On the Meaning of Human Existence

Instead of an ordinary use of “meaning”, one about intent and design, Wilson applies a broader definition of “meaning”, which is the idea that the random walk of accidents in human’s revolutionary history alters the future events. Humanity’s existence is the adaption to other potential events that led us to our current existence. These possibilities of alternative events consist our “meaning”. He argues that humanity arose on its own as humans “are not predestined to reach any goal”, nor are they “answerable to any power but their own”. To explain the advanced social behavior of human beings and other animal species, he introduces “eusociality”, a condition in which members of a group “cooperatively rear their young across multiple generations.” He goes on to argue that eusociality is a result of both individual and group selection, and a key to the meaning of human existence is a biological species’ adaption to live in a biological world.

Building on that, he specifically discusses human’s inner conflict with an evolution based approach. To answer the question on whether human beings are intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good, he suggests that as a result of multilevel selection, we are both because individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue. However, inclusive fitness has been shown to apply to only extreme situations, and thus the driving force of social evolution is the creation of groups.

Wilson draws a division between science and humanities. He points out that science has a property unlike humanities, the continuum that allows us to explore the tiniest perception, but its advances will slow once it reaches a certain size and complexity. Humanities on the other hand, our cultures, languages, religious beliefs and social practices are what “real aliens” will be interested in, and they remain important in the long run.

Wilson points out that compared to most of the species, whose interactions among others of their species depend on pheromones, for interaction among others of their species, humans experience only a small part of the world through senses because we are primarily audiovisual. We evolved into a species whose heads are farther from the ground, and from the other species who live there than most others.

He then goes on to discuss one example of other forms of existence, the “super-organisms” like ants and termites. Within one super-organism, each individual plays a role in a larger organism without being aware of that role. Wilson believes that humans shouldn’t live the way super-organisms exist and he believes that it’s not a stable way of existence since the current collapse of honeybees around the world indicates the vulnerability of such complex, fragile, organisms.

When it comes to E.T., Wilson gives a detailed description of characteristics of a hypothetical intelligent species of extra-terrestrials. He concludes that such a species would be – like humans – land-dwellers, relatively large and biologically audiovisual. The species would have a big, distinct head, located up front; light to moderate jaws and teeth; very high social intelligence; a small number of appendages and segments and one pair that has sensitive tips for touch and grasping. The species would also be moral.

However, he believes that aliens could never successfully invade Earth, nor can humans successfully settle an alien planet because “the two living worlds, ours and theirs, are radically different in origin, molecular machinery, and the endless pathways of evolution that produced the life-forms then brought together by colonization. The ecosystems and species of the alien world would be wholly incompatible with our own.” I think such statement slightly contradicts his view on science because I would assume that the forms of every potentially existing ecosystem are included in science, as science is defined. In this way, humans can (at least hypothetically have the potential to) discover and study a radically different ecosystem and how it operates. To settle an alien planet occupied by silicon-based lifeforms, humans would only need to spend enough time to expand their scientific knowledge on silicon.

By giving the example of the habitats in which children all around the world prefer to live and stating that as humans move into cities these preferences have not changed, Wilson concludes that human nature is “the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person.”

Wilson’s key insight into religion is that it is not something external to human experience, but instead, “the brain was made for religion and religion for the brain” for evolutionary purposes. Concretely, “Throughout prehistory and most of history, people needed religion to explain the occurrence of most phenomena around them.” Abstractly, with religion, “all the followers are unified into a vastly extended family, a metaphorical band of brothers and sisters, reliable, obedient to one supreme law, and guaranteed immortality as the benefit of membership.” Wilson believes that at its core, religion is tribalism, a creation story that teaches people that God favors them and that other religions worship the wrong gods and follow the wrong rituals. In this way, religious tribalism is the motivating force behind most conflicts around the world and science shouldn’t avoid religious issues.

With all the previous chapters, Wilson has argued that humans are one species among millions, with no demonstrable destiny or purpose. He goes on to summarize in the final chapter that such fact means free will exists in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species. However, he thinks that “genetic adaptations that worked very well for millions of years of hunter-gathered existence but are increasingly a hindrance in a globally urban and technoscientific society.” He believes that these obsolete genetic adaptations, including religion, are comparable to a tolerable parasite to humans and “if the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.”

As an atheist myself, I find Wilson’s approach to decode the meaning of human existence convincing and informative. Like an all seeing eye, he has also indicated what humans as a whole species should do to further explore and expand our meaning of existence – to incorporate the heuristic and analytic power of science into the introspective creativity of the humanities. But what about every human as an individual? From an all seeing eye perspective, there is truth in certain approaches humans can take to expand our meaning of existence, but at the same time, the planet is cooling, the sun is exploding, the universe is cooling. The further back I pull like Wilson does, the more such truth will endure. But when I zoom in a historical period, zoom into a family and zoom into a human brain and a childhood story and a religious experience, I see all the things that are meaningful to that specific person. Every human individual has a fleeting chance to participate in an illusion called “I love my son” or “I feel warm in my religious family”, what difference does it make if this illusion is manipulated by some obsolete genetic adaptation or an actual parasite? If I were to summarize the meaning of human existence, my answer would be it’s the fact that for every individual, every illusion she has experienced and every emotion triggered is the center of the universe.