coming back as long as I've got the pulpit here which is a Southern Baptist pastor and Mitt and you can and you can have it for a few more minutes. I think that the the distinction between an answer society and the human society is very much that the ant colony is a super organism and to substantial degree and I have a couple of colleagues I don't know if either is in this room but I don't see them yet. MARTIN Novak and. Careen attorney to do one here either one of him here. Anyway we're working together now. There are mathematicians and we're working on a whole new approach to this which is putting more and more emphasis on an insect colony as a super organism which is essentially really the queen in the case of the Hymenoptera Dansby of washing term A and B what is essentially

the subject of natural selection. They object to target and all of the workers showing. How interesting behavior self-sacrifice for the colony are in effect an extension of her genetic material. Darwin first made that suggestion. Incidentally in The Origin of Species. And now we're beginning to drift back to that perception but in a far more sophisticated way. That is not true of human beings. Human beings originated in extremely complex societies in a very different way. And that is we kept our reproductive potential we kept our individuality but at the same time we developed strong propensities that could be called a tribal instinct we bond together quickly form groups and we and we have group versus group almost universal is

a you know it's a human trait. The villain of what piece of advice would you give to people who are in their teens who want to go into scientific work and who want to go into environmental and conservation work. What's the most important thing that you would tell them. Yes. Look in case you haven't noticed. There is increasing agreement among scientists including biologists. Even my own proud colleagues in molecular cell biology and biomedical research that we and biology are entering the age of synthesis meaning that we're going to be having to pay much more attention to complex systems the way all these elements that they've been the sect ing and identify and put together to create celled organisms and beyond that whole ecosystems we're now moving in that direction. And there's going to be synthesis going on. We need broadly trained biologists to

have in addition to a basic background in the sciences. Pay attention to how you analyze complex systems. So that's something to keep in mind. This is going to be the structure is going to be the age of biology. I mean it's pretty imminent already. This is going to be the age of the environment in which we settle down before we wreck the planet. Put them together. And now you know what to do. Take Biology. Get a broad background become expert in one area. But we preach faired to move quickly with others in particular in partnership from research to one combination of problems and techniques to another and then realize that what you're doing is absolutely crucial in saving the environment as it would also be if you went into medicine and did similar research to save

people individually. And don't forget to write the novel. OK thank you very much that's been a treat and a thrill.