CONSILIENCE

David Ayer

      Edward O. Wilson has proposed the pursuit of a unified theory of knowledge, which he refers to as Consilience.  In his book, of the same name, he states the method and the avenues in which this unified theory should be pursued.  This essay will review Wilson’s proposal and focus on, what I believe, are a few stumbling blocks to Wilson’s endeavor.  Specifically, epigenetic rules, and the role emotions play in these rules and in the brains “self-assembly” of information. As Wilson believes, Cognitive Neuroscience is the avenue that will lead us to a consensus agreement on the mechanisms involved in emotion and rational thought; a brief discussion of this issue will follow.  Finally, a few words on whether Wilson’s conception of Consilience can be attained would seem relevant.

Epigenetic rules and Emotion

      Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733-1794) originally advanced the term epigenesis.  Wolff used the term to state that, “the development of an embryo involves the gradual and progressive growth of body organs and tissues (Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia, 1998).”  The main point being an organism’s development is determined by an interaction between its prenatal environment and its intracellular processes, as opposed to the previously held view of preformationism, which stated a miniature version of the organism was all ready present within the egg, sperm, or seed.  Wilson’s idea of epigenetic rules extends this concept to how behavior may be governed beyond prenatal development.  Wilson’s first definition of epigenetic rules, “epigenetic rules, which are the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself.  The mind grows from birth to death by absorbing parts of the existing culture available to it, with selections guided through epigenetic rules inherited by the individual (p.138).”  The terms culture and inherited are key concepts in this definition, as Wilson believes these epigenetic rules are encoded in our physical makeup and that they play an important role in what Wilson calls gene-culture coevolution.  According to Wilson, gene-culture coevolution is the idea that genetic evolution in humans has been paralleled by cultural evolution and that the “two forms of evolution are linked (p.138).” 

      For Wilson, epigenetic rules are obviously a result of evolution, “epigenetic rules are innate operations in the sensory system of the brain.  They are rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment.  They predispose individuals to view the world in a particular innate way and automatically to make certain choices as opposed to others (p. 210).”  Martin Seligman (1971) proposed a similar mechanism known as preparedness.  Seligman believed that classical conditioning was responsible for most phobic responses, but suggested that people may be biologically prepared by their evolutionary history to acquire some fears more readily than others.  Wilson and Seligman believe that the fear of snakes is one such example.  Most empirical studies have provided only tenuous support for this claim (McNally, 1987).  However, a study conducted by Cook & Mineka (1989), which showed that rhesus monkeys acquired conditioned fears of fear-relevant stimuli, such as snakes, more readily than they do for fear-irrelevant stimuli, such as flowers, is frequently cited as an example of preparedness.  Other research conducted with phobics has revealed that many cannot consciously recall any traumatic experience that may have resulted in a conditioned fear response.   This has been interpreted to suggest that maybe this fear response was not conditioned at all, but may be innate.  However, these examples do not provide conclusive evidence of an epigenetic rule that governs a fear response to snakes.  In other words, the results are open to interpretation.

      Another interpretation of this research is that people quickly learn to avoid objects that are sharp and that bite.  This aversion can be facilitated either in or out of a subject’s awareness.  A child who has been pinched by an object that opens and closes and who has been pricked with a sharp object, quickly learns to avoid that situation.  As Wilson noted, this aversion to snakes is “not a hard-wired instinct”(p.86), young children show no special aversion to snakes but quickly develop this aversion later in development.  So why do we need an inherited epigenetic rule to explain an aversion to snakes?  We don’t.  The laws of association and conditioning (classical and operant) do just fine.  One need not be aware of how one is learning in order for the process to occur.  Learning theorists, at least since the time of John Dewey, have known that learning can and often does occur passively as well as actively.  This is not to say that biology does not play a role in this process.  Obviously, avoiding potentially harmful stimuli as opposed to say, a benign flower has a survival function, i.e. avoid those things that may result in injury.  Our body is hard-wired to detect injury and react in a manner to escape from that situation.   However, avoidance of potentially harmful stimuli can be facilitated entirely through learning and conditioning. 

      Wilson provides another example of an epigenetic rule in what he calls the universal incest taboo.  Wilson makes the case that this incest taboo is more than just an aversion to breeding with one who has a similar genetic makeup, but it is actually governed by an epigenetic rule that states, “Have no sexual interest in those whom you knew intimately during the earliest years of your life (p.191).”  Wilson uses work conducted by Arthur P. Wolf (1995) to back this claim.  Basically, Wolf’s observations of Taiwanese culture revealed more marital problems in families who raised a non-biological sibling along side their intended future spouse.  Besides creating an epigenetic rule to explain this effect, several other possibilities exist. 

