Print: E. O. Wilson Takes Evolutionary Approach to the Novel
- 12:00 pm |
The club of scientists who write fiction is small, but its members tend to be accomplished. Carl Djerassi, inventor of the birth control pill, writes novels and plays. Legendary astronomer Carl Sagan dabbled in science fiction. And now another giant has joined their ranks: Harvard naturalist and biologist E. O. Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who has contributed landmark works in the fields of insect behavior and biological anthropology. His latest book, his 22nd, is his first novel.
Anthill tells the parallel stories of Raff Cody, a southern lawyer trying to preserve the wilderness of his youth, and the epic territorial wars among the ants that inhabit that land. Wilson has argued that our behavior is governed by genetics and evolutionary imperatives. In Anthill, he turns that conviction into a narrative technique, writing about human nature with the same detachment he uses when explaining how worker ants lick the secretions of their larvae for nourishment. But Wilson’s novel is also an emotional plea to safeguard wild landscapes. Wilson talked to Wired about ants, evolution, and the creative aspects of the scientific process.
Wired: You’ve already established a successful nonfiction career. Why write fiction now?
E. O. Wilson: I’ve always wanted to try it. If you’ve mastered a subject, then writing about the factual content and ideas of it is easy, relatively. But if you write a novel, you have to create the world and carry it around in your head. And that’s difficult.
Wired: You sparked a huge controversy in the 1970s when you wrote about the biological roots of behavior. You called it sociobiology, but some of your critics called it racism and eugenics.
Wilson: Yeah, but I won that argument. We’ve learned so much about neurobiology, genetics, and biological anthropology that no serious scholar, except maybe a determined ideologue, would doubt there is a genetic component to human nature. It should be a major goal of science to understand the genes that predispose us to do one thing as opposed to another.
Wired: In Anthill, you describe human interactions with the same scientific terminology that you use to describe the ants. For example, you have Raff size up a future girlfriend by analyzing bone structure and hip-to-waist ratio. Are we humans really just a set of reactions to biological signals?
Wilson: I’ll tell you, the analogies implied in the novel are not accidents. Social insects — termites and ants — in terms of biomass totally dominate the insect world. In parallel manner, human beings have essentially taken over the planet, with the same general properties of altruistic social behavior and division of labor.
Wired: But does that make for good fiction? It doesn’t seem very literary.
Wilson: Science takes the subconscious process of creating ideas, all those crazy dreams and imaginings and rhapsodies, and puts them to the test. But then you have to tell the story, and unfortunately you can’t tell it like a poet. Metaphor has no accuracy or measurable quantities. The ideal of the creative arts, on the other hand, is to provoke a deep emotional response — from something that, again, often has its origin in the subconscious. The similarity is in the thought process. We constantly hear about the creative arts being linked to the scientific imagination. But we haven’t been very successful in making that link. Anthill is my attempt in that direction.