In the 1970s, biologist Edward O. Wilson’s ideas about genetics and human behavior sparked mildly violent protests from the left.
This month, when Pope Benedict XVI gave a talk to academics in Germany, he sparked a far more violent outcry from Muslims worldwide.
You wouldn’t know it from the protests, but both men are talking these days about roughly the same thing: The intersection of faith and science and its importance to the future of humanity.
Wilson, one of the most important biologists of his generation, was in Houston this past week to address that very topic.
On Sept. 12, the pope told an audience of German scientists that the university needs to make room for the study of faith as something more than history or science.
On Thursday, Wilson told an audience of Houston progressives that his branch of science desperately needed help from religion.
“The defense of living nature is a universal value,” Wilson said. “The creation, living nature, is in clear trouble.”
Loss Of Life
Among the several fields of biology Wilson helped to pioneer in his 50 years at Harvard University, he is regarded as the father of biodiversity.
In the 1960s and ’70s, a series of experiments he conducted on tiny islands off the coast of Florida demonstrated that the smaller an ecosystem is and the farther it is from others, the fewer life forms it can support.
The work was important to the modern world for many reasons.
For example, as temperate forests, wetlands and tropical rainforests are clear-cut, burned or filled in to make room for farm fields, housing developments and strip malls, they make virtual islands of the habitat that is left.
Those “islands” aren’t able to support all the plants, animals, insects, fungi, bacteria, worms and other species the original landmass did.
For science, that means millions of years of natural history are lost when a species becomes extinct.
Wilson estimated that 90 percent of species on earth are still unknown to science.
The loss of habitat — combined with global warming, pollution and over-harvesting — is eliminating species at a pace that is breathtaking, he said.
For humanity, the loss of biodiversity could literally be breathtaking.
The equilibrium in which life exists regulates any number of natural systems — including the composition of the atmosphere. That composition, in turn, allows the relatively narrow band of temperatures in which humans are able to survive.
Clarion call
So to save this invaluable resource, Wilson is making a call for help.
He said that science and religion are the two most potent social forces in the United States.
But it was up to religion — particularly of the evangelical variety — that he attributed an “intensity of general moral belief and a willingness to take action.”
And direct, relatively cheap action could go a long way toward saving the diversity of life on the planet, said Wilson, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
For $30 billion, 70 percent of species could be stabilized worldwide for the foreseeable future, he said.
His appeal to the religious community is to help persuade the U.S. government to take the lead in raising and applying the funds.
Groping For Common Ground
Wilson was raised as a Southern Baptist, and he spoke respectfully about that faith.
But Wilson’s was clearly more passionate when he described how, when you pick up a handful of dirt, you grasp 5,000 to 6,000 unidentified species of bacteria.
It was about passion, faith and reason — and the proper balance between them — that the pope was speaking in Germany when he managed to antagonize a substantial portion of the Muslim world.
Where Wilson was trying to enlist religious leaders’ help in a problem discovered by science, Benedict was trying to convince scientists that faith has a vital role in the “universe of reason.”
He said that the Greek tradition of reason — “logos” — is inextricably bound up in Christianity.
He contrasted this with Islam by quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor who said, “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things that are only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
The pope didn’t elaborate much on Islam, and his point seemed to be that, without rationality, faith could lead to irrational outcomes such as violence.
He has since avowed his respect for Islam and the inflammatory passage seems to have been unnecessary to his talk in any case.
Benedict was telling an audience of scientists at the University Regensburg in Germany that the dictates of empirical, testable science were too tight a straightjacket for faith. But that didn’t mean that faith and reason were inimical; quite the contrary.
Unreasoning Passion
Ironically, Wilson 20 years ago sparked protest — albeit much less violent — doing exactly what the pope decried: He used principles of evolution and population biology to explain culture and human behavior. In other words, he put even religion into a scientific straightjacket.
The new field of sociobiology argues that species are predisposed by their genes to behaviors that will make them more likely to successfully pass on those genes to future generations.
For social animals like humans, that means — among other things — they are likely to form parent-child bonds, avoid incest and form tribes. And from tribal norms arise culture, the discipline argues.
On Thursday, Wilson described Christianity as “3,000 years of magnificent culture.”
Back in 1975, Wilson was careful to say that genes only predispose humans to certain behaviors; they don’t condemn us to them.
But in the overheated environment of the ’70s, some committed campus leftists took the theory as a modern eugenics, the pseudo science Hitler used to justify his racist delusions.
The protests went so far that at a meeting of scientists in 1978, radicals took over and one dumped a pitcher over the shy Wilson’s head. The others chanted, “Wilson, you’re all wet.”
In hindsight, the incident seems ridiculous and it probably wouldn’t have happened if the protesters had bothered to read Wilson’s book.
It was that sort of passion, unfettered by reason, that the pope was trying to decry when he irritated so many Muslims by reciting an incendiary, 600-year-old quotation.
It is ironic that some undertook far more violent acts than pouring water on somebody’s head in response.
Benedict, Wilson and many others are groping for a dialogue between disciplines and faiths. They say the future depends on it.
