(Book by Edward O. Wilson, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998, 3 3 2 pp.)

The unity of knowledge is a worthwhile goal, but Wilson intends it to mean the derivation of everything, including the social sciences, the arts, ethics and religion, from physics via chemistry, biology, brain physiology, and psychology, in that order. Perhaps it could be done, if the phenomenon of emergence (of new qualities at each level) is properly taken into account. That is, after all, the upward loop of the Great wrap-around, in my philosophy. However, the downward loop (“downward causation” in the words of Roger Sperry) should also enter the picture somehow. Reductionism and holism should be suitably combined, as Wilson himself states (but occasionally forgets), and Hofstadter in “Escher, Goedel, Bach” aptly illustrates, by composing a large letter A from a lot of lower-case a’s.

The alternative is to consider the world composed of separate hierarchical levels, each with laws of its own, as Arthur Koestler tried to do. Of course, the laws of the lowest (deepest) level, i.e. Physics, continue to apply also in all levels above it; and that is also true about every intermediate level. Yet each level also has higher-order laws of its own. Perhaps this alternative is not so very different.

But the book is mainly interesting for the cases and examples it provides, which contain much new (to me) information and insights. I will name a few below.

1. The different visual and sense worlds of animals, e.g. Butterflies see ultraviolet, bats use sonar above our sound frequency range, and electric eels have a sense we lack entirely.
2. Recently developed nano-technology and atomic-level imaging. (If we ever see an electron, will we observe its indeterminacy? )
3. A good theory must be falsifiable, parsimonious, fruitful (heuristic), replicable, elegant, and quantitative.
4. The scale of credibility: a theory ascends from interesting to suggestive to persuasive to compelling, and finally to obvious.
5. A proof is that which convinces a reasonable man. A rigorous proof is that which convinces an unreasonable man.
6. The Meselson-Stahl experiment which established how DNA replicates itself, distinguishing between 3 alternatives. (The double helix unwinds and each strand builds its own supplement.)
7. The metaphor of Ariadne’s thread, enabling Theseus to find his way in and out of the Labyrinth. This is compared to a scientist probing by reductionism, and eventually ascending back to the starting point by synthesis. Things get very intricate in the heart of the labyrinth where the Minotaur dwells.
8. When Karen Quinlan fell into a coma after taking in alcohol and certain drugs, it was established after her death that most of her brain was intact, only her thalamus was completely “burned out”. This helped establish the importance of this brain relay station, which connects sense input and motor output. (Could she think?!?)
9. The triple brain: (a) The hindbrain: pons, medulla, and cerebellum (the reptile brain) regulates heartbeat, breathing, the sleep-wake cycle. (b) The midbrain or limbic system: amygdala (emotion), hippocampus (short-term memory), hypothalamus (temperature regulation and basic drives), and thalamus (awareness of all senses except smell); these structures constitute the mammalian brain. (c) The forebrain and cortex (some of it a human addition) is the seat of consciousness, a collector and integrator of sense information, and director of muscle movements. (The “reptilian” and “mammalian” designation is my addition).
10. The neural circuits in the brain create competing scenarios of interpretation and of possible decisions to act, but there is no centre or headquarters that has the final word. This is like Dennett’s “demons” with no “Cartesian theatre”.
11. Without the guidance and stimulation of emotion, rational thought slows down and disintegrates, as shown by Damasio in analyzing the accident that befell Phineas Gage. After his forebrain was partly destroyed, he could reason out what he should do, but failed to act because of lack of motivation. The remnants of his forebrain did not receive messages from the thalamus.
12. The results of some ESP experiments could be explained by the ability of the subject to sense the electrical patterns in another person’s brain, the way a CATscan does. (But even at a distance?)
13. In wakefulness, neural circuits that use the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin predominate; in sleep, the balance shifts to those using acetylcholine. In brief we go from amines to cholines. Interestingly, the amines activate the sYmpathetic nervous system, the choline the parasympathetic. Perhaps in day dreams and in old-age mental confusion, both are almost equally active.
14. The human language instinct consists of precise mimicry, compulsive loquacity, near-automatic mastery of syntax, and the swift acquisition of a large vocabulary.
15. A unit of culture, a meme, is linked to a node in semantic memory (as opposed to working memory). Such a node begins as a concept (a noun), these are assembled into a proposition (a sentence), then assembled into a schema (a whole way of working).
16. Birth order greatly affects a child in a family. Later-borns are more apt to be rebels than the more conforming first-borns.
17. Heritability is defined as the percentage of the variation in the trait due to heredity. It is usually determined by studies of identical and fraternal twins.
