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The Fundamentals That Unite Science and Art
Edward O. Wilson
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According to sociobiologist and aesthetician Edward O.
Wilson,
art--regardless of the culture in which it's produced--
incorporates certain universal human themes and sentiments.
Above is Sokan's Mountain Landscape (Japan, 16th century),
hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, 32 3/4 x 15 3/8 in.
(83.2 x 39.1 cm) (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
[Editor's note: The World & I Online's two "Thinking About Art" articles for this month focus on the thought of biologist Edward O. Wilson. A Harvard professor for four decades, Wilson has written twenty books, won two Pulitzer prizes, and discovered hundreds of new species. Considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists and one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers, Wilson is often called "the father of biodiversity." In addition to originating the field of sociobiology, he is a leading aesthetician and has done much to bring science and the humanities together. This first article is composed of art-related excerpts from some of Wilson's works. The next piece is a commentary on Wilson's musings.]
From Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, abridged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Page 3
1. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions—hate, love, guilt, fear, and others—that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They are evolved by natural selection.
Pages 288-89
2. Artistic impulses are by no means limited to man. In 1962, when Desmond Morris reviewed the subject in The Biology of Art, 32 individual nonhuman primates had produced drawings and paintings in captivity. Twenty-three were chimpanzees, 2 were gorillas, 3 were orangutans, and 4 were capuchin monkeys. None received special training or anything more than access to the necessary equipment. In fact, attempts to guide the efforts of the animals by inducing imitation were always unsuccessful. The drive to use the painting and drawing equipment was powerful, requiring no reinforcement from the human observers. Both young and old animals became so engrossed with the activity that they preferred it to being fed and sometimes threw temper tantrums when stopped. Two of the chimpanzees studied extensively were highly productive. "Alpha" produced over 200 pictures, while the famous "Congo," who deserves to be called the Picasso of the great apes, was responsible for nearly 400. Although most of the efforts consisted of scribbling, the patterns were far from random. Lines and smudges were spread over a blank page outward from a centrally located figure. When a drawing was started on one side of a blank page, the chimpanzee usually shifted to the opposite side to offset it. With time the calligraphy became bolder, starting with simple lines and progressing to more complicated multiple scribbles. Congo's patterns progressed along approximately the same developmental path as those of very young human children, yielding fan-shaped diagrams and even complete circles.
3. The artistic activity of chimpanzees may well be a special manifestation of their tool-using behavior. Members of the species display a total of about ten techniques, all of which require manual skill. Probably all are improved through practice, while at least a few are passed as traditions from one generation to the next. The chimpanzees have a considerable facility for inventing new techniques, such as the use of sticks to pull objects through cage bars and to pry open boxes. Thus the tendency to manipulate objects and to explore their uses appears to have an adaptive advantage for chimpanzees.
4. The same reasoning applies a fortiori to the origin of art in man. As Washburn (1970) pointed out, human beings have been hunter-gatherers for over 99 percent of their history, during which time each man made his own tools. The appraisal of form and skill in execution were necessary for survival, and they probably brought social approval as well. Both forms of success paid off in greater genetic fitness. If the chimpanzee Congo could reach the stage of elementary diagrams, it is not too hard to imagine primitive man progressing to representational figures. Once that stage was reached, the transition to the use of art in sympathetic magic and ritual must have followed quickly. Art might then have played a reciprocally reinforcing role in the development of culture and mental capacity. In the end, writing emerged as the ideographic representation of language.
5. Music of a kind is also produced by some animals. Human beings consider the elaborate courtship and territorial songs of birds to be beautiful, and probably ultimately for the same reason they are of use to the birds. With clarity and precision they identify the species, the physiological condition, and the mental set of the singer. Richness of information and precise transmission of mood are no less the standards of excellence in human music. Singing and dancing serve to draw groups together, direct the emotions of the people, and prepare them for joint action. The carnival displays of chimpanzees described in earlier chapters are remarkably like human celebrations in this respect. The apes run, leap, pound the trunks of trees in drumming motions, and call loudly back and forth. These actions serve at least in part to assemble groups at common feeding grounds. They may resemble the ceremonies of earliest man. Nevertheless, fundamental differences appeared in subsequent human evolution. Human music has been liberated from iconic representation in the same way that true language has departed from the elementary ritualization characterizing the communication of animals. Music has the capacity for unlimited and arbitrary symbolization, and it employs rules of phrasing and order that serve the same function as syntax.
From On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Pages 187-88
6. The sacred rituals are the most human [rituals]. Their elementary forms are concerned with magic, the active attempt to manipulate nature and the gods. Upper Paleolithic art from the caves of Western Europe indicates a preoccupation with game animals. There are many scenes showing spears and arrows embedded in the bodies of the prey. Other drawings depict men dancing in animal disguises or standing with heads bowed in front of animals. Probably the function was sympathetic magic, derived from the notion that what is done with an image will come to pass with the real thing. The anticipatory action is comparable to the intention movements of animals, which in the course of evolution have often been ritualized into communicative signals.... Magic was, and still is in some societies, practiced by special people variously called shamans, sorcerers, or medicine men. They alone were believed to have the secret knowledge and power to deal with the supernatural forces of nature, and as such their influence sometimes exceeded that of the tribal headmen.
