Review by New York Times Review
THE ACT of reading alters your brain. It does so, first, because your thoughts are brain processes. When you read, neural patterns come and go as the words pass before you. Some of those patterns also give rise to memories, subtle molecular changes in cells and the signaling mechanisms that link them. And third, your brain is physically transformed by learning to read. The networks that underlie vision and language are changed. Even people who become literate in adulthood, as a team led by the French neurobiologist Stanislas Dehaene has shown, acquire differences that are visible in a brain scan. With and without literacy, the brain is the same basic organ, with the same shape and chemistry, but a reading brain is different in ways that count. As Cecilia Heyes says in her forthcoming book, "Cognitive Gadgets," if one didn't know that reading is a recent human invention (literate culture is perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 years old), a skill passed on through learning in each generation, it would be easy to mistake the brain patterns seen in reading as evidence for a genetically encoded reading instinct or "innate module." Reading is an apt skill to celebrate in a book review, a piece of writing about a piece of writing. E. O. Wilson's new book, "The Origins of Creativity," is about the role of the humanities in an intellectual culture increasingly dominated by science. Wilson values the humanities, but he wants them to have closer ties to some of the sciences, an argument that draws on his view of the relationships between human biology, thought and culture. "It is becoming increasingly clear," he says at one point, "that natural selection has programmed every bit of human biology - every toe, hair and nipple, every molecular configuration in every cell, every neuron circuit in the brain, and within all that, every trait that makes us human." But reading itself, the reading of books like his own, shows that this isn't true. The circuits of the brain are changed by literacy, and the molecular configurations in countless cells are being altered as you pick up new ideas from the page, as they make their way into your memory. If what Wilson says were true, there would be no point in reading, in trying to learn songs or engage in many other activities. We'd have little resemblance to humans at all. I have much admiration for the work Wilson has done in biology, not for the theoretical side but for the crawling in and climbing around side - his unearthing of new species, his charting of the quirks of their lives and attempting to get into the worlds of countless small fierce invertebrates. 1 also admire much of the path his life has taken, some of which is sketched here. His parents divorced during the Depression and his youth was spent roaming the South, attending 14 different schools. But he made it to college and then on to graduate work and a career at Harvard, ft's impossible to begrudge such a person a few literary victory laps. Yet Wilson is so widely read and admired that when he makes a public statement about the relationship between science and the humanities, it has to be taken on its own terms and assessed for what it says. And "The Origins of Creativity" is an extremely shallow book. Wilson wants the humanities to make more contact with science. By the "humanities" he means the fields that study languages, literature, history, art and so on. What Wilson would like is for these fields to become more scientifically literate and attend especially to developments in paleontology, anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and neurobiology - what he calls the "friendly ground of science," where the humanities can seek alliances. Such connections are always welcome, but is there a problem with the humanities that makes these meetings urgent? Wilson thinks there is indeed a "shortcoming" within the present-day humanities. The problem is their extreme "anthropocentrism." Initially it's hard not to read this as a joke - the humanities are anthropocentric? But it's not intended as one. Part of what Wilson wants is for human creative capacities to be put in a broader context that includes our prehistory and the biology of our nonhuman ancestors. He offers some sketches of his own of this kind, cataloging great films, for example, by identifying six archetypal figures and themes within them that have plausible resonance with prehistoric human experience: the hero, the antihero, the monster, the quest, the pair bond, other worlds. (The films include two Indiana Jones installments, no Fellinis). The plea for a broadened scope is also linked to Wilson's view of the relations between the content of humanistic and scientific work. Scientific observation and experiment, for Wilson, cover everything in the actual world. Scientific theory goes farther and considers all "possible real" worlds. The role of the humanities is to offer an even "further reach," covering merely "conceivable" and "fantasy" worlds. While some artistic endeavors can range in this way, this is not in any sense the point of the project. "The humanities" is a broad category; it includes not just the overtly literary and artistic work that Wilson focuses on but everything from John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" to studies of how Alexander the Great copied Persian royal costumes when organizing his court. And even within the more overtly literary and artistic category, much of the point of the work is entirely different from any sort of quest for breadth or reach. Much of the concern of the humanities is not to be general but to be particular, to look very closely at individual human lives and forms of human life, to turn them over and pause over them, over the singular experiences of individuals at certain times and places - much like, in fact, the brief better moments in Wilson's book, when he or another naturalist (like the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, whom he initially knew "only as a lepidopterist") walks through some particular landscape and marvels over some unprecedented ant or unrepeatable butterfly. ? PETER GODFREY-SMITH is the author of "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 21, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