      The reader, I am sure, is familiar with the old saying that familiarity breeds contempt.  This statement has some degree of face validity and rational basis.  Anyone who has raised children quickly becomes aware of the documented phenomenon that humans attend more readily to novel stimuli.  Humans, as a functional behavior, are constantly attempting to make sense of their environment.  One of the laws of association, the law of similarity, states that our brains organize objects that are similar into groups of like kind.  Once we come across a stimulus or phenomenon that has not been previously assigned meaning, we turn our focus towards that stimulus or phenomenon.  Another relevant concept is habituation.  Habituation is the observed phenomenon of, following repeated exposure to a stimulus, no longer consciously attending to that stimulus.   If you view the paired sibling as the habituated stimulus and the potential other mate as the novel stimulus, then these two concepts can easily explain Wolf’s observations, i.e. you will not attune to your paired sibling (intended spouse) but will attune to the other.

      Cultural norms and rule-governed behaviors would be a better explanation of incest avoidance than the invention of an epigenetic rule.  There exist cultures where relatives raised in close proximity frequently engage in incestual relationships.  In Arab cultures, first cousins frequently marry.  In some Appalachian cultures incest is the only guarantee that its members will ever engage in sexual activity.  As Wilson pointed out in discussing how we make rational choice, we often “take the first satisfactory choice encountered out of those perceived and reasonably available in the short term, as opposed to visualizing the optimum choice in advance and searching until it is found (p.224).”  In addition to this point on immediacy, in some Appalachian cultures incest is the cultural rule.  This writer briefly worked in a home for sexual perpetrators; most of these adolescents came from Appalachian cultures.  Without exception, these adolescents relayed their belief that families displayed their love for each other by engaging in sexual activity and could not understand why the outside world was punishing them for their expression of love to others.  Now, obviously these cultures are not the norm and are the product of rules that are considered deviant.  This is exactly the point.  These behaviors are entirely determined by the rules of their culture.  Well, maybe not entirely, as the behavior of self-propagation is genetically encoded.  However, the rules that govern who we attempt to propagate with are culturally derived.

      Wilson states that epigenetic rules are typically emotion driven (p.210).  For Wilson, emotion is the key determinant in how and why our mind works as it does.  Wilson states that, “emotion is not just a perturbation of reason but a vital part of it (p.116).”  He further states, “ Rational calculation is based on surges of competing emotions, whose interplay is resolved by an interaction of hereditary and environmental factors (p.223).”  Wilson believes that emotion gives meaning to our memory, that emotion focuses our mental activity on the most relevant of competing scenarios that exist in our consciousness, and that consciousness satisfies our emotion by causing physical activity based on the scenario selected by emotion.  Wilson states, “Without the stimulus and guidance of emotion, rational thought slows and disintegrates (p.123).” 

      Wilson’s emphasis on emotion as being the key to rational thought is counterintuitive.  It is common to hear people speak of thinking with their head rather than their heart. The implication being that the clarity brought about by rational thought is often contaminated by human emotion; that emotion is contrived and suspect but that rational thought is logical and always relevant. (note:  Damasio (1994) gives a much more compelling argument for emotion being key to rational thought. A full discussion of Damasio’s argument is beyond the scope of this paper.)  Complications with Wilson’s view of emotion can be contrasted with the view of emotion first proposed by William James.

      Prior to William James (and evidently, for Wilson, after James), the traditional view of emotion was as follows:  we see a wild animal, we feel fear, and we run away.  William James, in Principles of Psychology Vol. 2 (1890), stated that the arousal of the physical response precedes the appearance of the emotion, i.e. we see a wild animal, we run away, we feel fear.  “Our feeling of the [physical] changes is the emotion” (James, 1890, Vol. 2, p. 449). 

      Modern scientific psychologists have adopted James’s view of emotion.  This view would seem problematic for Wilson.  Emotion cannot be the stimulus and guidance for rational thought, if emotion is merely the interpretation of physical events guided by past history and rational thought.  Contrary to Wilson’s account that emotion gives meaning to our memory, we must also consider that memory gives meaning to emotion.  Now we have to be careful here.  Wilson does give a physiological account of emotion (p.123) that closely resembles that of James and of John Watson, which bring us to a problem in Wilson’s book, usage of certain words vary in terms of definition and degree of conviction throughout the book. For example, Wilson states one of the reasons humans have chosen transcendental explanations for certain human behaviors over empirical explanations is that, “Resistance to empiricism is also due to a purely emotional shortcoming of the mode of reasoning it promotes:  It is bloodless (p.290).”  This seems to run counter to Wilson’s claim that emotion drives rational thought.  This type of apparent incongruity makes it very difficult to discuss some of Wilson’s ideas with any degree of certainty.