7. sacred rites mobilize and display primitive societies in ways that appear to be directly and biologically advantageous.
Page 191
8. This extreme form of certification is granted to the practices and dogmas that serve the vital interests of the group. The individual is prepared by the sacred rituals for supreme efforts and self-sacrifice. Overwhelmed by shibboleths, special costumes, and sacred dancing and music accurately keyed to his emotive centers, he is transformed by a religious experience. The votary is ready to reassert allegiance to his tribe and family, perform charities, consecrate his life, leave for the hunt, join the battle, die for God and country.
Pages 197-98
9. Finally there is myth: the narratives by which the tribe's special place in the world is explained in rational terms consistent with the listener's understanding of the physical world. Proliferate hunter-gatherers tell believable sacred stories about the creation of the world. Human beings and animals with supernatural powers and a special relationship to the tribe fight, eat and beget offspring. Their actions explain a little bit of how nature works and why the tribe has a favored position on earth. The complexity of the myths increases with that of societies. They duplicate the essential structure in more fantastic forms. Tribes of demigods and heroes, warring for kingship and possession of territory, allocate dominion over different parts of the lives of mortal men. Over and again the myths strike the Manichaean theme of two supernal forces struggling for control of the world of man. For some of the Amerinds of the Amazon-Orinoco forests, for example, the contenders are two brothers representing the sun and the moon, one a benevolent creator, the other a trickster. In the later Hindu myths Brahma, benevolent lord of the universe, creates Night. She gives birth to the rakshasas, who try to eat Brahma and to destroy mortal men. Another recurrent theme in the more elaborate mythologies is the apocalypse and millenium, wherein it is forecast that the struggles will cease when a god descends to end the existing world and to create a new order.
Pages 213-14
10. I ... do not envision scientific generalization as a substitute for art or as anything more than a nourishing symbiont of art. The artist, including the creative writer, communicates his most personal experience and vision in a direct manner chosen to commit his audience emotionally to that perception. Science can hope to explain artists, and artistic genius, and even art, and it will increasingly use art to investigate human behavior, but it is not designed to transmit experience on a personal level or to reconstitute the full richness of the experience from the laws and principles which are its first concern by definition.
From Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Pages 60-61
11. Elegance is more a product of the human mind than of external reality. The brain depends upon elegance to compensate for its own small size and short lifetime. As the cerebral cortex grew from apish dimensions through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it was forced to rely on tricks to enlarge memory and speed computation. The mind therefore specializes on analogy and metaphor, on a sweeping together of chaotic sensory experience into workable categories labeled by words and stacked into hierarchies for quick recovery. To a considerable degree science consists in originating the maximum amount of information with the minimum expenditure of energy. Beauty is the cleanness of line in such formulations, along with symmetry, surprise, and congruence with other prevailing beliefs. This widely accepted definition is why P. A. M. Dirac (1963), after working out the behavior of electrons, could say that physical theories with some physical beauty are also the ones most likely to be correct, and why Hermann Weyl (1956), the perfecter of quantum and relativity theory, made an even franker confession: "My work has always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
12. Einstein offered the following solution to the dilemma of truth versus beauty: "God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically." In other words, a mind with infinite memory store and calculating ability could compute any system as the sum of all its parts. Mathematics and beauty are devices by which human beings get through life with the limited intellectual capacity inherited by the species. Like a discerning palate and sexual appetite, these esthetic contrivances give pleasure. Put in more mechanistic terms, they play upon the circuitry of the brain's limbic system in a way that ultimately promotes survival and reproduction. They lead the scientist adventitiously into the unexplored fractions of space and time, from which he returns to reports his findings and fulfill his social role. Riemannian geometry is declared beautiful no less than the bird of paradise, because the mind is innately prepared to receive its symmetry and power. Pleasure is shared, triumph ceremonies held, and the communal hunt resumed.
Pages 62-64
13. Scientific innovation sometimes sounds like poetry, and I would claim that it is, at least in the earliest stages. The ideal scientist can be said to think like a poet, work like a clerk, and write like a journalist. The ideal poet thinks, works, and writes like a poet. The two vocations draw from the same subconscious wellsprings and depend upon similar primal stories and images. But where scientists aim for a generalizing formula to which special cases are obedient, seeking unifying natural laws, artists invent special cases immediately. They transmit forms of knowledge in which the knower-himself is revealed. Their works are lit by a personal flame and above all else they identify, in Roger Shattuck's expression, "the individual as the accountable agent of his action and as the potential seat of human greatness" (1974).
