E.O. Wilson sees psychology 'at the crossroads'

Renowned Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson told a packed audience of psychologists at APA's 1999 Annual Convention in Boston that they have a leadership role to play in coordinating all the branches of science to help solve society's most difficult problems, such as poverty, violence and environmental destruction.

In his keynote address for the APA Science Directorate's Focus on Science programming, Wilson challenged psychology to embrace his vision of science without disciplinary boundaries--a world where the branches of science are unified by a single overarching theory.

Indeed, he argued, psychology is already at the crossroads of the biological sciences, the behavioral sciences and the humanities. And by integrating the knowledge of these fields, he said, researchers will eventually find the key to understanding human nature.

Wilson, considered one of the great scientific thinkers of our time, has long argued for unifying the sciences to form a single model to explain all aspects of the world from physics to human nature. His critics view his ideas as too reductionist, arguing that complex human behaviors cannot be explained fully by basic rules of biology and physics. And though Wilson admitted that he may be wrong, he challenged skeptics to prove it.

At his talk, he argued that the life sciences, such as biology, are inherently connected to the humanities and social sciences, and that the "borderland" disciplines of cognitive psychology, genetics and evolutionary psychology could unify our knowledge of human nature.

The crux of his argument hinged on evidence for what he calls "epigenetic rules"--inherited regularities of mental development that, he says, are the basis of human nature.

"These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we open to ourselves and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make," he said.

Our genes lead us to acquire fears and phobias of environmental dangers such as heights and snakes, to bond with infants and to evaluate the aesthetics of artistic design according to elementary abstract shapes, said Wilson.

For example, studies that monitor brain activity as people look at abstract designs find that the brain is most aroused by patterns that have a 20 percent redundancy of elements. Roughly, this is the amount of complexity found in a simple maze or an asymmetric cross, said Wilson. And it's the same level of complexity found throughout the world in a great deal of the art in friezes, grillwork, logographs and flag designs. In addition, it is present in the glyphs of ancient Egyptian languages and the pictographs of modern Asian languages.

How much of these types of aesthetics are innate is unclear, admitted Wilson. "Genetic evolution and cultural evolution have proceeded in a closely interwoven manner," he said. "And we are only beginning to obtain a glimmer of the nature of this process."

However, the result, obtained through research in the "borderland disciplines" that intimately involve psychology, will help unite the branches of learning, he added.

"I'm very aware that the conception of a biological foundation of complex social and cultural structures runs against the grain for a lot of scholars," said Wilson. But "at long last we appear to have acquired the means either to establish the truth of the fundamental unity of knowledge, or to discard the idea. I think we're going to establish it."

--B. Azar



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