      Let me make my objection to his significance of emotion as clear as his book and my understanding will allow.  Wilson correctly makes the distinction between primary and secondary emotion.  Primary emotion is simply our fight or flight physical response to certain stimuli.  Primary emotion provides the template for secondary emotion.  Primary emotion is a physiological response that has been “passed down with little change from the vertebrate forebears of the human line (p. 125)”, while secondary emotion is learned.  Wilson further believes the types of stimuli that elicit our primary emotion are passed on through epigenetic rules.  He again gives the example of the snake, for which I have all ready addressed.  He also gives our response to the pain of broken bones and heart attacks as an example of primary emotion.   On this latter point, I believe Wilson is correct.  Pain, as opposed to injury, is a primary emotion in and of itself.  So, Wilson’s account of internal stimuli producing physiological responses that guide us to action is correct.  Which actions we take, and our physiological responses to external stimuli are not genetically or epigenetically encoded.

      In summation, Wilson’s account provides no grounds for emotion producing an epigenetic rule or guiding our rational thought.  Additionally, research conducted by McNally (1987) and others provides no empirical support for the existence of epigenetic rules.  Further, the concept provides no additional, useful, scientific information for explaining the acquisition of a fear response to certain stimuli more readily than to other stimuli.  Again, our scientific knowledge of our physical structures and of the laws of learning and conditioning does the job just fine.  Wilson acknowledges that we are hard-wired for attention to audio/visual data.  Likewise, we are hard-wired for our response to real or perceived injury.  This is not determined by an epigenetic rule, but is determined by the faculties imputed to us by our genes.  A startle response (physiological origin of all emotion) is not an epigenetic rule; it is a combination of our physical makeup and our behavioral histories.  We have a hard-wired startle (fight or flight) response, but what external stimulus elicits this response is environmentally determined.  Wilson fails to make this distinction.  To appeal to the law of parsimony, the interaction between our physical structures and our environment is all we need to explain elicited fear responses.  

Cognitive Neuroscience         

      Wilson, I believe correctly so, states that Consilience should be pursued through the convergent natural sciences of biology and psychology.  However, the sub-discipline of psychology that Wilson chooses marks my point of divergence.

      Being that we are living organisms, biology will always need to be addressed when speaking of human activity.  The fact that we have opposable thumbs is of extreme significance.  Without such devices, our use of tools and pictorial representations would not have played such important roles in human history.  The prefrontal lobe and vocal chord hardware that biology gives us, dictates that we are capable of verbal behavior.  How biology equips us for sexual reproduction also plays a determinate role in our behavior.  As Wilson points out (and discussed earlier in this paper), we are creatures that are prone to use audio and visual information. In this manner, given the hardware provided, our biology must be taken into account. However, as noted in my discussion on epigenetic rules, beyond our physical make-up, biology is not needed to explain the human mind and our behavior.  Psychology is the next arena to turn when looking for these types of explanations.

      Wilson believes psychology’s sub-discipline of Cognitive Neuroscience will provide us with the answers of what the human mind is and how it works.  Wilson correctly asserts that the mind is simply the brain at work.  It is composed of over 100 billion nerve cells that comprise our neural pathways. These pathways come to pass through exposure to and interaction with our environment. Our mental development can literally be seen as the exercising of our brain’s neurons into working neural pathways. The more exercise these pathways get, the stronger they become. But, this rudimentary conception of the brain tells us little more than the rules that govern external behaviors also govern internal behaviors (although this finding should not be trivialized). Mapping the interaction of these 100 billion or more nerve cells is one problem with Cognitive Neuroscience.

      In apparent oblivion to the math that shows the possible number of interactions between these nerve cells and subsequently shows the impossibility of mapping all these interactions, Wilson nonetheless expresses his faith that Cognitive Neuroscience will “map the physical basis of mental concepts (p.147)”. Wilson discusses the history of neuroscience and our current knowledge of the field (p.109-115). Wilson acknowledges that neuroscientists have traced only a fraction of the brain but he believes enough is known about the brains major anatomical structures to give us an understanding of how it works (p.112).  A quick side note here, Wilson’s neuroscience history is incomplete; he asserts that, “beginning with Wilder Penfield and other pioneers in the 1920’s and 1930’s, researchers have mapped sensory and motor functions over all parts of the cerebral cortex (p.111).”  To be historically accurate, this work began in the early 1800’s by Marshall Hall, Pierre Flourens, Paul Broca, Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig.  Additionally, Luigi Galvani and his nephew Giovanni Aldini began research on the nervous system in the late 1700’s.  This may seem only a minor point, but if Wilson wishes to recruit psychologists for his program of consilience, he should at least acknowledge our claimed history.