14. The aim of art is not to show how or why an effect is produced (that would be science) but literally to produce it. And not just any cry from the heart—it requires mental discipline no less than in science. In poetry, T. S. Eliot explained, the often-quoted criterion of sublimity misses the mark. What counts is not the greatness of the emotion but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure under which the fusion takes place (1919). The great artist touches others in surgical manner with the generating impulse, transferring feeling precisely. His work is personal in style but general in effect.
15. Ideally art is powerful enough to cross cultures; it reads the code of human nature. Octavio Paz's poem The Broken Waterjar (El cantaro roto) accomplishes this result with splendid effectiveness. Paz is torn by the contradiction in the Mexican experience. He says that the minds of his people are capable of long flights of imagination and visions of piercing beauty. The people look at the sky and add torches, wings, and "bracelets of flaming islands." But they also look down to a desiccated landscape, symbolizing physical and spiritual poverty. A potentially great nation had been divided by the Conquest and stifled by oppression.
Bare hills, a cold volcano, stone and a sound of panting
under such splendor, and drouth, the taste of dust,
the rustle of bare feet in the dust, and one tall tree in the
middle of the field like a petrified fountain! (1973)
The resolution is not offered in the form of practical advice, which might easily prove wrong, but in the poet's vision of unity in a search back through time, "mas alla de las aguas del bautismo," to a more secure metaphysical truth, and Paz says,
vida y muerte no son mundos contrarios, somos un solo
tallo con dos flores gemelas
Mexico is a single stem with twin flowers, united by the continuity of time.
16. The essence of art, no less than of science, is synecdoche. A carefully chosen part serves for the whole. Some features of the subject directly perceived or implied by analogy transmits precisely the quality intended. The listener is moved by a single, surprising image. In The Broken Waterjar the rustle of bare feet in the dust conveys the pauperization of Mexico. The artist knows which sensibilities shared by his audience will permit the desired impact.
17. Picasso defined art as the lie that helps us to see the truth. The aphorism fits both art and science, since each in its own way seeks power through elegance. But this inspired distortion is only a technique of thinking and communication. There is a still more basic similarity: both are enterprises of discovery. And the binding force lies in our biology and in our relationship to other organisms. In art, the workings of the mind are explored, whereas in science the domain is the world at large and now, increasingly, the workings of the mind as well. Of equal importance, both rely on similar forms of metaphor and analogy, because they share the brain's strict and peculiar limitations in the processing of information.
Page 67
18. We have now come to the common, human origin of science and art. The innovator searches for comparisons that no one else has made. He scrambles to tighten his extension by argument, example, and experiment. Important science is not just any similarity glimpsed for the first time. It offers analogies that map the gateways to unexplored terrain. The comparisons meet the criterion of principal metaphor used by art critics: one commanding image synthesized from several units, such that a single complex idea is attained not by analysis but by the sudden perception of an objective relation.
Pages 74-81
19. At the moment the spark ignites, when intuition and metaphor are all-important, the artist most closely resembles the scientist. But he does not then press on toward natural law and self-dissolution within the big picture. All his skills are aimed at the instant transference of images and control of emotions in others. For purposes of craft, he carefully avoids exact definitions or the display of inner logic.
20. In 1753 Bishop Lowth made the correct diagnosis in Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews: the poetic mind is not satisfied with a plain and exact description but seeks to heighten sensation. "For the passions are naturally inclined to amplifications; they wonderfully magnify and exaggerate whatever dwells upon the mind, and labour to express it in animated, bold, and magnificent terms" (cited in Abrams 1953).
21. The essential quality can be rephrased in more modem terms. The mind is biologically prone to discursive communication that expands thought. Mankind, in Richard Rorty's expression, is the poetic species (1982). The symbols of art, music, and language freight power well beyond their outward and literal meanings. So each one also condenses large quantities of information. Just as mathematical equations allow us to move swiftly across large amounts of knowledge and spring into the unknown, the symbols of art gather human experience into novel forms in order to evoke a more intense perception in others. Human beings live—literally live, if life is equated with the mind—by symbols, particularly words, because the brain is constructed to process information almost exclusively in their terms.
22. I have spoken of art as a device for exploration and discovery. Its practitioners and expert observers, whose authority is beyond question, have stressed other functions as well. In Samuel Johnson's definition, to instruct by pleasing. According to Keats, to uplift by the refinement of shared feelings. No—moral, the role of art is moral, according to D. H. Lawrence. A spell against death, to create and preserve the self, in the formulation of Richard Eberhart. For the more prosaic cultural anthropologists, art above all else expresses the purposes of a society. Indeed, affirmation may have been the original evolutionary driving force behind Paleolithic cave art. It was certainly served by the early oral poets of Europe, including the illiterate Homeric bards who recited the Iliad and Odyssey at festivals and thus transmitted the central myths and legends of ancient Greece. When this cohesive functions fails, and tradition and taste fragment as part of culture’s advance criticism becomes a necessary and honored profession. Then we also witness revolutionary art, which goes beyond innovation to promote a different society and culture.
