Questioner: As a long time consultant, I've always been fascinated by the longitudinal studies at the University of Minnesota of identical twins who were separated at birth. There are over 700 pairs of such twins now, that have been followed through their lifetimes by the research staff in an absolutely extraordinary suggestion in their case studies that there are many, many biological determinants of behavior that seemed to exceed our innate sense of what is in fact encoded and what is in fact choice. I would like any of our three speakers to comment on any way that they have integrated the knowledge of these twins studies, and how it might reflect back on the discussion that we had earlier today.

Prof. Wilson: I would volunteer, but after today's events I feel my frontal cortex is beginning to dissolve. First of all, the amazing phenomena that you were referring to is the parallel behavior shown by twins, twins that are genetically identical, raised apart, and yet they come up with amazing similarities, such as a preference for cocker spaniels, a preference for Irish wolf hounds. These things go way beyond the limits of what is possible by chance alone. Obviously, there is no gene for selecting Irish wolf houndsÉ.There are common traits that have great influence on our lives, on the channels in our lives that we go into, that have a strong influence on what, given a wide array of choices, our choices will be, and we know that the heritability of these traits is remarkable. It ranges around 50% -- sometimes as low as 10%, sometimes as high as 90%. What is heritability? Heritability is that percentage of the variation in the given, measurable trait, within a population (we don't do it across different countries and we don't do it across different ethnic groups), within fairly homogenous sample groups, if you measure straight (and there is a certain amount of variation playing in their traits if you measure introversion and predilection and so on) and this generally settles around 50% apart. It's due to genes, to the differences among people's genes. You don't say, oh, so-and-so is an excellent musician and that's 90% heredity and 10% cultureÉ.What you say is musical ability -- certain kinds of musical ability -- varies in the population to thus degree. If it's 50% heritability that 50% is due to the difference in the genes from one individual to the next. Now, an individual in a particular culture is confronted with an array of choices: Pets to select, and within pets, certain breeds of dogs; certain avocations -- boating, hiking vs. professional blood sports, whatever. And when two individuals are growing up in roughly the same society, they will [make] their preferences and thus the effect depends on their lifestyle and selection of the mate. And therefore you can say it's because of a particular gene, but it only makes sense when you study it this way, as a product of genes and environment.

Prof. Gross: I can encapsulate it in shorter and smarter words. Anybody today who is inclined to argue that behavior is hereditary, or that behavior is environmental, should be shot. It is both. It is perfectly clear that it is both, it has been for twenty years, and there is simply no point in arguing about it anymore.

Questioner: Professor Wilson, Whewell brought in this word 'consilience,' and it didn't take -- people didn't follow up on it a whole lot. He brought in 'the scientist,' and it did take. Ideas have their evolution, as well as nature. Maybe there's a reason why it didn't take -- and I'm not sure that I know why you want to revive it. One of the reasons why perhaps it didn't take is that consilience involves this idea of jumping together. It's a risky business, jumping (people jumping to conclusions they make, etc.), and it's very difficult to get criteria for what counts as a good consilience-type jump and what doesn't. And I wondered if you had criteria, because it does strike me that of course within the natural sciences there are cases in which things come together just in the way you've described and I think the same thing has been happening in the humanities and social sciences recently. There are all kinds of ways in which philosophy and literature and anthropology and so on have been coming together. But cross-jumps between these two sides are harder to judge and some of the ones there have been, like "quantum mysticism" -- there's a jump for youÉ.So I wonder whether the attempt to resuscitate this notion runs up against a really rather good evolutionary barrier?

Prof. Wilson: William Whewell was the first person to use 'consilience' when modern chemistry and physics were in their earliest days and biology hadn't come along enough to get in on the ball. But the word 'consilience' was used thereafter on occasion up to the very present, and it has acquired among the philosophers an historic assignment, that being that I alluded to. (Professor Rorty may disagree with me; he's certainly a better historian than I am.) It was available, it was there, and it was used occasionally. And no, I think in the natural sciences it is used quite precisely as a certain kind of jumping -- it's a euphonious word, 'consilient.' What it means is the coming together, interlocking. Just for example, the fact that you laid out blue eyes, and that you may be colorblind, and this is something that affects the way you see the world and so on. You describe this in psychological and personal [terms]. The fact is that we know precisely why you are colorblindÉ.We can tell you exactly what happened, the nature of pigments and cones in your retina, we can go to the molecular level and explain it in terms of cells, and we can go right down to genetic and explain it in terms of the genes. That's consilience, that's what's building up all through the natural sciences. So I don't think it's misused at all, jumping or converging. [In response to a repetition of the question, focusing on criteria:] Humanity assigns the epigenetic rules, just in the way we elucidated the entire clinical regulatory system by elucidating hormone after hormone to get a pretty complete picture of hormonal deviation in the physiology of the body. We will gradually uncover these epigenetic rules, very much like a structure sticking out of the edge of partly excavated hotel, dislodge it, dig it out, and the thing will prove to be very complicated.