18. The OGOD principle (one gene – one disease) does not always hold. Some diseases depend on several or many genes, and some gene mutations do not cause any disease.
19. Cultural universals gleaned from hundreds of societies from Human Relations Area Files: 67 were found, from age grading to weaving, including body adornment, cleanliness, dancing, ethno-botany, food taboos, gift giving, hospitality, inheritance rules, kinship nomenclature, luck superstitions, marriage, penal sanctions, religious ritual, sexual restrictions, status differentiation, and tool-making.
20. Epigenetic rules are at the basis of cultural universals. They are the basis of “prepared learning”. The cultural customs are learned behaviour, but along the lines of genetic preparedness. Roughly similar customs are found in societies completely isolated from each other, as in the Old World and the New World.
21. Colour words are hierarchically ordered: black and white (in languages with only 2 colour words), then red, green or yellow, blue, brown, and either pink or purple or orange or gray, added on in succession as the colour vocabulary expands. (It makes me think of colour charts for paints or book covers, with so many other hues in our industrial culture. Or even just adding violet, mauve, magenta, carmine (for shades of purple), or aquamarine, navy, azure, turquoise, and teal (for shades of blue), plus beige, ivory, and lime.
22. Territoriality is not an unavoidable “instinct”, but develops where there is “lateral pressure” (a word from North and Choucri, not this book), a combination of high population density and shortage of resources. So it is one of the “epigenetic rules”, or genetic predispositions, appearing only when the environment favours it.
23. Incest avoidance is a strong cultural universal. One theory about it is the Westermarck hypothesis: that siblings brought up closely together (“sharing the same potty”) do not develop sexual attraction to each other. But primitive people also knew that children born from incest have a higher probability of being defective. However, accidental incest abounds in the literature, e.g. Sigmund and Siglinde (Siegfried was not defective!), Oedipus and his mother, Arthur and Morgan – in history (Egyptian rulers), and in religion (goddess Isis marrying her son Osiris).
24. Theory of the family: the closer the genetic relationship of the family members, the higher the degree of cooperation. This is the inclusive fitness of sociobiology. This also determines patterns of conflict, e.g. With step-parents.
25. Economic models are not based on bio-psychological knowledge, and thus often fail. People are not always rational utility maximizers.
26. The Hardy-Weinberg principles of the distribution of genes in a population: we can predict the percentage of individuals possessing different pairs of alleles of the same gene, AA, Aa, or aa, if we know the percentages of the alleles, A and a, in the population. This is a probability formula based on Mendelian genetics. It applies only if natural selection does not favour one of the alleles. But sometimes (as in sickle-cell anemia), Aa is adaptive, AA is less so, and aa produces disease.
27. Satisficing (a compound word of “satisfying” and “sufficing”): In making up our mind quickly when necessary, we do not seek the optimum option, which would take time, but only the nearest peak that is good enough. This is reminiscent of Stuart Kauffman’s ideas on species evolution choosing the nearby peaks of fitness.
28. Gene-culture co-evolution: The brain can generate metaphors easily and move them from .one context to another. This is the genetic origin of art.
29. Myths (and fairy tales) have only a few common themes, which form the cultural archetypes: creation, journey, evil forces, the hero, apocalypse, the tree or river of life, the goddess, the virgin, the awakening kiss, the trickster (Dionysus), the monster, the serpent. Are these based on the “prepared learning” of epigenesis?
30. Are the cave paintings in Southern France a case of magic through art, to achieve a successful hunt?
31. The beauty of a face is enhanced by exaggerating certain features which are pleasing (e.g. High cheek-bones and large eyes). The same is true for sexual preferences in butterflies and the colours they prefer in a mate.
32. Ethicists are either transcendentalists or empiricists. Wilson greatly prefers the latter. Ethical rules and systems do not come from above as “natural law”, but grow from the survival experience of societies.
33. Prisoner’s dilemma is a good model for how people learned to cooperate in paradoxical situations. (But he fails to cite Axelrod’s work.)
34. Power hierarchies are common in both animal and human societies. The alpha male is on top, and above him is God.
35. The creation myth based on science is more beautiful and inspiring than any of the ancient myths.
36. Migration and interbreeding have been important influences on human genetic and cultural evolution.
37. We are acquiring new powers for self-directed evolution via bio-technology (genetic manipulation), but are not at all sure how far we should go in using it, beyond the minimum of eliminating diseases.
38. Economists need to do full-cost accounting, to take the environment into account.

Metaphoric thinking in “PhiLosophy in the Flesh” by George La koff and Mark Johnson, Basic Books, 1999.