23. All these functions are variously filled according to circumstances. Nevertheless, art generally considered to be important appears to be marked by one consistent quality: it explores the unknown reaches of the mind. The departure is both calculated and tentative, as in science. The poet focuses on the inward search itself and attracts us to his distant constructions. Something moves on the edge of the field of vision, a new connection is glimpsed, holds for a moment. Words pour in and around, and the image takes substantial form, at first believed familiar, then seen as strikingly new. It is something, as in Thomas Kinsella's "Midsummer,"
that for this long year
Had hid and halted like a deer
Turned marvelous,
Parted the tragic grass, tame,
Lifted its perfect head and came
To welcome us. (1973)
24. But the poet refuses to take us any farther. If he goes on the precise image will melt into abstract descriptions; light and beauty will congeal into rows of formulas. In this essential way art differs from science. The world of interest is the mind, not the physical universe on which mental process feeds. Richard Eberhart, a keen observer of nature, listened to the same New England birds that led Robert MacArthur to mathematical theories of ecology and I daresay that the first swirl of imagery, the first tensile pleasures were the same, but the two then diverged, the poet inward and the scientist outward into separate existences:
No, may the thrush among our high pine trees
Be ambiguous still, elusive in true song,
Never or seldom seen, and if never seen
May it to my imperious memory belong. (1976)
He holds back, on himself and on us, in order to cast his spell. Again we see that the dilemma of the machine-in-the-garden exists in the rain forests of the mind as surely as it does in the American continent. Our intrinsic emotions drive us to search for fresh habitats, to cross unexplored terrain, but we still crave the sense of a mysterious world stretching infinitely beyond. The free-living birds (thrush, nightingale, bird of paradise), being rulers of the blank spaces on the map and negligent of human existence, are worthy symbols of both art and science.
25. I have emphasized the expansive role of poetry to argue that, whereas art and science are basically different in execution, they are convergent in what they might eventually disclose about human nature.
Pages 78-81
26. They must be true: ... can be said of outstanding achievements in literature and the arts, which pull the rest of us along until the construction becomes self-evident. Eliot wrote that "unless we have those few men who combine an exceptional sensibility with an exceptional power over words, our own ability, not merely to express, but even to feel any but the crudest emotions, will degenerate" (1975). The difference in power is one of degree rather than kind, but it crosses a threshold to create a qualitative new result in the same way that a critical speed lifts a glider off the ground into flight.
27. Research on cognitive development has shown that in the course of its growth the mind probes certain channels much more readily than others. Some of the responses are automatic and can be measured by physiological changes of which the individual is mostly or entirely unaware. For example, using electroencephalograms in the study of response to graphic designs, the Belgian psychologist Gerda Smets found that maximal arousal (measured by the blockage of the alpha wave) occurs when the figure contains about 20 percent redundancy (1973). That is the amount present in a spiral with two or three turns, or a relatively simple maze, or a neat cluster of ten or so triangles. Less arousal occurs when the figure consists of only one triangle or square, or when the design is more complicated than the optimum—as in a difficult maze or an irregular scattering of twenty rectangles. The data are not the result of a chance biochemical quirk. When selecting symbols and abstract art, people actually gravitate to about the levels of complexity observed in Smet's experiments. Furthermore, the preference has its roots in early life. Newborn infants gaze longest at visual designs containing between five and twenty angles. During the next three months their preference shifts toward the adult pattern measured with electroencephalograms. Nor is there anything foreordained or otherwise trivial in the aesthetic optimum of human beings. It is easy to imagine the evolution of some other intelligent species in another time or on some other planet, possessing different eyes, optic nerves, and brain—and thus distinct optimal complexity and artistic standards.
28. We can reasonably suppose that the compositions of artists play upon the rules of mental development that are now beginning to receive the objective attention of experimental psychology. The distinction between science and art can be understood more clearly from this different perspective. The abstracted qualities of the developmental rules of the mind are the principal concern of science. In contrast, the node-link structures [of long-term memory] themselves, their emotional color, tone, cadence, fidelity to personal experience, and the images they fleetingly reveal, are more the domain of art. Of equal importance to both enterprises are the symbols and myths that evoke the mental structures in compelling fashion. Certain great myths—the origin of the world, cataclysm and rebirth, the struggle between the powers of light and darkness. Earth Mother, and a few others—recur dependably in cultures around the world. Lesser, more personal myths appear in crisis poems and romantic tales, where they blend imperceptibly into legend and history. Through the deep pleasures they naturally excite, and the ease with which they are passed from one person to another, these stories invade the developing mind more readily than others, and they tend to converge to form the commonalities of human nature. Yeats in his 1900 essay on Shelley distinguished between the theoretician who seeks abstract truth and the naturalist-poet who celebrates detail. In the universe of the mind, Yeats said, no symbol tells all its meanings to any generation. Only by discovering the ancient symbols can the artist express meanings that cross generations and open the full abundance of nature.
