Biophilia

Edward O. Wilson, a biologist and entomologist, opens with a memory from March 12, 1961, when he stood in the Arawak village of Bernhardsdorp in Surinam, a small country on the northern coast of South America. The emotions stirred by that moment took him 20 years to understand. He defines the concept at the heart of the book: biophilia, the innate human tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. From infancy, he argues, human beings concentrate on other organisms and are drawn to novelty and diversity in the living world. Wilson draws an optimistic conclusion: Because modern biology aligns instinct with reason, the more humans understand other organisms, the greater value they will place on them and on themselves.

In "Bernhardsdorp," Wilson reconstructs his field excursion into the savanna woodland surrounding the village. He observes a captive collared peccary, an intelligent and socially complex animal reduced to a mute presence in a human clearing. His purpose is to study ants and other social insects, which comprise roughly one third of all animal biomass in the tropical forest. Wilson describes entering the naturalist's trance, a meditative state of heightened focus in which hidden organisms slowly materialize. He explains coevolution, the reciprocal genetic change among species interacting through many life cycles, and warns that removing even one tree species can trigger cascading extinctions. He describes tiny moths of the species Cryptoses cholcepi, which live exclusively in the fur of three-toed sloths, as one example of extreme specialization. He catalogs staggering diversity in the microscopic world within a handful of soil. He concludes that one could spend a lifetime exploring a single tree and that the naturalist's vision is a specialized expression of a biophilic instinct shared by all humanity.

In "The Superorganism," Wilson describes his 1983 trip to the Minimum Critical Size Project, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) study north of Manaus, Brazil. Conceived by Thomas Lovejoy, WWF's vice-president for science, the project tested how large a forest reserve must be to retain most of its species. Wilson explains that when a patch of forest is isolated by clearing, it becomes an island that inevitably loses species, with smaller populations more likely to disappear. He provides an extended account of the leafcutter ant: Thousands of workers stream in columns, cutting leaves and carrying fragments to underground nests. The ants navigate by sweeping their antennae through a cloud of trail-marking molecules so potent that one milligram could guide a column three times around the world. He details their division of labor: Large foragers cut leaves, while progressively smaller workers mold fragments into paste, plant fungal strands, and patrol the resulting gardens. The colony functions as a superorganism with no command center; its social plan is distributed across all workers, each performing tasks according to its size and age. Wilson argues that the true scientific frontier lies not along the retreating wall of the rain forest but in the bodies and lives of its organisms.

"The Time Machine" uses the metaphor of a magical motion-picture projector to present the hierarchical levels of biological organization. Wilson focuses on May 12, 1859, when Louis Agassiz, Harvard's most celebrated scientist and soon Darwin's most bitter American opponent, walked through Cambridge, Massachusetts, after the botanist Asa Gray first presented Darwinian theory in the Western Hemisphere. He distinguishes organismic time, biochemical time, ecological time, and evolutionary time. He introduces the historian Loren Graham's distinction between restrictionists, who believe science must eventually yield to other forms of explanation, and expansionists, who acknowledge no intrinsic limits. Darwin, the great expansionist, showed that even the most complicated organism can be self-assembled through natural selection. Wilson identifies two foundational ideas of modern biology: that all life descended from single-celled organisms through natural selection, and that organisms obey the laws of physics and chemistry. He closes by acknowledging the historic alienation between science and the humanities.

In "The Bird of Paradise," Wilson recounts a trek across the Huon Peninsula of New Guinea and describes the male Emperor of Germany bird of paradise, with its elaborate courtship display shaped by millions of generations of natural selection. He argues that science is not merely analytic but also synthetic: The analytic phase reduces behavior to genes and cells, but the synthetic phase reveals rich patterns at the levels of organism and society. He proposes that with each advance in biological synthesis, the humanities will expand, and with each redirection of the humanities, science will add dimensions to human biology.

"The Poetic Species" argues that science and art draw from the same cognitive wellsprings but diverge in aim: Scientists seek generalizing formulas, while artists invent special cases that reveal the knower. Wilson reconstructs his development of species-equilibrium theory, a model of island biodiversity as a dynamic balance between immigration and extinction rates, with Robert H. MacArthur, whom he describes as the most important ecologist of his generation. They tested the theory against data from Krakatoa, the Indonesian island sterilized by the 1883 volcanic explosion. Dutch surveys showed bird species recolonizing at approximately predicted rates, with a turnover rate five times lower than predicted but higher than most naturalists expected. The theory proved heuristic, generating studies across diverse ecosystems, and the WWF used variants in planning its Amazon reserves.

In "The Serpent," Wilson uses the human relationship with snakes to demonstrate how innate biophilic tendencies become cultural symbols. Humans, he argues, have an innate propensity to learn fear of snakes quickly past the age of five, and the images built from this predisposition have made the serpent a major element in cultures worldwide, from the Hopi water serpent Palulukon to the Aztec Quetzalcoatl to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He presents evidence from primate studies: Guenons and vervets, species of African monkeys, emit alarm calls specific to snakes; rhesus macaques raised without prior exposure display fear of snakes but not other objects; lemurs from snake-free Madagascar show no such response. Wilson argues that culture transforms the literal snake into the far more potent serpent through biases built into the brain by natural selection.

"The Right Place" proposes that human habitat preferences reflect an evolved predisposition toward savanna-like environments. Wilson identifies the tropical savanna of Africa, where the genus Homo lived for most of two million years, as the original human habitat. He argues that whenever given free choice, people gravitate toward open, tree-studded land on prominences overlooking water, and traces this preference across Roman gardens, Japanese gardens from the Heian period (ninth to twelfth centuries), and American frontier journals. He constructs a thought experiment: An artificial world of perfect visual design but containing no life would be psychologically devastating, because the human mind requires the living world to sustain its bearings.

In "The Conservation Ethic," Wilson argues that natural selection programmed people to think in physiological time, making it difficult to respond emotionally to ecological and evolutionary timescales. The worst event already underway, he contends, is not energy depletion or war but the loss of genetic and species diversity, a process that will take millions of years to correct. He critiques existing conservation arguments as surface ethics, including kinship with animals, phylogenetic continuity (genetic and evolutionary relatedness between humans and other species), and legal rights extended to nonhuman organisms. He recounts his encounter with Kanzi, a young pygmy chimpanzee to whom he responded almost as he would to a two-year-old child, and notes that the species is endangered. He presents the economic argument for conservation, cataloging promising species from the winged bean of New Guinea to the rosy periwinkle of the West Indies, whose alkaloids achieve high remission rates from certain cancers. He calls for moral reasoning grounded in biophilia itself and argues that the drive toward expansion and the need for stewardship are complementary goals.

In the closing chapter, "Surinam," Wilson returns to the country he has long held as a naturalist's dream refuge and a source of his formative beliefs. He notes that Bernhardsdorp has grown into a multiethnic town of about 500 people. He recounts the 1980 military coup by Dési Bouterse, a former physical-education instructor who overthrew the democratic government and in December 1982 ordered the execution of 15 leading citizens. Wilson places this tragedy in long-term perspective, citing the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius on the transience of power, and expresses hope that Surinam's interior wilderness will be kept intact. He predicts that as biological knowledge grows, a country's fauna and flora will be regarded as part of its national heritage, as important as its art, its language, and its history.