      Acknowledgement of history is a good place to start in critiquing Wilson’s role of neuroscience in understanding the human mind. Wilson states that through brain-imaging we can look into ones brain and see which pathways are at work when an individual is engaged in an external behavior:  “…and while they are doing this the fiery play of their neuronal circuitry is made visible by the techniques of neurobiology… The two brains are linked by perception of brain activity (p.128-129).” What Wilson is proposing is introspection, albeit technologically guided introspection. A quick review of the history of introspection reveals a problem with this approach.

       Introspection (Latin, literally meaning ‘looking inwards’) as a concept can be traced to Socrates (Schultz & Schultz, 2000). However, Wihlem Wundt was the first to attempt to make introspection a more objective process by applying experimental control to its use. Edward Bradford Titchner and other Structuralists quickly came to realize that the act of introspection altered the experience. For example, introspecting on an angry state introduces rational thought into this emotion charged environment, necessarily altering its process, i.e. anger is seldom rational, and introspecting on it is. Sigmund Freud also offered us a reason to avoid introspection; if part of our mental activity lies outside of conscious thought how can we attend to, through introspection, those things which we are not aware?

      Wilson acknowledges that past attempts to understand the mind using introspection alone have failed (p.105). Using technology-guided introspection will also fail. Brain-imagery tools do not address the problem of the process of introspection changing what is being looked at nor does it address the problem of us knowing what it is that we are looking at or for. Wilson and his subject, whose “brains are linked by perception of brain activity (p. 129)”, cannot know if they are looking at the neural activity surrounding the “emotion” that is elicited by the object under common observance, or if they are looking at the neural activity produced by the introspective process, some interaction between the two, or maybe something entirely unrelated. The possible number of interactions within the brain prohibits us from making any conclusive statements about a direct relationship between a specific external event and a specific neural pathway.

Towards Consilience 

      In closing, Wilson’s program of pursuing a unified theory of knowledge is a program worth undertaking. Additionally, an empirical approach is the approach that should be used.  However, Wilson’s methods and avenues are plagued with methodological and practical problems. Most attempts at a unified theory will be plagued with problems. As William James points out, we should attempt to find truth but with the understanding that will we find “little t” truths and not “big T” truths.  James states, “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation (James, 1978, p.97).”  This statement makes it clear that that the dynamic nature of our physical environment makes it impossible to achieve any one truth or theory that will continually explain changing physical and behavioral phenomena. It also makes clear that we should none-the-less make attempts at these sorts of explanation and hence, make our truths along the way. Wilson correctly identifies those groups who have most successfully carried the torch of Consilience (p.67-69). The logical positivists have come closest to achieving this goal but were held up by disagreements concerning language and specific meanings of terms. This, I believe, is where Consilience must begin—refinement and specificity of language. Creating terms like epigenetic rules, which are not empirically validated, does nothing to correct our current jargon prone scientific language.

REFERENCES

      Cook, M., & Mineka, S. (1989). Observational conditioning of fear to fear-relevant versus fear-irrelevant stimuli in Rhesus monkeys.  Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 98 (4), 448 – 459.

        Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error:  Emotion, reason, and the human brain.  New York: Putnam.

      Isaacs, A., Martin, E., Law, J., Blair, P., Clark, J., Isaacs, Am., Allaby, M., and Chilvers, I. (Eds,). (1998). Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia.  London:  Oxford University Press.

      James, W.  (1890).  The principles of psychology.  New York:  Holt.

      James, W.  (1978).  Pragmatism  (F. Burkhardt, Ed.).  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

      McNally, R. J. (1987).  Preparedness and phobias:  A review.  Psychological Bulletin, 101 (2), 283 – 303.

      Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2000). A history of modern psychology  (7^th edition).  Orlando, Fl:  Harcourt Brace & Company.

      Seligman, M. E. P. (1971).  Phobias and preparedness.  Behavior Therapy, 2, 307 – 321.

      Wilson, Edward O.  (1998).  Consilience.  New York:  Random House.

      Wolf, A. P.  (1995).  Sexual attraction and childhood association:  A Chinese brief for Edward Westermack.  Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press.