29. We need not worry about the extravagances of visionary artists, so long as they reveal the deeper channels of their minds in a manner that gives meaning to our own. Each human mindscape is idiosyncratic and yet ultimately obedient to biological law. Like the forest of some newly discovered island, it possesses unique contours and previously undescribed forms of life, treasures to be valued for their own sake, but the genetic process that spawned them is the same as elsewhere. Continuity is essential for comprehension; the imagery chosen by the artist must draw on common experience and values, however tortuous the manner of presentation. Thus in 1919 the American modernist Joseph Stella created 'Tree of My Life" to translate his own vaulting optimism into a physical paradise within the mind. Bright tropical plants and animals served as the symbols. He described his feelings that led to the painting:
And one clear morning in April I found myself in (he midst of joyous
singing and delicious scent—the singing and the scent of the birds and
flowers ready to celebrate the baptism of my new art, the birds and the
flowers already enjewelling the tender foliage of the new-born tree of
my hopes. (cited in Sweeney 1977)
30. We are in the fullest sense a biological species and will find little ultimate meaning apart from the remainder of life. The fiery circle of disciplines will be closed if science looks at the inward journey of the artist's mind, making art and culture objects of study in the biological mode, and if the artist and critic are informed of the workings of the mind and the natural world as illuminated by the scientific method. In principle at least, nothing can be denied to the humanities, nothing to science.
Pages 83-86
31. Science and the humanities, biology and culture, are bridged in a dramatic manner by the phenomenon of the serpent. The snake's image enters the conscious mind with ease during dreams and reveries, fabricated from symbols and bearing portents of magic. It appears without warning and departs abruptly, leaving behind not the perception of any real snake but the vague memory of a more powerful creature, the serpent, surrounded by a mist of fear and wonderment.
32. The snake and the serpent, flesh-and-blood reptile and demonic dream-image, reveal the complexity of our relation to nature and the fascination and beauty inherent in all forms of organisms. Even the deadliest and most repugnant creatures bring an endowment of magic to the human mind. Human beings have an innate fear of snakes or, more precisely, they have an innate propensity to learn such fear quickly and easily past the age of five. The images they build out of this peculiar mental set are both powerful and ambivalent, ranging from terror-stricken flight to the experience of power and male sexuality. As a consequence the serpent has become an important part of cultures around the world.
33. There is a principle of many ramifications to consider here, which extends well beyond the ordinary concerns of psychoanalytic reasoning about sexual symbols. Life of any kind is infinitely more interesting than almost any conceivable variety of inanimate matter. The latter is valued chiefly to the extent that it can be metabolized into live tissue, accidentally resembles it, or can be fashioned into a useful and properly animated artifact. No one in his right mind looks at a pile of dead leaves in preference to the tree from which they fell.
34. What is it exactly that binds us so closely to living things? The biologist will tell you that life is the self-replication of giant molecules from lesser chemical fragments, resulting in the assembly of complex organic structures, the transfer of large amounts of molecular information, ingestion, growth, movement of an outwardly purposeful nature, and the proliferation of closely similar organisms. The poet-in-biologist will add that life is an exceedingly improbable state, metastable, open to other systems, thus ephemeral-and worth any price to keep.
35. 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 Ac 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.
36. Perhaps the most bizarre of the biophilic traits is awe and veneration of the serpent. The dreams from which the dominant images arise are known to exist in all those societies where systematic studies have been conducted on mental life. At least 5 percent of the people at any given time remember experiencing them, while many more would probably do so if they recorded their waking impressions over a period of several months. The images described by urban New Yorkers are as detailed and emotional as those of Australian aboriginals and Zulus. In all cultures the serpents are prone to be mystically transfigured. The Hopi know Palulukon, the water serpent a benevolent but frightening godlike being. The Kwakiutl fear the sisiutl a kind of three-headed serpent with both human and reptile faces, whose appearance in dreams presages insanity or death. The Sharanahua of Peru summon reptile spirits by taking hallucinogenic drugs and stroking the severed tongues of snakes over their faces. They are rewarded with dreams of brightly colored boas, venomous snakes, and lakes teeming with caimans and anacondas.
37. These cultural manifestations may seem at first detached and mysterious but there is a simple reality behind the ophidian archetype that lies within the experience of ordinary people. The mind is primed to react emotionally to the sight of snakes, not just to fear them but to be aroused and absorbed in their details, to weave stories about them.
Pages 92-101
38. What is there in snakes anyway that makes them so repellent and fascinating? The answer in retrospect is deceptively simple: their ability to remain hidden, the power in their sinuous limbless bodies, and the threat from venom injected hypodermically through sharp hollow teeth. It pays in elementary survival to be interested in snakes and to respond emotionally to their generalized image, to go beyond ordinary caution and fear. The rule built into the brain of a learning bias is: become alert quickly to any object with the serpentine gestalt. Overlearn this particular response in order to keep safe.
