E.O. Wilson is dead

Jan 09, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

---

Kaieteur News – If you ask Guyanese if they ever heard of E.O. Wilson, 99 percent would say they haven’t. Edward Wilson died on Boxing Day, December 27, 2021. I would think that even the person that hates Wilson would not deny he was one of the greatest minds of modern civilisation.
I will never forget Wilson for two reasons. When I arrived at the University of Toronto in 1980, he was the leading academic superstar in the world. All the professors were talking about him. Secondly, since his theory of sociobiology was sweeping the scientific world, I wanted to know why this man’s theory was so hated yet so admired at the same time.
I went out and bought a copy of the journal, “The Philosophical Forum” (TPF) of Boston University. It was the 1981-1982 issue (Vol X111, No. 2-3 and was devoted to the controversial yet fascinating theory of sociobiology. The title the journal gave that edition was, “Sociobiology: The Debate Evolves.”
I have that journal up to this day. As I am getting on in age, I would like to part with it and most of my books. So I would like to give it to someone very much interested in philosophy. Philosophy is the darkest body of knowledge dealing with dark, subterranean monsters the likes of which Stephen King would be incompetent to handle.
I will always believe that my friend Charles Mills became a different human after he began studying philosophy at the University of Toronto. We were contemporary West Indian students at the university. As the years passed on, Charles simply was not the Jamaican I knew in 1980. I believe he was getting too absorbed in the esoteric world of philosophy.
I left the University of Toronto to serve the Government of Maurice Bishop of Grenada and lost touch with Charles. On my return to Guyana years after, I learned that Charles had produced one of the most brilliant, phenomenal texts in modern philosophy titled, “The Racial Contract.” This book is simply pure genius. If you ask Guyanese who Charles Mills is, 99 percent would say they don’t know. But he may be the profoundest mind West Indian academia has produced and certainly of the brightest scholars Third World academia gave the 21st century.
See my column of Saturday, October 15, 2021, with the title, “Charles Mills who exceeded Walter Rodney is dead.” For a good description of how the darkness in philosophy affects the mind see the well-written book: “The Reckless Mind” by Mark Lilla in which he describes philosophy’s effect of the following philosophers: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexander Kojeve, Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Anyway, back to E.O. Wilson.
I simply cannot deceive myself by denying that E.O. Wilson has not had an effect on me. I don’t subscribe to Wilson’s presentation of how the mind works but Wilson has been lurking in my mind since I brought that issue of TPF. I don’t want to believe Wilson is right. I don’t believe Wilson is right. But I cannot get out of my mind what Wilson was saying.
I like many of the critiques of Wilson, some of which are very compelling in that very issue of TPF. But the socio-biological arguments of Wilson cannot be easily washed away as many Marxists did from the seventies onto this day.
Wilson was essentially a Darwinian biologist. Here are his findings that made him into a global figure. Insects and animals are fundamentally shaped by evolution through natural selection. All species are so shaped including Homo sapiens. There is no such thing as the non-biological human mind. The mind is a part of human nature. The contents of the mind are a product of natural selection.
Values such as love, altruism, the incest-taboo, aggression, xenophobia, art appreciation, etc., are products of evolution through natural selection. Wilson was taking Darwin in a direction we don’t know the founding father of evolution would have gone.
There is a large barrier that prevents the efficacy of Wilson’s presentation. It is the nature versus nurture debate. Critics of Wilson have consistently used this argument to counter Wilson saying that people become who they are through social interaction.
Wilson did not deny the role of people shaping other people but he argued that this was always an exaggeration in that many of the values the mind incorporates are in fact derived from evolution. When told that his findings can encourage thoughts of eugenics, racism and superiority complex, Wilson fought back by saying, the connection does not have to be there. In other words, the philosophers have interpreted the world. The point is to change it.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

---