Notes

1. . Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).
2. . Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 10. The account of “normal science” that follows is drawn from chap. 3.
3. . Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 201.
4. . Ibid., p. 221.
5. . Ibid., p. 4. Curiously Wilson asserts that this has occurred “not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival.” If this were the case, would this realization not have the same eroding effect on our scientific beliefs?
6. . Ibid., p. 13. This seems to be a prudent retreat from earlier comments (in Sociobiology) about one discipline “cannibalizing” another.
7. . LucretiusDe Rerum Natura  3, 228–34, 273–75. The translation is mine, and I have inserted the bracketed material.
8. . Wilson, On Human Nature, pp. 76–77. I am aware that there is dangerously loose talk in both Wilson's discussion and mine confusing such concepts as mind, soul, will, consciousness, and intentionality. Wilson has been sketching a general picture, and it is that which I have sought to characterize. For a more technical context a neater vocabulary is required.
9. . Wilson recognizes this when he affirms: “The cardinal mystery of neurobiology is not self‐love or dreams of immortality but intentionality” (ibid., p. 75).
10. . Ibid., p. 195.
11. . Ibid., p. 201.
12. . Ibid., p. 215.
13. . This formulation is reconstructed from Wilson's remarks, ibid., pp. 77–78.
14. . Ibid., p. 73.
15. . Epicurus, struggling with the atomistic determinism of Democritus, tried to make room for free will with the ad‐hoc assumption that atoms would randomly “swerve.” This famous doctrine of parenklisis has the same difficulty of trying to ground free will and moral responsibility in the randomness or unpredictability of matter.
16. . The first two dilemmas are proposed in the first chapter (On Human Nature, pp. 2 and 6) and recur thematically thereafter; the third dilemma is developed only in the final pages (ibid., p. 208) and is quickly bequeathed to posterity.
17. . Ibid., p. 6.
18. . Ibid., p. 208.
19. . Wilson seems to understand and accept this schizophrenia fully, although he gives no explanation of how or why he can have such acceptance, for he says: “And at the center of the second dilemma is found a circularity: we are forced to choose among the elements of human nature by reference to value systems which these same elements created in an evolutionary age now long vanished. Fortunately, this circularity of the human predicament is not so tight that it cannot be broken through an exercise of human will” (ibid., p. 196). Exactly how the will can do this is not at all clear. Incidentally William James used this point about dilemmas subtly and ironically when he titled a famous paper “The Dilemma of Determinism.”
20. . There is a vast philosophical literature on explanation. Important discussions may be found in various works by Carl Hempel, William Dray, Patrick Gardiner, Ernest Nagel, Patrick Suppes, and Israel Scheffler.
21. . Mary Midgley, Beast and Men: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 5–6. This book has a rich discussion of Wilson's Sociobiology, covering some of the same issues raised in this paper.
22. . Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 191.
23. . LudwigWittgensteinTractatus Logico-Philosophicus  6. 732.
24. . Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 196.
25. . A classic discussion of the genetic fallacy may be found in Morris Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (New York: Harcourt, Brace & CO. 1934), pp. 388–90.
26. . Two examples come to mind. John Rawls, in his remarkable A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). develops a procedural theory of justice in which the validity and legitimacy of basic principles of justice are derived from the way in which they are chosen. From one angle this seems to be an instance of judging the moral worth of a proposal on the basis of the procedure which instituted it. Stephen Toulmin in Human Understanding, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), wrote: “…a comprehensive account of conceptual development must not merely consider concepts in the abstract, and in isolation from the men who conceive and use them, but also relate the history of ideas to the history of people, so placing the development of our conceptual traditions within the evolution of the activities by which those traditions are carried. At the time Kuhn first wrote, most philosophers of science were excessively wary of the genetic and psychologistic fallacies” (p. 116).
27. . Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 169.
28. . Ibid., p. 205.
29. . Ibid., p. 201.
30. . Perhaps Wilson had in mind something closer to an aesthetic argument: Producing a sociobiological understanding of religion would “spoil the charm” of our current religious mythologies and rituals. I think, in the end, Wilson's attitude toward religion is very similar to Plato's attitude toward art. Both men are in awe of the power and motivational force of these dimensions of human life, and for that very reason they find them dangerous and debilitating when not directed at the truth. Both propose to harness these forces in service to the truth—Wilson wants to make cosmic evolution the new myth. It is puzzling, though, that Wilson does not transfer his worry about religion to art; nor does he believe that a scientific explanation of our artistic creativity will “explain away” the arts and deprive us of aesthetic motivations. He says: “I…do not envision scientific generalization as a substitute for art or as anything more than a nourishing symbiont of art…. 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”(On Human Nature, p. 206). Here he seems to recognize the integrity of the aesthetic “realm of meaning” that 1 discuss later.
31. . Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 575.
32. . Wilson, On Human Nature, pp. 167, 7.
33. . Ibid., p. 208.
34. . Ibid., p. 201.
35. . David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, introduction.