39. Other primates have evolved similar rules. When guenons and vervets, the common monkeys of the African forest, see a python, cobra, or puff adder, they emit a distinctive chuttering call that rouses other members in the group (Different calls are used to designate eagles and leopards.) Some of the adults then follow the intruding snake at a safe distance until it leaves the area. The monkeys in effect broadcast a dangerous-snake alert, which serves to protect the entire group and not solely the individual who encountered the danger. The most remarkable fact is that the alarm is evoked most strongly by the kinds of snakes that can harm them. Somehow, apparently through the routes of instinct, the guenons and vervets have become competent herpetologists.
40. The idea that snake aversion on the part of man's relatives can be an inborn trait is supported by other studies on rhesus monkeys, the large brown monkeys of India and surrounding Asian countries. When adults see a snake of any kind, they react with the generalized fear response of their species. They variously back off and stare (or turn away), crouch, shield their faces' baric, screech, and twist their faces into the fear grimace, in which the lips are retracted, the teeth are bared, and the ears are flattened against the head. Monkeys raised in the laboratory without previous exposure to snakes show the same response to them as those brought in from the wild, although in weaker form. During control experiments designed to test the specificity of the response, the rhesus failed to react to other, nonsinuous objects placed in their cages. It is the form of the snake and perhaps also. It is the form of the snake and perhaps also its distinctive movements that contain the key stimuli to which the monkeys are innately tuned.
41. Grant for the moment that snake aversion does have a hereditary basis in at least some kinds of nonhuman primates. The possibility that immediately follows is that the trait is evolved by natural selection. In other words individual who respond leave more offspring than those who do not and as a result the propensity to learn fear quickly spreads through the population—or, if it was already present, is maintained there at a high level.
42. How can biologists test such a proposition about the origin of behavior? They turn natural history upside down. They search for species historically free of forces m the environment believed to favor the evolutionary change to see if m fact the organisms do not possess the trait. The lemurs, primitive revives of the monkeys, offer such an inverted opportunity. They are the indigenous inhabitants of Madagascar, where no large or poisonous snakes exist to threaten them. Sure enough, lemurs presented with snakes in captivity fail to display anything resembling the automatic fear responses of the African and Asian monkeys. Is this adequate proof? In the chaste idiom of scientific discourse, we are permitted to conclude only that the evidence is consistent with the proposal. Neither this nor any comparable hypothesis can be settled by a single case. Only further examples can raise confidence in it to a level beyond the reach of determined skeptics.
43. Another line of evidence comes from studies of the chimpanzee, a species thought to have shared a common ancestor with prehumans as recently as five million years ago. Chimps raised in the laboratory become apprehensive in the presence of snakes, even if they have had no previous experience. They back off to a safe distance and follow the intruder with a fixed stare while altering companions with the Wah! warning call. More important, the response becomes gradually more marked during adolescence.
44. This last quality is especially interesting because human beings pass through approximately the same developmental sequence. Children under five years of age feel no special anxiety over snakes, but later they grow increasingly wary. Just one or two mildly bad experiences, such as a garter snake seem writhing away in the grass, a playmate thrusting a rubber model at them, or a counselor telling scary stories at the campfire, can make children deeply and permanently fearful. Other common fears, notably of the dark, strangers, and loud noises, start to wane after seven years of age. In contrast, the tendency to avoid snakes grows stronger with time. It is possible to turn the mind in the opposite direction, to learn to handle snakes without apprehension or even to like them in some special way, as I did—but the adaptation takes a special effort and is usually a little forced and self-conscious. The special sensitivity will just as likely lead to full-blown ophidiophobia, the pathological extreme in which the mere appearance of a snake brings on a feeling of panic, cold sweat, and waves of nausea.
45. Why should serpents have such a strong influence during mental development? The direct and simple answer is that throughout the history of mankind a few kinds have been a major cause of sickness and death. Every continent except Antarctica has poisonous snakes. Over large stretches of Asia and Africa the known death rate from snake bite is 5 persons per 100,000 each year, or higher. The local record is held by a province in Burma, with 36.8 deaths per 100,000 a year. Australia had an exceptional abundance of deadly snakes, a majority of which are relatives of the cobras. Among them the tiger snake is especially feared for its large size and tendency to strike without warning. In South and Central America live the bushmaster, fer-de-lance, and jaracara, among the largest and most aggressive of the pit vipers. With back colored like rotting leaves and fangs long enough to pass through a human hand, they lie in ambush on the floor of the tropical forest for the small warm-blooded animals that form their major prey. Few people realize that a complex of dangerous snakes, the "true" vipers, are still relatively abundant throughout Europe. The common adder Viperus berus ranges to the Arctic Circle. The number of people bitten in such improbable places as Switzerland and Finland is still high enough, running into the hundreds annually, to keep outdoorsmen on a sort of yellow alert. Even Ireland, one of the few countries in the world lacking snakes altogether (thanks to the last Pleistocene glaciation and not Saint Patrick), has imported the key ophidian symbols and traditions from other European cultures and preserved the fear of serpents in art and literature.