Questioner (a sociologist): I'm going to show my sociliological bias by saying, "Not by individuality alone we live," and almost all of the wonderful examples that we've heard have had to do with individuals, with cognitions. But we are also members of partnered entities, of communities, of groups, and my question would be, what might what some would see as a form of biological reductionism have to tell us by the extreme variability in something like inequality across societies, across civilizations? What might it tell us about the extremes in hostility and aggression and violence across societies? Not within societies -- I understand that biological barriers might account for individual differences in success or in violence. But looking at corporate entities and cultural phenomena that are transmitted, are you confident, sir, that biology will also help us understand this type of element?

Prof. Wilson: Why couldn't it? I am not confident to the point of being ignorant. Paul [Gross] probably would know better. But I have reflections about the body of the central patterns of sociology -- how can they possibly be approached and dealt with in this manner? Am I confident that they can be? I feel it in my bones that they are but I couldn't say they do with confidence, and in fact, this, to me, is the challenge in it. For if you show that they are not consilient then you would make one of the greatest intellectual advances in the social sciences in an hundred years. Please give it a try.

Questioner: I'm generally very impressed with the attempt to unite whatever there is good in the scientific experiment and whatever there is in the human experiment, but if what you just said, a few moments ago is true, that even among the carefully controlled scientific experiments about how much heredity plays a role in our behavior, it's roughly 50%, what are we to say? We're Americans; we believe in freedom. What are we to say about this other 50% of what human being is that is not attributable to genetic inheritance? I want to say that I'm very sympathetic to trying to unite as much as we can unite, but it just seems like half of human existence is left out in what you said today, and I think largely, as much as I appreciate what everyone attributed to this conversation, there is something else. And what is human freedom? What are we, as Americans who believe in human freedom, to make of the vision you're proposing in consilience?

Prof. Wilson: I see you saved the hard question for after dinner, and certainly what is left [the other 50%] is history, environment, circumstance.

Questioner: Those are determinants, not freedom. They are other forms of determinants, for sure. Jared Diamond's recent book on German Steel is devoted to the prospect for a systematic study of that kind of ecological determinant. The book Born To Rebel by Frank Sulloway is a close examination of the role of birth order; the differences are not genetic there but they have a powerful influence on personality. At Harvard, Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who heads the Harvard Institute for International Development, is getting strongly into the idea of working out more of a science of environmental determinants in the economic growth of different countries. So clearly, just as the ecologist and evolutionary biologist who studies the diversification of life forms has in mind and is developing the basic rules of evolution that create drive and create species and then must deal with the natural differences of each species for its own sake, its own history, in order to get some sense of how wide that variation can go, what the big directions are for it, so will the natural sciences and humanities deal with the non-genetic aspects in this interaction phenomenon that does drive and give direction to it.

Tom Lovejoy, moderator, attempting to clarify the question: There is the evolutionary genetic compound, and there are the environmental determinants, but then there is this other piece of it which is a little more free form and that's what the freedom of response is all about, and that's expressing our ability to deal with these things. Looking at the series of things that you're just presented with, which talents you draw in response to them represents the other piece -- and that's a little bit of a random choice, right?

Prof. Gross: What I heard initially was the proposal that reductionism means deterrence. That's not true. Sorry, but it's not. We can argue it out; it doesn't follow that the epistemological bag of tricks by which you insist on explaining things at a high level of complexity by rules that work at a lower level of complexity does not imply the term deterrence.

Questioner: But at one point are you saying that we pass over? Because I concede entirely that we know that about 50% of our behavior is genetic. But what does that mean for us? We're talking here in the Wilson Center as Americans who believe that liberty and choice and intelligent appraisal of circumstances are somehow involved in the kind of system that we have. You're talking about reductionism and determinism. But what else is there? Where does that begin? Where does that engage the kind of choice and freedom that we as a society think is the most inspiring aspect of who we are?

Tom Lovejoy, moderator: What I hear you suggesting is that if heritable components of behavior are 50% of total behavior, and the remaining half of total behavior is not heritable -- hence a consequence of acculturation in one form or another -- then there's nothing else. There's got to be something else. And my question is, what else? Why does that imply a limitation of choice? That is, the 50-50 division has no implications for free will, which is a wholly different question, which we could argue about, but so far as I can see it has no implications for the question of free will. And free will is what I think you're talking about.

