Biophilia by E.O. Wilson
Confessions of a Dendritic Mind
I’m going to begin with a confession: I want to present a Rationalist case for conservation. I believe (largely) in tech progress and most of the contemporary writers and thinkers I respect have at least a passing affiliation with EA and Rationalism. EAs are unquestionably more open to the notion of expanding our circle of moral consideration than your average Joe. Many of us are vegetarians and more of us are radically opposed to factory farming. When it comes to conventional conservation, though - things get trickier.Economic growth has more reliably improved human well-being than basically anything else, and until very recently, there was more or less a one-to-one relationship between environmental degradation and resource extraction. Thanks to computation, we can get more from less. Yes,37% of Earth's land is used for agriculture, but would you really make the exchange between contemporary agricultural technology and heavy industry for a medieval lifestyle on a planet with more space for animals topursue a Malthusian existence? Many of us might feel that there’s some kind of a loss in the diminishing space for wildlife, but surely no utilitarian would endorse increasing the number of beings living lives with barely any happiness in them at the expense of adding to the number of self-actualized persons. Maybe environmentalism as a movement is on balance negative too because itslows the pace of development. - Or so the arguments go, anyways. (Though some of us do think thatwild animal suffering is bad enough to merit serious attention as a research area).
But another confession: in addition to my admiration for EA-adjacent folks, I also love Thoreau, Muir, Annie Dillard, Richard Powers and co., and I don’t think it’s the case that what you find in them is just a pastoral / Romantic / nostalgic longing for the past. But if you want to talk to Rationalists about the circumstances under which we ought to conserve, Thoreau won’t be of much help. I thought hard about what books do pose this question, and ultimately, I decided one couldn’t do better than one of the fathers of modern biology: E.O. Wilson, and his book on the subject, Biophilia.
humble beginnings
‘Biophilia’ is a new addition to the language, coined by apsychoanalyst in the 60s. Wilson referred to it as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” And, Wilson, for those who aren’t familiar with him, died in 2021, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s heir’. He was something of a troubled youth, having attended - in his words - 15 or 16 schools in 11 years of schooling. In high school, one of his goals was to catch every snake species native to Alabama, a task that involved asking neighborhood boys to stun them with slingshots so he could go grab them. He famously butted heads with James Watson (the discoverer of DNA) who said that anyone interested in natural history and ecology was just a “stamp collector.” Afterwards, Wilson’s work on ant colonies led him to develop sociobiology, which later rebranded itself as evolutionary psychology. Suggesting that human beings aren’t magical doesn’t make you very popular, and Harvard held afaculty vote on censuring him after he published Sociobiology. According to legend, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who was by then a wizened old lady, stormed into the meeting with a giant walking stick, slammed it on the ground, and said, “BOOK burning, we are talking about book burning,” The censors lost.
Fun anecdotes aside, Wilson was a sharp guy and biodiversity conservation was the cause he decided to devote his life to. Biophilia is his attempt to explain why. Like I said at the start, I want to take conservation seriously, but I want to have seriously good reasons for doing so. This question has bothered me for years. After re-reading Biophilia, I realize I needn’t have read so broadly: Wilson was always the man for the job.
To begin: Biophilia is something of a book that can’t make up its mind. It starts with Wilson in Berhardsdorp, Brazil, a town at the entrance to the Amazon, meditating on the forest before him. For as much as Wilson has fathered a lot of the familiar images of conservation (we get some references here to the meager time of man and the deep time of ecology and geology, the history of life on Earth as a clock and a football field), he’s no druid. He alternates between pragmatism and romanticism, speaking lovingly of the tropical rainforest as “unknown terrain beyond, a borderland of still unconceivable prodigies,” and bemoans its loss, “this image is almost gone. Although perhaps as old as man, it has faded during our own lifetime.” Biophilia is not a return-to-the-land fantasy, though. The metaphor he uses describe our predicament is the “machine in the garden.” We can’t live in Eden without our machines, but our machines destroy Eden. I think that this is an important picture for understanding Wilson. He gets that nature is beautiful and fascinating, but he also gets that the rainforest is filled with “miniature horrors designed to reduce visiting biologists to their constituent amino acids in quick time.” Later, he advocates for the Amazon Project, a large-scale experiment to see how much species diversity declines when habitat decreases. Endorsing a project like that seems to beg the question: how much can we get away with? - not a typical question for a conservationist.
