E. O. Wilson and poet laureate on altruism and mystery

Amy Maxmen, contributor

(Image: Left: Christian Science Monitor/Getty, right: Cindy Ord/Getty)

When two leading scholars get together to swap stories, you might expect the conversation to meander to unexpected places. This was certainly the case last week at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where evolutionary biologist E.?O. Wilson and former US poet laureate Robert Hass had a freewheeling discourse that became lost in the mysteries of nature.

Though the pair ended up in very different ends of academia, both men spent their childhoods wandering in nature - Hass in northern California and Wilson in the Alabama countryside. Now, after successful careers, they both seek to inspire a similar sense of wonder for the natural world in the next generation.

Not shying away from conflict, Hass launched the discussion with a mention of Wilson?s latest academic shake-up. In 2010, the biologist announced that he no longer endorsed the kin selection theory he had developed for decades. According to that theory, altruism arises when the "giver" has a genetic stake in the game. For instance, an individual helps his sister raise children because the two share some genes. But after a mathematical assessment of the natural world, Wilson and his colleagues at Harvard University decided that altruism evolved for the good of the community rather than for the good of individual genes. As Wilson put it, cooperating groups dominate groups who do not cooperate.

Hass argued that, if this theory is true, it suggests that the origin of altruism accompanies the origin of war. "This is why we are constantly conflicted!? Wilson agreed. ?We?re constantly looking for a balance between selfishness and the good of the group.?

?It?s the dance between free will and moral life,? Hass said.

Into the wild

A shared viewpoint - and a recurring theme throughout the discussion - was the importance of the conservation movement. ?People find hope by saying that nature is over, to the extent that nothing is left untouched by humankind,? Hass lamented. ?The thing I hear now is that nature is a garden and we should give up on the idea of wilderness.?

Wilson nodded in aggravated agreement. The 83-year-old rejected the idea that wild nature is gone, noting that he had recently returned from a trip to the jungle. Yet inasmuch as humans do impact the wilderness, he said, we should do so for its protection. ?I have a few years left, and I am spending them on national parks,? he said. ?I think we need a revival of the Rooseveltian spirit.?

Poetry of the unknown

In the course of the discussion, which also ranged to human nature and how best to educate children about the natural world, the pair also wound their way to perhaps a more obvious topic, given their disparate realms of expertise - the role of art in exploring science and nature. Hass made a compelling case that art and music give us unique ways to explore things we cannot know through science and to examine tensions in nature, such as that between selfishness and altruism. Emphasising an idea he has flirted with for years, he said that science cannot answer what it cannot know, but the humanities flourish in zones that remain open to interpretation. ?Science progresses,? he said, ?but the humanities have remained in the mystery since the beginning.?

After the discussion had wrapped up, Hass delved a bit more into the ways in which the natural world has influenced his poetry. I asked him about?On the Coast near Sausalito, a poem he wrote at 21 years old, about a boy who catches a prehistoric-looking fish in a sea "the color of sour milk". One stanza ends with the line ?here filthy life begins? (read the full poem below). When I inquired why he had imparted such darkness to a poem about a boy gone fishing, he said the poem arose from the tension between vitality and death. The tide was the shade of decomposition, and by calling life filthy, he meant that the boy was grappling with the twisted notion that life arises from killing.

Paraphrasing American writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell, he added, ?The origin of art is in the shock of the food chain.?

On the Coast near Sausalito

1.
I won?t say much for the sea,
except that it was, almost,
the color of sour milk.
The sin on that clear
unmenacing sky was low,
angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,
hills dark green with manzanita.

Low tide: slimed rocks
mottled brown and thick with kelp
merged with the gray stone
of the breakwater, sliding off
to antediluvian depths.
The old story: here filthy life begins.

2.
Fish-
ing, as Melville said,
?to purge the spleen,?
to put to task my clumsy hands
my hands that bruise by
not touching
pluck the legs from a prawn,
peel the shell off,
and curl the body twice about a hook.

3.
The cabezone is not highly regarded
by fishermen, except Italians
who have the grace
to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh
in olive oil with a sprig
of fresh rosemary.

The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,
as old as the coastal shelf
it feeds upon
has fins of duck?s-web thickness,
resembles a prehistoric toad,
and is delicately sweet.

Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise
and the line?s tension
are a recognition.

4.
But it?s strange to kill
for the sudden feel of life.
The danger is
to moralize
that strangeness.
Holding the spiny monster in my hands
his bulging purple eyes
were eyes and the sun was
almost tangent to the planet
on our uneasy coast.
Creature and creatures,
we stared down centuries.

This poem appears in Field Guide ? 1973 by Robert Hass
Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.

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