Brief Notes on Biophilia, by E.O. Wilson
We can only understand our pleasure and meaning in human life by understanding it in relation to the richness of our evolutionary heritage and our place in the superorganism of ecological diversity. This must be the source of our conservation ethic -- our life will be poorer with a less rich superorganism. Science will disclose that we have an innate biophilia, love of life in all its richness, and to ignore that biophilia would be a crime against human nature.
The book begins with a description of a few natural processes, that all fit together to explain how interconnected humans are with their environment, how all animals have developed to fit into the web of life. Organisms exist and coexist on multiple levels, so we look at the superorganism of symbiotes, and the superorganism on larger and smaller levels of time and scale.
We have developed certain preferences, that we understand as meaning and emotion and myth, but that are encoded into our genes, like our fascination with the serpent. These are what art plays on, why timeless art is attractive to people of all times.
Art heightens our sense of the world through the use of metaphor. Theoretical science also relies on metaphor to make sense of systems more complicated than our minds can fully comprehend. The elegant theory explains huge amounts of data with a simple formula that is possible to grasp. Both of these rely on the moment of insight, the clarity into a system. The further pushing into the frontiers of knowledge does not remove the meaning from our lives, but deepens our understanding and thus the meaning as well. Because art plays on natural preferences in the mind, working with them intuitively, and science is beginning to discover the reasons for those natural preferences, the two disciplines are converging. Art will still serve to heighten sensations with particularities, though, and science to deepen understanding in abstract, generalized theory, but we will understand both to a much greater extent.
The book begins with a description of a few natural processes, that all fit together to explain how interconnected humans are with their environment, how all animals have developed to fit into the web of life. Organisms exist and coexist on multiple levels, so we look at the superorganism of symbiotes, and the superorganism on larger and smaller levels of time and scale.
We have developed certain preferences, that we understand as meaning and emotion and myth, but that are encoded into our genes, like our fascination with the serpent. These are what art plays on, why timeless art is attractive to people of all times.
Art heightens our sense of the world through the use of metaphor. Theoretical science also relies on metaphor to make sense of systems more complicated than our minds can fully comprehend. The elegant theory explains huge amounts of data with a simple formula that is possible to grasp. Both of these rely on the moment of insight, the clarity into a system. The further pushing into the frontiers of knowledge does not remove the meaning from our lives, but deepens our understanding and thus the meaning as well. Because art plays on natural preferences in the mind, working with them intuitively, and science is beginning to discover the reasons for those natural preferences, the two disciplines are converging. Art will still serve to heighten sensations with particularities, though, and science to deepen understanding in abstract, generalized theory, but we will understand both to a much greater extent.