Edward Wilson finishes his book with a wonderful chapter that induces the reader to understand the fact that we are part of an environment, and we have reason, but that doesn't mean that everything will turn out to be alright.

We are not programmed to be perfect, we can make mistakes. And it's absolutely understandable that we make mistakes. There are things that work, others that won't. And the responsibility as conscious species is that we have to estimate and see if we're creating instead of constructing.

While reading this chapter, I have to admit I came to question certain facts about my economic perspectives. Until what extent are we free? Who speaks for the species that can't communicate? What is the borderline of our capacity to transform nature?

Thanks to Consilience, I can't stop thinking about how important it is for us to understand the fundamental rules of the world. It is incredibly valuable and beautiful.

We are parts of a species anyway. A part of history. With brains capable of reasoning and feeling.

Wilson ends with a wonderful phrase:
"... And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing."

In order to prove the theory of Consilience, we must understand that there is no such thing as other rules out of the regime of this universe. That is the difference between Transcendentalism and Empiricism. Transcendentalism asserts that there are inherent moral rules (whether coming from god or not), and Empiricism asserts that moral rules are a result of human behavior.

The independence of moral values from humanity asserts that there's some knowledge or mind outside ours. And that is why, if proven, Transcendentalism can disprove the theory of Consilience.

Though it is a difficult conversation that is still in the arms of philosophy, we can't discard the fact that our mind is the one that perceives knowledge and that is the only way we can understand moral values. Even, Michael Polanyi quotes:


“So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centers of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the appearance of the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world; and all that has gone before, the striving of myriad centers that have taken the risks of living and believing, seem to have all been pursuing, along rival lines, the aim now achieved by us up to this point. They are all akin to us, for all these centers - those which led up to our own existence and the far more numerous others which produced different lines of which many are extinct - may be seen engaged in the same endeavor towards ultimate liberation. We may envisage then a cosmic field which called forth all these centers by offering them a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress of their own towards an unthinkable consummation." That is why we believe in gods.

We try to explain things, but with that we use our mind, the circuits. Further understanding of the mind will certainly help a lot understand this magnificent aspect of philosophy and our own visualization as species.

Aye, I made that one up. I remember my mom wouldn't stop teasing me telling me that "curiosity killed the cat". Well mama, I ain't no cat!

Why do we have an epigenetic rule that let's us be free, innovate and create? That is a question that has really concerned me. We're somehow hardwired to have this space for freedom. It is amazing, though it has helped us to survive.

But still, our human nature have that emotional fact that searches for beauty and mystery. The dialogue went around this topic, and it went amazing. There was a lot of "awe" and smiles. I really enjoyed it.

But one of the things that I really liked was, that when we're in a critical moment, we start creating. For this I'll say, we're in crisis if we don't create. An individual crisis.

The name of the chapter caught me from the very beginning.
"Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science."
I can't help thinking in how imagination and wonderment is implicit in all scientific or artistic discovery. It isn't like we only have reason in one side to think of science or just emotion when we think on creating music. We're creative, by nature.

Some chapters before, Wilson claimed in how arts and documented work made culture evolve faster. In this chapter, he wrote "gene-culture coevolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated." and there is, culture documented through the years making our artistic works evolve more and more.

Also, the origins of our artistic brain is theorized as a mechanism that started off by putting meaning to things we didn't understand in our surroundings. We have an aesthetic instinct, and I would dare to say that it is also a search for human seal in things. We like to see our genes printed throughout nature. And also, we have idealized beauty characteristics that come from our instinctual search for fertility and powerful genes.

Between instinct and reason, there's tradition. AH, Hayek. I remembered him all throughout this chapter. I'll explain further.

The Social Sciences goes through how complex societies are, and how the researchers in this field haven't acquired a good amount of knowledge, because they separate biology and psychology from human behavior. This is an incredible misunderstanding of human nature. After all, we're part of all this complex system called universe.

But the fact is, that society isn't either a purely deterministic system or a full culture product. It is an interaction of epigenetic rules and an evolving culture. (See Hayek hidden here somewhere?)

And it is amazing, how natural sciences have grown to reach social matters. Biology or psychology for instance, have found characteristics applicable to the society. These are proofs of consilience.

Then, he gets to the prediction topic. For this, he says that math can be made in order to measure certain things in society. Is that something that can be done? I'm of the people that think that society is far too complex... but what if? Would it be helpful?

For this, I'll claim (with help from Wilson) that in order to understand the complexity of society, we have to also understand the environment and our mind. For that, we should claim consilience.

There are some imperatives in our human nature such as categories of choice or rational calculation. Wilson even quoted our friend Daniel Khaneman (Thinking fast and Slow) on how we make irrational choices according to our heuristics and how we tend to make certain decisions according to time and avoiding risk.

This song is wonderful, it is a set of mixes made by different conferences of TED. Definitely, ideas in a song this way made me feel extremely happy. This types of lyrics are amazing! I like them a little more abstract though, but the goal... that is what I really liked.

