“Social order is the vessel that keeps us afloat in a sea of chaos and entropy,” states David Sloan Wilson, professor of evolutionary biology and author of Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society and Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. In this interview with EnlightenNext editor Ross Robertson, Wilson discusses why social order, altruism, and even religion fit squarely within existing evolutionary models of natural selection.
Wilson, a major proponent of a theory called multilevel selection, believes that the traditional Darwinian notion of natural selection works not only at the level of individuals and their genes but also functions as effectively between groups of people, collections of organisms, and even whole ecosystems. The theory argues that just as genes serve as vehicles for transmitting an organism’s design, individuals and groups can also serve that purpose. “Indeed, genes themselves can be affected by selection, not just because of their effects on the design of their vehicle (the organism) but also because of their effect on the functioning of the DNA on which they reside. Hence, the notion of multilevel selection.” The implications of this theory are profound, establishing cooperation between individuals (and therefore between species and entire ecosystems) as an integral part of natural selection, and injecting the most basic—and potentially revolutionary—principles and rigorous tools of evolutionary theory squarely into the fields of sociology, psychology, social sciences, and the humanities. Wilson’s pioneering work is helping the scientific community as well as the general public embrace a broader and more nuanced understanding of the evolutionary process.
BIO
David Sloan Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Biology with a joint appointment in Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is best known for championing the theory of multilevel selection, which shows how adaptations can evolve at all levels of the biological hierarchy, with implications ranging from the origin of life to the nature of religion. He is author of nearly 200 scientific articles published in biology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy journals. His academic books include The Natural Selection of Populations and Communities (1980), Unto Others: the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior (with Elliott Sober; 1998), Darwin's Cathedral: evolution, religion, and the nature of society (2002), and the The Literary Animal: Evolution and the nature of narrative (co-edited with Jonathan Gottschall, 2005). His first book for a general audience, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, will be published in Spring 2007 by Bantam Press.
In addition to his own research and writing, Dr. Wilson is director of EvoS, a campus-wide program that strives to use evolutionary theory as a common language to create a single intellectual community, spanning all human related subjects in addition to the natural world.