Jay Tolson: I think what Bob is saying is that if 50 and 50 add up to an hundred, where is the realm of human freedom? If you're going to say genetics determine 50%, and 50% of other factors determine our fate, then where is the realm of human freedom, if any? Or is this a wholly chimerical term?

Prof. Gross: Now I begin to see the misunderstanding, and it's a very serious one -- at least a difference in understandings. If I say that 50% of our behavior is heritable, or appears to be heritable, hence a consequence of our history, and 50% of it seems to be attributable to events in our individual on-going lives (things that we saw and did), that's the environmental component. And that adds up to 100% of our behavior. I have not said that our behavior or my behavior is determined. I've said nothing of the sort; I've said nothing to reduce my choices. I've just said that my choices come from two large sets of inputs to my cognition. Now if you want somehow to get into this picture a statement about free will, ineffably derived from something outside of biology, you have every right to do that and I'm not going to argue with you about that, that's a whole different thing. But we're not talking about the ineffable. And it may be that the ineffable is a whole 100 additional percent.

Questioner: You have to understand that algorithms is not a word that most of us use in our daily lives. So should Congress be debating in terms of algorithms or is there some irreducible core of language that we have to talk about? We all know that there's heritability. Everybody in the history of the universe has known that if your parents are both blond it's very likely that you're going to end up blond; if you're parents are both stocky, you're likely to end up stocky; we really want to know that point at which the classically human thing takes off. It's something other than what we all were unable to do in Algebra II, if that's what algorithms are. You guys seem to understand that so explain it to us!

Prof. Wilson: I'd like to see if I could explicate this if I may, with defining a couple of terms and I hope I don't get too pedantic. Heritability is a percentage of variation among people due to genes: it's not a measure of what a single person receives, an influence that determines them. As you increase the environment, by culture for example, and open more and more options, as you expand these cultural options and people flow out through them, then the environment influence is expanding and heritability shrinks. Heritability is a measure that we take of a character, character by character, such as a particular ability in cognition or emotional response. Questioner: I already know that heritability and environment are two things. I still want to know if there is an individual person. Of course. Let me flip it over now if I might, and that is to introduce the expression 'normal reaction.' Normal reaction is when you take a set of genes (for example that compose us as individuals - and this is where we get the individual variation in, focusing on an individual), the normal reaction is: for ensemble genes for a particular character -- cognition, emotional response and so on -- what is the maximum variation that is possible in all survivable environments? In other words, what is the capacity of the expression of that trait for individuals who have a particular genetic constitution? For some traits, for all individuals it is extraordinarily limited: five fingers, zero normal reaction. For others, it is moderately restricted: the Westermarck effect. For other categories, the normal reactions for the genes we have is enormous, and for genius in music and creativity or just individuality of expression, it is in many walks of life enormous. So, humanity in this relationship between genes and culture constantly changes its environment, and that effect is nearly limitless. Limitless by shrinking heritability and by exposing to us the full normative reaction that we have before us which may be in the categories of creative thinking and art and work and individuality. Does that help?

Questioner:É[unintelligible]É.The title sentence on rationality really says it all. We all have certain views about how it can be resolved and it's not so much a matter of reasoning but what James called visceral Jack as opposed to cerebral Jack. What is appealing to us? What makes us feel that we've heard the truth? And of course that's determined by the brain, by the limbic system. What argument is the most appealing to us, what will set us arguing with someone else? What will finally convince us that it's not really a rational thing, not something that exists in a platonic way where you can just look at it, but something that is really determined by the brain, and, as Professor Wilson would say, basically genetic and neuroscientific?

Questioner: I'd like to suggest that philosophy has become totally irrelevant and the methods that our ancestors used to approach reality 2000,3000,4000 years ago are totally irrelevant to present day reality, and that this kind of approach where you sit down in a chair and work out what the world is about has nothing to do with the way that Ed [Wilson] and the rest of the scientific world would approach it. Reality is something you investigate, you subject to experimental verification and finally arrive at interesting testable conclusions. And sitting down and doing thought experiments has nothing to do with the world in which we live. It's just a medieval, or pre-medieval exercise in intellectual curiosity. The world is what we perceive it by experimentation and verification and hypothesis.