Besides this video, we took time to watch others that told us a little of economic theory:

And a little of history of Nikolas Tesla and Che Guevara. It is extremely funny that wrong idea we have of certain people, such as Thomas Edison and Guevara. These people just became famous for reasons that aren't really true or legitimate. People using Che Guevara shirts, pretending to be rebels. People crediting Edison in all of the textbooks not considering that he wasn't the actual inventor of so many things.

"What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find ready expression. It is the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture"

We have millions of years of evolution as human beings, and our epigenetic rules have also been changing with this evolution. It is amazing how that "open input" that we have in our rules so we can modify voluntarily, by learning new things.

Wilson introduces in this chapter also some behavioral genes that are really "primitive" in our nature: kin selection, parental investment, mating strategy, status, territorial expansion and defense. For this, please let me post a video of Life.... talking about primates. You will see the correlation:

Here we can see some political issues happening with our familiar gene-sharers: the other primates! Here, I also see a notion of private property going on. (But communal at the same time)...

But, also, there are some influential cultural facts in our interactions (in some other primates is also present actually). Curiously, we rely in a epigenetic rule "have no sexual interest in those whom you knew intimately during the earliest years of our life". Interesting, though, because it is not something that we think about. Though there are some symptoms such as the Electra, we grow and, unaware of this taboo, we don't feel attracted to those who were near us for the first 30 months of our lives, according to Wilson. How did this epigenetic rule evolve?

At the end of the chapter, Wilson suggests and explanation of what rational choice is: It "is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules. It is these rules and this hierarchy of their relative strengths by which human beings have successfully survived and reproduced for hundreds of millennia. The incest avoidance case may illustrate the manner in which the coevolution of genes and culture has woven not just a part but all of the rich fabric of  human social behavior."

I have to ask myself: What does happen then, we assented cultures which are self-destructive? What about taboos as homosexuality?

This chapter was special. I have to confess, that before I started reading Consilience I had this certainty that we would never get to the bottom of anything. We, humans won't ever be able to find truth. But, ah, I was mistaken. There are something we can figure out. But one of the most difficult things that can be given a scientific explanations relies on social networks. In complex societies.

Culture is not alienated from genetics. In fact, these two interact and they interact based in epigenetics. There's a lot of interesting things concerning to universal cultural characteristics such as clothing, food, etc. But other interesting thing is that we also tend to divide things like "good' or "bad", and certain actions are correlated with each division. But, I wonder, is there an ethical concern here?

Other thing that is extremely interesting in this chapter is the fact that children, without any knowledge of what is "in tune" or "out of tune", are able to recognize and like symmetrical combinations of music over others. But before that, newborns are able to distinguish noise and tone. These is absolutely interesting!

Today we spoke of a really beautiful topic: of Epigenes.

Before starting my insight, I want to mention that Bert decided to step away from the circle. I feel that made this dialogue something really interesting. We actually got to learn from each other.

"What is Human Nature?" Carmen asked.
"It  has something to do with epigenes" Marcela mentioned.
                        BUT WHAT IS AN EPIGENE?
Ah, and there the journey started.
The first paragraph mentioned by Kata:

"As recognized in biology, epigenetic rules comprise the full range of inherited regularities of development in anatomy, physiology, cognition and behavior. They are the algorithms of growth and differentiation that create a fully functioning organism."

Epigenes are not exclusive from culture, they're not exclusive from genes. They're the link that make these two interact.
"Etiology of culture its way tortuously from the genes through the brain and senses to learning and social behavior. What we inherit are neurobiological traits that cause us to see the world in a particular way and to learn certain behaviors in preference to other behaviors. The genetically inherited traits are not memes, not units of culture, but rather the propensity to invent and transmit certain kinds of these elements of memory in preference to others."

Ah, this is an amazing part of the topic. Actually, our mind is wired. I see this like a set of connections, and if you use one, it's somehow programmed and these systems have more propensity to be repeated. But yes. We  have space for freedom. And this part stroke my heart.

Epigenetic rules "... leave open the potential generation of an immense array of cultural variations and combinations."
Where do these rules come from? Are they part of this tendency of growth? Because these rules leave open a space for people to change and reprogram these rules. We're a species that can perfect themselves. Individually!

It was Majo's morning meeting, and I would say, it was pretty fun! We watched three of her favorite videos of VSauce. The first one was What Color Is A Mirror? and this one explained how the mirror is some kind of a smart kind of white.  It reflects all colors that are put in front of it. But they're a little bit green because they are imperfect.

Something really beautiful about these colors is that, one has to count the fact air when talking about colors, because our atmosphere lets us perceive certain kinds of colors because we of the traveling wavelengths.

Other videos we watched from the same channel. One that talked about how many times we type, and the other one about Dejavu. It is amazing how our brain reacts in certain unconscious forms (Consilience) and still, we are not aware of that happenings.