E.O. Wilson: Science, Not Philosophy, Will Explain the Meaning of Existence
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Biologist E.O. Wilson, a two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, discusses his most recent book on the meaning of existence. "Philosophy," says Wilson, is "a highly endangered academic species." He argues that explaining the meaning of human existence falls instead to science, which is making significant progress.
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EDWARD O. WILSON:

Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist (Myrmecology, a branch of entomology), researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), and naturalist (conservationism). Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular humanist ideas concerned with religious and ethical matters.

A Harvard professor for four decades, he has written twenty books, won two Pulitzer prizes, and discovered hundreds of new species. Considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, Dr. Wilson is often called "the father of biodiversity," (a word that he coined). He is the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
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TRANSCRIPT:

E.O. Wilson: In my book I deal right away with the meaning of meaning because I knew I would be attacked like a disturbed nest of hornets by philosophers if I did not. And of course meaning has a number of meanings, but generally speaking after you've gone past the basic religious definition of meaning, which is of course: "The divine creator is responsible for the design and nature of humanity and what else do you want to know?" After you get past that particular response then the subject moves to meaning as history, that is essentially: What are we and why? Where do we come from?" And this is part of meaning too: "Where are we most likely to be headed?" And I like to suggest that in order to answer those questions we cannot do it with religion because every religion has, or every religious faith, rather, has a different creation story, a story of how the universe and the Earth and people came into being. And every faith has its own special accounts of supernatural events, and they differ one from the other. And they are in competition.

And in any case they cannot be boiled down to any kind of a coherent explanation because religious faith is very much a product of human culture. And we can't really figure out just what we are or what our meaning is by introspection. I'm reminded of the statement that Darwin made in one of his notebooks, which was that the mind, consciousness, cannot be taken by direct assault. We cannot imagine what we are inside by thinking about it alone. And it hadn't been really dented very well by philosophy. I like to say that most of philosophy, which is a declining and highly endangered academic species, incidentally, consists of failed models of how the brain works. So students going into philosophy have to learn what Descartes thought and then after a long while why that's wrong and what Schopenhauer might have thought and what Kant might of thought or did think. But they cannot go on from that position and historical examination of the nature of humanity to what it really is and how we might define it. So by default the explanation of meaning, of humanity, falls to science and we are making progress, if I might speak for science.

And it’s from five disciplines, and I'll take just a moment to tell you what they are and it will make sense as to why, not all of science is whole by any means, which is developing exponentially in the creation of knowledge faster and faster...

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