Edward O Wilson Materialism

E.O. Wilson should be read in Contemporary Great Books

Edward O. Wilson is a living scientist who has written and coauthored a number of books about insects, especially ants— his favorite field of study. He is influential in creating the broad field of sociobiology and is the well-known author of a number of books which have garnered wide appeal among specialists and the general public: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, On Human Nature, Biophilia, Promethean Fire, The Diversity of Life, The Future of Life, Consilience, and The Meaning of Human Existence. The goals of his works are both scientific and philosophical. Wilson was raised in Alabama as a fundamentalist Southern Baptist. As a teenager, he went through a conversion experience at a

On the very first page of his book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), he argues that ethical philosophers severely lack credibility and must take the evolved nature of human minds into account: [Our understanding of good and evil] was evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers… at all depths” (Wilson 1975, p. 3). One of Wilson’s goals is to prove that scientific materialism is superior to religion and that it can provide a better code of ethics. In On Human Nature (1978), he explains that he wants to provide a solution to what he perceives as religion’s pervasive and erroneous domination of social life (Wilson 1978, p. 142). He asserts that the moral code found in the Bible is arbitrary and causes needless guilt and suffering among the human populace. Wilson desires to analyze religion from a sociobiological perspective, believing that an explanation of religion in terms of evolutionary biology would give scientific materialism a final victory over religion: “If religion… can be systematically analyzed and explained as a product of the brain’s evolution, its power as an external source of morality will be gone forever” (Wilson 1978, p. 201). Wilson is not only interested in examining human nature and human values, but also he’s also interested in prescribing values for mankind. In Sociobiology he suggests that “a genetically accurate and hence completely fair code of ethics must wait for further contributions of evolutionary sociobiology” (Wilson 1975, p. 144). In On Human Nature, he argues that “the principal task of human biology is to identify and to measure the constraints that influence the decisions of ethical philosophers and everyone else, and to infer their significance through neurophysiological and phylogenetic reconstructions of the mind… in