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9486 in the collection
Ed Deformers Model Anti-Seniority Positions on Ant Behavior
Norm Scott offers a timely message from Anthill.
by Education Notes Online
Edward O. Wilson, an antologist (as opposed to an uncologist - yes, I can make up my own words and be as corny as I like) has written his first novel called "Anthill" which was reviewed in the Sunday Times book review section last week. Wilson is a major biologist and naturalist who has studied ants and other social insects and made comparisons to human society.
I was struck by this comment in the review:
His language achieves poetic transcendence when describing “the decency of ants,” whose disabled members “leave and trouble no more.” When the nest must be defended, its eldest residents — with the least long-term utility remaining to them — become the most suicidally aggressive, “obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: Where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies.”
Ear to the Ground
By Barbara Kingsolver
New York Times
April 9, 2010
ANTHILL
By E. O. Wilson
378 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95
Scientists hardly ever write novels. Fabricating imaginary people is not the domain of the scientific method, to put it mildly. Constructing a plot, lacing it with clues to lead the reader to a well-prepared conclusion, is heretical business for those trained to unprejudiced observation. But any who take the leap may use their worldliness to good advantage, smuggling gems of empirical knowledge across the literary border to create fiction with unusually rewarding heft. Consider the meticulous puzzle-solving of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a trained surgeon) or the flights of physics in Alan Lightman’s Einstein's Dreams.
Next, think of Edward O. Wilson, one of the most important biological theorists since Darwin. Author of some two dozen books, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, expert on social insects, discoverer of new species, passionate advocate of biodiversity, he is best known for his groundbreaking work on the evolution of social behavior. He had a considerable cache of scholarship to tuck into his pockets before slipping across the genre line to write his first novel, Anthill.
Wilson, who turns 81 this year, has written what he knows: a southern Alabama boy comes of age in the thrall of ants, nature and solitude, determined to save what he loves from destruction. His protagonist, Raff Cody, inhabits working-class Clayville and all its mysteries, which extend beyond the complex codes of social ambition on his mother’s side and his father's simpler rules of manhood into the wild edges of Nokobee County. There he prowls the pine woodlands, catching spiders and frogs for close scrutiny.
The story's nominal narrator is a biology professor who mentors the boy at Florida State University but has known him from childhood. Professor Norville frames the account in frank, objective prose: Raff's family history is phylogeny; his settings are habitats; his parents’ marital conflicts appear preordained by different biological interests. When new characters appear, their clothing and features are described as if to make them identifiable in a field guide to the humans. Behavior is noted likewise. As a boy turning over logs in the woods, Raff absorbs rules of life for later use. (Principle No. 1: "Don’t antagonize your opponent unnecessarily.")As a young man assessing a potential girlfriend, he proceeds "in the usual, genetically programmed sequence. . . . JoLane had a keen, intelligent face and two of the traits scientifically considered beautiful, small chin and wide-spaced eyes, but not the third, high cheekbones."
The twinkle in this tale lies in its irony, as the reader absorbs the premise that we are the equal of ants. When 10-year-old Raff is dragged by his mother to visit the family matriarch, Aunt Jessica, she is the perfect Queen Ant. Sitting torpid in her chamber, she disseminates faint odors and crucial information about the family while her mysteriously unpaid lifelong servant scurries about bringing soda crackers. The great-aunt’s sagas stupefy Raff -- "He was neither the genealogist nor the mathematician required for such a celebration of the deceased multitude” -- but he follows wide-eyed as the worker-ant Sissy forays outside the house muttering, "Look there, look there," grasping a hen from the chicken yard, dispatching her prey with the succinct announcement: "Dinner." If ants wrote a stage play for human characters, it would look like this.
In a fascinating turn, Wilson does the opposite in the book's middle section, titled "The Anthill Chronicles." Presented as Raff's undergraduate thesis, it carries the reader down the ant-hole to describe life from the ants’'point of view. No writer could do this better, and Wilson's passion serves him best here. His language achieves poetic transcendence when describing “the decency of ants,” whose disabled members "leave and trouble no more." When the nest must be defended, its eldest residents -- with the least long-term utility remaining to them -- become the most suicidally aggressive, "obedient to a simple truth that separates our two species: Where humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies."
During his studies Raff discovers an ant supercolony, in which a mutation has removed the ants' capacity to recognize the subtle, important cues that create limits within and between nests. Colonies thus impaired grow boundless in size, extracting resources until their habitats collapse. The lesson is not lost on Raff. When real estate developers plan to acquire his beloved Nokobee Tract, one of the last unspoiled stands of old-growth pine savanna, he is moved from his reverie to consider what is possible against long odds.