An emeritus Harvard biologist, environmental champion, and prolific, Pulitzer-winning writer, Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence, 2014) continues his investigation into human nature and our domination of the biosphere. Combining entertaining tales from the field with philosophical and aesthetic musings and biological elucidations, he analyzes creativity, the unique and defining trait of our species, in terms of genetic and cultural evolution. From our ancestors' campfire stories to gardens, music, metaphors, novels, history, literary criticism, and archetypes in movies, he defines the arts and humanities as the foundation of moral and political reasoning and social values, arguing for a more dynamic nexus between science and the creative realm. Wilson believes artists and scholars need to be more curious about the living natural world, the nature of consciousness, why we're hardwired to be social, and the deep biological lineage of the safety net of civilization, which comprises such qualities as generosity, courage, leadership, and justice. Art and the humanities, Wilson contends, must keep pace with science and technology if we are to come together for the common good and preserve life on Earth.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wilson (Half-Earth) makes a case for blending an understanding of the sciences into the humanities in his latest work, raising provocative questions in the process. He ponders what sets humans apart from other hominids and what societal factors may be suppressing the humanities as a field of study, but despite his title's promise he only provides brief glimpses of answers to his central question. As Wilson is one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, it is not surprising that he focuses so much on the evolutionary history of our species. "Because the creative arts entail a universal, genetic trait, the answer to the question [of what it means to be human] lies in evolutionary biology," he posits. He argues that the humanities have failed to make enough progress on this front and have lost public support because "they remain largely unaware and uncaring about the evolutionary events of prehistory that created the human mind, which after all created the history on which the humanities focus." He integrates examples largely from literature and the visual arts to analogize cultural innovation to genetic mutation. Wilson concludes by calling for a "third enlightenment" in which the humanities and the sciences draw more heavily on one another but, even as he professes otherwise, he appears to place far more weight on the latter. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Wilson (emeritus, Honorary Curator in Entomology, Harvard Univ.; The Ants; The Social Conquest of Earth) returns to the task he previously wrote of in Consilience: uniting science and the humanities to look at the how and why of existence. Although he posits science and the humanities as complementary products of the human mind, he situates the former as the bedrock out of which springs the latter, with its broader reach going beyond physical reality into the imagination. Wilson is strongest when explaining creativity and symbolic reasoning as evolutionary adaptations that allowed the genus Homo to thrive in multiple ecologies. He describes the coevolution of genes and culture, highlighting intriguing genetic vestiges of our common heritage on the African savanna in language, aesthetics, and other endeavors. Another recent publication in this vein is Augustín Fuentes's The Creative Spark. Less convincingly argued, perhaps, is Wilson's contention that the humanities must extend the limits of human perception (e.g., the visible spectrum, the range of audible sounds) to achieve their full potential. -VERDICT A rallying cry for uniting scientific and humanistic inquiry to answer big questions, this book will resonate with science enthusiasts who appreciate that a life worth living means embracing more than the material world. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]-Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson (Emeritus, Evolutionary Biology/Harvard Univ.; Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life, 2016, etc.) offers a philosophical examination into "the mystery of why there are universal creative arts."The author's answer exemplifies an alliance between science and the humanities that he champions throughout the book. Such a blending, he maintains, could "reinvigorate philosophy and begin a new, more endurable Enlightenment." Wilson identifies five fields of research where this blending can be especially fertile: paleontology, anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and neurobiology. These fields may allow "the full meaning of the humanities" to emerge by helping the humanities overcome their shortcomings: "they are rootless in their explanations of causation and they exist within a bubble of sensory experience." The big five fields are united by a "common thread" of belief in the crucial importance of natural selection. "Nothing in science and the humanities makes sense except in the light of evolution," Wilson quotes a geneticist, including the existence of creativity. The author sees language as "the greatest evolutionary advance," setting Homo sapiens apart from other species: "Without the invention of language we would have remained animals. Without metaphors we would still be savages." Early Homo sapiens had a larger brain than their ancestors, providing "larger memory, leading to the construction of internal storytelling" and "true language," which in turn gave rise to "our unprecedented creativity and culture." That rapid transformation "was driven by a unique mode of evolution, called gene-culture coevolution," in which cultural innovation and genes favoring intelligence and cooperation occurred "in reciprocity." Wilson's writing is at its most luminous when describing the "chitinous armor" and glistening bodies of ants"one of the most beautiful animals in the world"to which he has devoted much of his career. His more abstract analysis, though sometimes repetitious, is nevertheless salient. A concise, thoughtful exploration of how human understanding will be enhanced by "a humanistic science and a scientific humanities." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