Jay Tolson: Since I'm the mischief maker behind all this tonight, I feel like I'm entitled to make one observation and I think this has been a very dramatic illustration of the point. I would hark back to the words of a man I greatly admire, Walker Percy, who was trained as a scientist, a thorough-going agnostic in his early years, who once said that "science can tell us everything that we need to know about the human being as species, but nothing about what it means to be an individual person living an individual life." I still think that's true. I would go a step farther and say, "science can tell us everything we need to know about human cultures as cultures, but it can't tell us the most important thing about any specific human culture." That's an interesting gap, and I think if nothing else, this evening illustrates the ongoing existence of that gap. But I don't think we can just be satisfied with the fact that there is that gap, because I think we have to be attentive to what the people across the gap, the scientists, are saying about what we can know about people and cultures, as people and as cultures, and what, similarly, I think scientists need to acquire, or regain, that initial modesty about the importance of what there is to know and respect about individuals, and individual cultures. Because there's something mysterious and free there that is irreducible. And I think if we begin to make that conversation, this stupid divide between science and humanities, the two cultures, begins to melt down. But if we don't, we continue the stupid divide indefinitely.

Tom Lovejoy, moderator: Actually that reminds me of an Einstein observation that a Beethoven symphony could be described mathematically as a variety of sound waves but it wouldn't tell you how it sounds.

Questioner: I'm a philosopher by training but I'll ask the question anyway. One of the things I've most admired about Professor Wilson's writing for years, apart from his anecdotes about ants which are always entertaining, is his great concern for the environment that comes through in almost all of his writings, and I suspect motivates his concern for consilience. And so I'd like to ask about the connection between the concern for the environment and consilience, because I'm confident that Professor Rorty shares a concern for the environment. I'm sure that if it's bad for the birds, Professor Rorty's against it. So I'd like to know why we should think that if consilience is more than just various people from different backgrounds and with different interests listening to each other, and the thought that philosophers might do better philosophy if they read novels and understood some science and scientists might do better science if they read novels and read some philosophy -- apart from that, might we get better solutions for our environmental problems if we bring together these different voices under one single discipline, or is that something to be feared? I'd like to know why Professor Wilson thinks (if he does) that that might be a whole lot better prospect for solving the great problems that confront us, and perhaps why Professor Rorty thinks that better prospects for solving our great problems lie in having many different voices independently asserting the truths as they understand them.

Prof. Wilson: One of the motivations I had for writing Consilience was to try to move the environment to the center of the intellectual stage. It has been marginalized consistently by public philosophers and political leaders and commentators, the gurus of think tanks, the op-ed writers, the close advisors of high government officials and so on, marginalized because they are trained in the social sciences and the humanities and have little training in the natural sciences. I saw that the most effective way to move it to center stage (it wasn't my only motivation but I saw it as one beneficial effect) was to move to help to develop a more naturalistic philosophy, to seize humanity as a biological species in a biological world in which we are born by evolution. It is our cradle and we are exquisitely well adapted to it and all the rest of life on earth. Call that a moral value if you will; I could justify it, I believe, at many levels, but that was my chief motivation and I do think that one of the consequences of this consilience program (to the extent that it succeeds) will be the development of an authentic environmental ethic that will move the entire issue of the environment to center stage in intellectual inquiry and daily commentary -- I would hope on the pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Prof. Rorty: It seems to me that there are a lot of people writing books to try to direct our attention towards environmental questions. To take a couple of other examples besides Prof. Wilson's book, there's a book by the German Sociologist Ulrich Bech, who is sort of the ideologist of the Green Party in Germany, arguing that our failure to attend to the environment is in part due to the fact that our political and legal institutions are set up to pin responsibility on particular agents, individuals, corporations, factions, and so on; that it's impossible to pin responsibility for the fate of the earth on any particular person; that the way we think about moral and political issues isn't appropriate for these particular issues. I'm not endorsing Beck's view entirely, but I think it's interesting that he writes a book with the same aim as Prof. Wilson's book which has nothing to do with biology; it has a great deal to do with sociology, economics, and law. There are other people writing on the environment who take their point of departure from the later Heidegger and the poetry of such writers as Robinson Jeffers. They bring Jeffers and Heidegger together into a sort of green perspective on man in the world, or man on earth. This has nothing to do either with Professor Wilson's consilience or with Beck's risk society. It seems to me that there's just no natural priority for any of these three books or these three enterprises. All of them help a little toward encouraging awareness of the overwhelming problem of the day, and I think it would be a mistake to ask, "yes, but which approach is the more fundamental, or which gets at the real problem, or which has the firmest intellectual basis?" Since it's a practical question of dealing with an urgent practical question, I think we shouldn't get lost in the question, "is it a question best approached through biology, through poetry, through philosophy, through sociology, or whatever?" The more people think about environmental questions the better; but there isn't a right way to think about environmental questions. My doubts about Professor Wilson's overall enterprise are doubts about the suggestion that there is a fundamental insight or a fundamental discipline which can work consilience top-down in the way in which Marx attempted, in the way in which the neo-Thomists attempted, in the way in which the logical positivists attempted, and survey culture and say, "here is what you need to know in order to put culture right." It seems to me consilience is okay when done bottom-up, that is, when a physicist or a chemist reads the other's work and says, "hey, here's something I can use." When there's a natural, organic, bottom-up growth of consilience everybody thinks it's wonderful, nobody has any objection. I think the suspicion only comes when the effort looks quasi-philosophical as when Marx says, "by finding the economic laws of history I've given us the science which unlocks the secrets of all the other sciences," or when the logical positivists said, "we have discovered how to attain objective truth and nobody else has quite understood this" thus producing 50 years of pointless physics envy in the other disciplines. I think enterprises which say, "here is the perspective from which you are to approach your problems" are always dubious, but enterprises which say, "here is the crucial problem of the day," as in the closing chapters of Professor Wilson's book, namely the environment, are always useful.