I. For the aesthetes
For a book that purports to be about the love of life, less than half of it is explicitly devoted to making the case for the Biophilia hypothesis. Large sections of it are devoted instead to trying to move the reader. This is not without success. He spends a whole chapter describing an ant colony and another on the birds of paradise - he talks about the success of leaf-cutter ants, says that they’re so good at harvesting vegetation that they inflict a billion dollars in losses in agriculture every year, that the trick of converting cellulose to a digestible material via a fungus is so rare that it has evolved only once, etc. I know a few biologists who are obsessed with ant warfare (which has me thinking that the world needs an ant parody of The Better Angels of Our Nature). So the argument goes that the evolved character of leaf-cutter ants is so rare and contingent as to be extremely precious. Every living thing is the victor of a similar evolutionary battle - so if you get on board here, the argument for preserving biodiversity is easy!
But following the machine in the garden paradigm, he throws in a wrinkle. In his discussion of the birds of paradise, he writes, “Science is not just analytic; it is synthetic… There will come a time when the bird of paradise is reconstituted by the synthesis of all the hard-won analytic information.” For context, Biophilia came out in 1984. PCR was invented in 1983; the cutting-edge of synthetic biology at the time was Steven Benner’s lab at Harvard, where they figured out how to synthesize a single enzyme. It’s pretty astonishing that he saw even then a future where we might be able to synthesize complex organisms fromscratch. If the birds of paradise are mechanically reproducible, then, what’s so special about biodiversity? Maybe they’re just instances of a class we’ll soon be able to remake with ease.
Well, Wilson’s project is ultimately to put biophilia on some kind of objective ground. He’s not a moral philosopher, and he’s an old friend of Richard Dawkins: he likes moral philosophy, but he’s skeptical that altruistic appeals can put much of a dent in a problem like this. He thinks that what makes the organisms we evolved with special is that they constituted features of our ancestral environment. There might be really good pragmatic reasons to value nature in conventional terms - I’ll lay out the economic reasoning in a moment - but he thinks that the operation of the mind is bound up in how early humans related to living things. In his view, this means that the optimal environment for human beings should in some way mirror how early humans lived. Throughout Biophilia, he tries to construct what he calls a “conservation ethic,” a term that comes from the Wisconsin ecologist Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac. Wilson’s conservation ethic is more or less the “throw a bunch of propositions against the wall and see what sticks” approach to philosophy (known in some circles as the “socks and underwear” method after lazy bag-packing), but the “mind’s proper environment” argument is the one he seems to invest in the most. What he really wants to be the case is that we have no choice but to practice conservation for our own benefit.
II. for the economists
Anyways, roughly the first half of the book is intended to stoke your aesthetic sensibilities, and the latter half is the upshot, the conceptual argument. A lot of it is familiar terrain to conservation and environmental adjacent folks. He tries a lot of different angles, but I’ll name the first one of these propositions the prospecting argument, which says that the untapped value of biodiversity for agricultural and pharmaceutical use is immense (people usually like to say at this point that aspirin is derived from willow bark). At present, nearly half of human calories come fromcorn, rice, and wheat. It seems to me, though, that the prospecting thesis is less persuasive than it might have been forty years ago. It’s pretty apparent that we'll be going the way ofsynthesis going forward. Wilson does point out that biodiversity hot spots tend to be located in the developing world, meaning that it’s probably something that could especially benefit in poorer countries. It seems like there’s been somesuccess in this area since the publication of Biophilia, but not the panacea for poverty that he suggests it might be.
So prospecting: good, not great. What else is on the table, pragmatically? The term didn’t exist yet, butecosystem services are very much in vogue, and try to count up the economic benefits people derive from nature (e.g. flood protection, water storage and purification, a substrate for growing food, etc. Most importantly for most ecosystem service advocates, carbon sequestration). That seems to be a safe bet in terms of conservation, but if we take this approach seriously, we’re valuing biodiversity as a means - which is to say it’s a matter of indifference which species is doing the job so long as one of them is. Taken more radically, this view might advocate for rearranging ecosystems to produce particular service outcomes (e.g. some invasive species are exceptionally good carbon sequesters). Thus, a major part of his conservation ethic advises restraint, and suggests that we shouldn’t intervene in complex systems thoughtlessly. The first rule of tinkering, he agrees with Aldo Leopold, is to keep all of the parts. Even so - if we had really good reasons to think that our tinkering would work, would he advise us to get rid of the extra nuts and bolts? Doesn’t seem like it. Which means we need something besides arguments from the obviously pragmatic if we’re going to get the sort of ethic Wilson wants.