46. Here, then, is the sequence by which the agents of nature appear to have been translated into the symbols of culture. For hundred of thousands of years, time enough for the appropriate genetic changes to occur in the brain, poisonous snakes have been a significant source of injury and death to human beings. The response to the threat is not simply to avoid it, in the way that certain berries are recognized as poisonous through a process of trial and error. People also display the mixture of apprehension and morbid fascination characterizing the nonhuman primates. They inherit a strong tendency to acquire the aversion during early childhood and to add to it progressively, like our closest phylogenetic relatives, the chimpanzees. The mind then adds a great deal more that is distinctively human. It feeds upon the emotions to enrich culture. The tendency of the serpent to appear suddenly in dreams, its sinuous form, and its power and mystery are the natural ingredients of myth and religion.
47. Consider how sensation and emotional states are elaborated into stories during dreams. The dreamer hears a distant thunderclap and changes an ongoing episode to end with the slamming of a door. He feels a general anxiety and is transported to a schoolhouse corridor, where he searches for a classroom he does not know in order to take an examination for which he is unprepared. As the sleeping brain enters its regular dream periods, marked by rapid eye movement beneath closed eyelids, giant fibers in the lower brainstem fire upward into the cortex. The awakened mind responds by retrieving memories and fabricating stories around the sources of physical and emotional discomfort. It hastens to recreate the elements of past real experience, often in a jumbled and antic form. And from time to time the serpent appears as the embodiment of one or more of these feelings. The direct and literal fear of snakes is foremost among them, but the dream-image can also be summoned by sexual desire, a craving for dominance and power, and the apprehension of violent death.
48. We need not turn to Freudian theory in order to explain our special relationship to snakes. The serpent did not originate as the vehicle of dreams and symbols. The relation appears to be precisely the other way around and correspondingly easier to study and understand. Humanity's concrete experience with poisonous snakes gave rise to the Freudian phenomena after it was assimilated by genetic evolution into the brain's structure. The mind has to create symbols and fantasies from something. It leans toward the most powerful preexistent images or at least follows the learning rules that create the images, including that of the serpent. For most of this century, perhaps overly enchanted by psychoanalysis, we have confused the dream with the reality and its psychic effect with the ultimate cause rooted in nature.
49. Among prescientific people, whose dreams are conduits to the spirit world and snakes a part of ordinary experience, the serpent has played a central role in the building of culture. There are magic incantations for simple protection as in the hymns of the Atharva Veda:
With my eye do I slay thy eye, with poison do I slay thy poison. O
Serpent, die, do not live; back upon thee shall thy poison turn.
50. "Indra slew thy first ancestors, O Serpent," the chant continues, "and since they are crushed, what strength forsooth can be theirs?" And so the power can be controlled and even diverted to human use through iatromancy and the casting of magic spells. Two serpents entwine the caduceus, which was first the winged staff of Mercury as messenger of the gods, then the safe-conduct pass of ambassadors and heralds, and finally the universal emblem of the medical profession.
51. Balaji Mundkur (1983) has shown how the inborn awe of snakes matured into rich productions of art and religion around the world. Serpentine forms wind across stone carvings from paleolithic Europe and are scratched into mammoth teeth found in Siberia. They are the emblems of power and ceremony for the shamans of the Kwakiutl, the Siberian Yakut and Yenisei Ostyak, and many of the tribes of Australian aboriginals. Stylized snakes have often served as the talismans of the gods and spirits who bestow fertility: Ashtoreth of the Canaanites, the demons Fu-Hsi and Nu-kua of the Han Chinese, and the powerful goddesses Mudamma and Manasa of Hindu India. The ancient Egyptians venerated at least thirteen ophidian deities ministering to various combinations of health, fecundity, and vegetation. Prominent among them was the triple-headed giant Nehebku who travelled widely to inspect every part of the river kingdom. Amulets in gold inscribed with the sign of a cobra were placed in the wrappings of Tutankhamen's mummy. Even the scorpion goddess Selket bore the title "mother of serpents." Like her offspring, she prevailed simultaneously as a source of evil, power, and goodness.
52. The Aztec pantheon was a phantasmagoria of monstrous forms among whom serpents were given pride of place. The calendrical symbols included the ophidian olin-nahi and cipactli, the earth crocodile that possessed a forked tongue and rattlesnake's tail. The rain god Tialoc consisted in part of two coiled rattlesnakes whose heads met to form the god's upper lip. Coatl, serpent, is the dominant phrase in the names of the divinities. Coatlicue was the a threatening chimera of snake and human parts, Cihuacoati the goddess of childbirth and mother of the human race, and Xiuhcoati the fire serpent over whose body fire was rekindled every fifty-two years to mark a major division in the religious calendar. Quetzacoati, the plumed serpent with the human head, reigned as god of the morning and evening star and thus of death and resurrection. As inventor of the calendar, deity of books and learning, and patron of the priesthood, he was revered in the schools where nobles and priests were taught. His reported departure over the eastern horizon upon a raft of snakes must have been the occasion of consternation for the intellectuals of the day, something like the folding of the Guggenheim Foundation.