Prof. Gross: I will enter my demur. I think there is a fundamental issue that underlies the broader problem of environment, and that is: is there a problem? Environmental issues subdivide into particular environmental threats. That's the language in which we talk about them. It isn't the only possible language; with somebody here I had a little conversation about the notion of stewardship. That's almost a religious notion and that's a perfectly legitimate way to talk about the environmental problem. But is it fundamental? The fundamental problem is: is global warming imminent, or has it already happened? And if you're not sure, how good is the data that lead you to the position, to the opinion that you have? Is world population rising at a rate that it becomes a literal threat to some quantity called the carrying capacity for population? And if so, how soon will the situation become critical? I can make a list of five or six others, on almost all of which Ed Wilson has written, and on almost all of which I agree with his position. But those are the fundamental issues. And they are of a different order, of a different kind, than the social issues. I think the distinction is a distinction between brute facts and social facts. I'm stealing those terms from John Searle. The core questions of environment are brute fact questions: are things the way some people say they are, or are they not? And those are not easy to answer; they have to be answered by science and it seems to me that the policies you make and the feelings you have about environmental questions ought to be (they aren't necessarily) strongly conditioned by that base of brute fact.

Gary Marks: Your question implies that the nature of nature is given in the problem. Aren't there disagreements about how we ought to best measure a phenomena? I'm surprised at the strong confidence you have in measures. Aren't measures to some extent choices that people make? How best to measure population, how best to measure global warming --these are not mathematical equations, I would think.

Prof. Gross: I'm talking about mathematics. I'm talking about the quality of the global circulation models and the extent to which the global circulation models accurately predict a change in global temperature at a certain time. I think that they're getting pretty good now, but that's a very serious question, and really much depends on it.

Don Wolfensburger: I want to get back to an even more primary and core question that was raised earlier and give the final word to Dr. Wilson on this. In the article I read in the most recent addition of The Atlantic Monthly, you identify yourself religiously as a deist, someone who believes in the clockwork God that wound up the universe and put it off there to work according to certain laws of nature. Yet tonight I heard you sort of throw the clock out the window, and I was wondering if you were still there. Because I see our founders too as being deists -- Jefferson and Washington. They had this same idea of God as not being personally involved and yet putting the universe in motion, and at the same time I think they obviously went along with the idea of individual freedom from our core documents. The Bible and Genesis tells us the same thing: Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden and they were given free will, but the knowledge of good and evil. It seems to me your book gets down to these questions: does man and woman have imbedded in them a basic knowledge of good and evil? And is that tied to religious belief or does it not have to be?

Prof. Wilson: Thanks a lot. You know, I'm going to beg off on that one and short circuit my answer because I have dealt with that at length in my chapter on ethics and religion. What I did with great care was lay out the two fundamental views of the origin of moral reasoning and religious or transcendental belief versus empirical, materialist belief. Of course, I take the empiricist view - I think that's the one that accords with the brute facts as we understand them today. I beg the question, quite frankly, as to the origin of the universe because that's a problem in the astrophysics. But eventually it may stump us or lead us to a whole new perception of how the universe was cranked up and kick-started that will be of great importance to our understanding. Other than that, I took care through that chapter to say something I never hear from the other side -- I said repeatedly that I may be wrong.

Tom Lovejoy, moderator: I want to thank each and every one of our speakers this evening, and each and every one of our dinner guests. I think this has been an extraordinary evening and each and every one of you has contributed to it. I have the beginnings of a suspicion that our next evening may have to address the topic of quantum mysticism. Thank you all very much.