III. for all thinking things
With that said, things start to heat up when he talks about living things and culture:
Certain organisms have still more to offer because of their special impact on mental development. I have suggested that the urge to affiliate with other forms of life is to some degree innate, hence deserves to be called biophilia. The evidence for the proposition is not strong in a formal scientific sense: the subject has not been studied enough in the scientific manner of hypothesis, deduction, and experimentation to let us be certain about it one way or the other. The biophilic tendency is nevertheless so clearly evinced in daily life and widely distributed as to deserve serious attention. It unfolds in the predictable fantasies and responses of individuals from early childhood onward. It cascades into repetitive patterns of culture across most or all societies, a consistency often noted in the literature of anthropology. These processes appear to be part of the programs of the brain. They are marked by the quickness and decisiveness with which we learn particular things about certain kinds of plants and animals. They are too consistent to be dismissed as the result of purely historical events working on a mental blank slate.
OK. Now we’re talking. His primary example is the snake. The chapter entitled “The Serpent” kicks off with a sort of Jungian account of cultural representations of snakes (which had me rolling my eyes), but this is where I started to pay attention:
The rule built into the brain in the form of a learning bias is: become alert quickly to any object with the serpentine gestalt. Overlearn this particular response in order to keep safe.
As it turns out, other primates have a similar “overlearned” response to snakes. This isn’t just a generalized feature of the family, though - lemurs have no natural snakes in their environment and aren’t afraid of them. Humans under five seem not to have an innate fear of snakes, but can develop severe phobias if they have an interaction with one in that window. Venomous snakes are native to just about everywhere we live. And with this in mind, it begins to seem more meaningful that snakes feature heavily in culture. As Wilson puts it, “here, then, is the sequence by which the agents of nature appear to have been translated into the symbols of culture.” And critically: “the mind has to create symbols and fantasies from something.”
So, what exactly is the takeaway here? The operation of the mind mimics the setting of ancient human beings - our symbolic environment looks like the natural one. It’s sort of banal to point out that our language is replete with natural metaphors, but I would actually struggle to articulate what the progress of science has looked like without invoking a tree. What word do you use if not ‘branching’? Would you talk about rivers, streams, and tributaries instead? It fits, mostly. Some philosophers who work on metaphor have noted that there seem to be certain phenomena we can only discuss via appeal to space - time, actually, being one of them, but love being another. If I say that I’m flying down the left hand lane of the freeway of love, you get what I mean.
All of this reminds me of some of Cormac McCarthy’s last pieces of writing before his death, the best example having been published in Nautilis and entitled “The Kekulé Problem.”
He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesn’t it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.”
The most striking part for me is that Kekule’s subconscious calls forth the image of a snake specifically. McCarthy goes on to argue that the process of thinking in most disciplines occurs subconsciously. “if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.” So what shaped the operation of these subconscious processes? Nothing spooky and Freudian, but the problems we faced hundreds of thousands of years ago. A place where snakes really mattered, evidently. Where it was important to track time by the motion of bodies across the horizon. So our categories and our cultural products are shaped by them! Wilson seems to have a fear that losing parts of the natural world would impoverish our minds. That’s a bold claim, and a difficult one to justify - after all, he wants to say that this behavior is in many respects innate. If that’s the case, then it hardly needs to be reinforced. It might be a more serious concern that excessive time in the built environmentcan dull your faculties rather than do something like make us lose metaphors and categories. This is an argument for conservation that I have come across less frequently, but it’s one that actually is pretty cool. I’d like to see further research into this. There seems to be some limited inquiryalready.