53. A contradiction of ophidian images was a feature of Greek religion as well Among the early forms of Zeus was the serpent Meilikhios, god of love, gentle and responsive to supplication, and god of vengeance, whose sacrifice was a holocaust offered at night. Another great serpent protected the lustral waters at the spring of Ares. He coexisted with the Erinyes, demons of the underworld so horrible they could not be pictured in early mythology. They were given the form of serpents when broughttothe stage by Euripides in the Iphigeneia in Tauris: "Dost see her, her the Hades-snake who gapes / To slay me, with dread vipers, open-mouthed?"
54. Slyness deception, malevolence, betrayal, the implicit threat of a forked tongue flicking in and out of the masklike head, all qualities tinged with miraculous powers to heal and guide, forecast and empower, became the serpent's prevailing image in western cultures. The serpent in the Garden of Eden appearing as in a dream to serve as Judaism's evil Prometheus, gave humankind knowledge of good and evil and with it the burden of original sin, for which God repaid in kind:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
between your brood and hers.
They shall strike at your head,
and you shall strike at their heel.
55. To summarize the relation between man and snake: life gathers human meaning to become part of us. Culture transforms the snake into the serpent, a far more potent creation than the literal reptile. Culture in turn is a product of the mind, which can be interpreted as an image-making machine that recreates the outside world through symbols arranged into maps and stories. But the mind does not have an instant capacity to grasp reality in its fall chaotic richness; nor does the body last long enough for the brain to process information piece by piece like an all-purpose computer. Rather, consciousness races ahead to master certain kinds of information with enough efficiency to survive, it submits to a few biases easily while automatically avoiding others. A great deal of evidence has accumulated in genetics and physiology to show that the controlling devices are biological in nature, built into the sensory apparatus and brain by particularities in cellular architecture.
56. The combined biases are what we call human nature. The central tendencies, exemplified so strikingly in fear and veneration of the serpent, are the wellsprings of culture. Hence simple perceptions yield an unending abundance of images with special meaning while remaining true to the forces of natural selection that created them.
57. How could it be otherwise? The brain evolved into its present form over a period of about two million years, from the time of Homo habilis to the late stone age of Homo sapiens, during which people existed in hunter- gatherer bands in intimate contact with the natural environment. Snakes mattered. The smell of water, the hum of a bee, the directional bend of a plant stalk mattered. The naturalist's trance was adaptive: the glimpse of one small animal hidden in the grass could make the difference between eating and going hungry in the evening. And a sweet sense of horror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delights us today even in the sterile hearts of cities, could see you through to the next morning. Organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual. Although the evidence is far from all in, the brain appears to have kept its old capacities, its channeled quickness. We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.
From Jeffrey Saver, "An Interview with E.O. Wilson on Sociobiology and Religion," Free Inquiry 5 (1985): 15-22.
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58. People do have a strong tendency to appreciate and love life. I use the word biophilia to stress this natural human impulse to affiliate with and even to love living things. It's no coincidence, for example, that most science fiction entails life, either at the fairly crude level of a transference of human life, politics, or social existence to some distant imagined place, or at the more speculative level of envisioning contact with other forms of life. Very little sci-fi entails the real substance of physics and chemistry. How compelling is it in the end to know what lies one kilometer below the surface of Jupiter? But people become truly excited when writers start talking about the prospect of making contact with extraterrestrial life. Then unlimited possibilities seem to open.
From The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
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And here is Edgar Degas' Dance Exercise. (Corel)
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59. The favored living place of most peoples is a prominence near water from which parkland can be viewed. On such heights are found the abodes of the powerful and rich, tombs of the great, temples, parliaments, and monuments commemorating tribal glory. The location is today an aesthetic choice and, by the implied freedom to settle there, a symbol of status. In ancient, more practical times the topography provided a place to retreat and a sweeping prospect from which to spot the distant approach of storms and enemy forces. Every animal species selects a habitat in which its members gain a favorable mix of security and food. For most of deep history, human beings lived in tropical and subtropical savanna in East Africa, open country sprinkled with streams and lakes, trees and copses. In similar topography modem peoples choose their residences and design their parks and gardens, if given a free choice. They simulate neither dense jungles, toward which gibbons are drawn, nor dry grasslands, preferred by hamadryas baboons. In their gardens they plant trees that resemble the acacias, sterculias, and other native trees of the African savannas. The ideal tree crown sought is consistently wider than tall, with spreading lowermost branches close enough to the ground to touch and climb, clothed with compound or needle-shaped leaves.
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© 1999 International Cultural Foundation. This article first appeared as a compilation in Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts.
Edward O. Wilson is a professor at Harvard University.
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