The other hypothesis he submits in this vein is prospect-refuge theory. He begins with a simple observation: most organisms are incredibly particular about where they live. Lots of different species have been found to have an inborn preference for one type of landscape - lab-raised field mice still prefer open fields. Even bacteria migrate towards the densest concentration of nutrients. This begs the question: what is the preferred environment of human beings? Wilson thinks that the answer to this question lies in looking closely at our aesthetic judgments. It’s no coincidence, then, that when we make something more visually appealing, we also say that we’re making it more “livable.” As best as we can tell, our evolved environment was the savannah. Gardens, cemeteries, malls, suburbs, and parks all have lots of open space but are dotted with occasional features. How do nice visuals look, while we’re at it? I’ve always been advised to keep powerpoints from looking “busy” and to include plenty of pictures. For an animal in the middle of the food chain, places like this would let them keep a watch out for resources (prospect) without being seen (refuge). I really wonder about Zen gardens being an ideal of beauty and tranquility in this context, too. Pioneers in the West chose plains time and again, and wherever people live, they travel to spend time on some kind of savannah gestalt. It’s here that we get another argument for biodiversity conservation - he thinks that these places just aren’t the same if they consist only of human artifacts.
Without beauty and mystery beyond itself, the mind by definition is deprived of its bearings and will drift to simpler and cruder configurations. Artifacts are incomparably poorer than the life they are designed to mimic. They are only a mirror to our thoughts.
It’s very peculiar to me that there’s been so little empirical research into some of the questions he brings up here. But I think that Rationalists, to be safe, still ought to touch grass. Granted, it’s probably the case that the data he assembled for writing Biophilia is some of the best of what you could hope for - what are you going to do, raise a control group of children deprived of green space and then compare their creative output to a few other groups receiving varying doses of outside?
But to offer an argument by analogy: when we try to train LLMs today, we find that we can’t generate endless training data by training subsequent iterations on the output of older ones. It’s not impossible to imagine that something similar might happen if our only inputs were our outputs, so to speak. Á laNassim Taleb, healthy systems gain from disorders, exposedness, and shock.
IV. hall of fame nomination
TO SUMMARIZE: a healthful environment, the warmth of kinship, right-sounding moral strictures, sure-bet economic gain, and a stirring of nostalgia and sentiment are the chief components of the surface ethic. Together they are enough to make a compelling case to most people most of the time for the preservation of organic diversity.
As far as I can tell, Wilson never explicitly commented on Rationalism or Effective Altruism, but his ideas are at home here. Evolutionary psychology, which has helped to identify and clarify much of our implicit biases, has its roots in his work on sociobiology. LessWrong owes him a debt of gratitude, to be sure.
It’s common in the humanities for figures to get claimed by an intellectual movement well after their death. Kierkegaard preceded the existentialists by fifty years or so, and he’s still referred to as the father of it. Tyler Cowen called John Stuart Millone of the greatest economists of all time in spite of his being a philosopher. John Gray said that every intellectual group in post-war Francecalled themselves Nietzscheans. So, here’s my pitch: I recommend E.O. Wilson as a posthumous addition to the list of Rationalist predecessors. He was serious, intellectually honest, and he cared deeply about life, of both the human and nonhuman varieties. He was brave enough to look hard truths nakedly in the eye - he led the fight against radical blank-slatism, and wrote a treatise on the implications of our lacking free will - and none of this sufficed to make him any less committed to the well-being of living things. He certainly passes muster if one judges by the Twelve Virtues of Rationality.
But to adopt Wilson means to take him seriously, to recognize that the most basic operations of the mind might be biased in ways we never considered. Wilson’s career also ought to serve as a caution for the rest of us. He was a stamp-collector, a no-good kid from the middle of nowhere Alabama who just happened to love studying reptiles and insects. EAs at the time would probably have rolled their eyes if you suggested that sending him to South America to study bugs might be a high-impact investment. But what happened? He became an almost inconceivably broad thinker, whose insights came from stamp-collecting seriously and enthusiastically. We had a lot to learn about being human from looking at ants, as it turned out. And true to his own account of creativity, his work emerged from looking beyond the built environment in which so much of contemporary thought occurs. There is a great deal to be learned and gained from engaging with the most humble living things - and that, perhaps, is the single most important takeaway from Biophilia.
I have argued in this book that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted… The more the mind is fathomed in its own right, as an organ of survival, the greater will be the reverence for life for purely rational reasons.