Anthill presents Raff as a mid-20th-century Huck Finn, complete with a stolen river skiff and 600-pound alligator in the opening scene, but this hero has less mischief in him, and earns more advanced degrees. Raff is dutiful, uncomplicated and extremely well organized for a young male Homo sapiens. He is an Eagle Scout. After college he puts himself through Harvard Law for the apparent purpose of negotiating one crucial contract down the line. In his logical single-mindedness he sometimes sounds like an Alabama-born Mr. Spock. But the denizens of his home turf, when he returns to it, are as real as a Gulf hurricane: rumpled newspapermen, target-shooting lawyers and murderous renegade Bible thumpers. Even the 600-pound alligator will rise again. By story's end the reader surely will want to believe in Raff and his mission, egged on by the hypothesis that human developments, like mutant supercolonies, doom themselves with the iron credo "Grow or die."
The comparison is not unexpected from an author who has spent four distinguished decades studying social behavior and its adaptive value. But it is bold. However logical it may be to assume that the forces of nature create human nature, Wilson's previous forays into the subject have stirred up swarms of controversy. Like most innovative thinkers, Wilson has been "whipsawed . . . with alternating praise and condemnation," to use his own words in describing the response to his landmark synthesis Sociobiology (1975) and its follow-up, On Human Nature (1978). His work reset the ground rules for evolutionary biologists and comparative psychologists, but some people were enraged by the suggestion that human behavior is driven by the same forces that govern all of life -- for example, that males are genetically rewarded for sowing wild oats, while a female's best reproductive bet is to secure a faithful partner to help rear her acutely needy young. Sociobiology, as a unifying theory of behavior, is profoundly more nuanced than any simple construct about men and women. But sound bites have consistently oversimplified it and raised the ire of a public ever eager to mistake an observer's statement of "This is" for a moralist's "This is what should be."
Fiction is a safer place for drawing on nature to illuminate the human condition, for it is generally understood as metaphor rather than recommendation. Melville gave us whales and obsession, Orwell gave us pigs and politicians. Now Wilson suggests with winning conviction that in our own colonies, we proceed at our peril when we cast off mindful restraint in favor of unchecked growth. It's hard to resist the notion that as we bustle around with our heads bent to the day's next task, we are like nothing so much as a bunch of ants.
Barbara Kingsolver was trained as a biologist. She is the author of 13 books of nonfiction and fiction, including her most recent novel, "The Lacuna."
Books of The Times
Life Lessons, Taught by Insects
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
New York Times
April 9, 2010
ANTHILL
By E. O. Wilson
Illustrated. 378 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Anthill is E. O. Wilson's 25th book. It is also the slightest of them, perhaps because it's his first novel. Mr. Wilson begins with an epigraph from Webster's Third New International Dictionary, a definition of "anthill" that suggests a parallel between ant and human societies -- a potent analogy, you'd think, for a great entomologist and the founder of sociobiology.
But let me offer a more useful epigraph. It comes from Mr. Wilson's Naturalist, his 1994 foray into autobiography. "I instinctively respect authority," Mr. Wilson writes, "and believe emotionally if not intellectually that it should be perturbed only for conspicuous cause. At my core I am a social conservative, a loyalist. I cherish traditional institutions, the more venerable and ritual-laden the better." So might an ant have written.
Anthill is the tale of young Raphael Semmes Cody -- Raff, as everyone calls him. As a child he discovers in the wildlands of Nokobee -- a privately owned tract of longleaf pine savanna -- a refuge from his parents' troubled marriage. To Raff, Nokobee has a clarity that is lacking in the society that surrounds him, for Raff is the scion of two Southern worlds. On his mother's side there are the deep proprieties -- and the social and financial expectations -- of the Semmes family, minor aristocracy on the Gulf Coast of southern Alabama. On his father's side there is a code of honor clouded with cigarette smoke and befuddled with drink. When Raff's father, Ainsley, gives voice to his code, it seems to rise, as Mr. Wilson writes elsewhere, "through the limbic system to pre-empt the thinking brain."
Poor Raff. Not only does he have to find his way into manhood -- troubling enough anywhere and at all times -- but he also has to save Nokobee in the bargain. He knows Nokobee better than any adult except Frederick Norville, his mentor, a family friend, professor of ecology at Florida State University and sometime first-person narrator of Anthill. Will it surprise you to learn that Raff succeeds in the end? It shouldn't. You can tell from the taste of Mr. Wilson's prose in the very first paragraph that Raff will save Nokobee. And that's one of the troubles with Anthill. It's a house of cards, stacked entirely in Raff's favor.
Suffice it to say that Raff goes to Florida State, gives up entomology for Harvard Law and becomes in-house counsel at the very corporation that wants to develop Nokobee. This trajectory gives Mr. Wilson, who is, of course, a Harvard emeritus professor of entomology as well as a Gulf Coast native, a chance to dilate on the anthill qualities of the university and to arrange the kind of encounters that a reasonable young Southern environmentalist is likely to encounter as he respects authority and perturbs it as little as possible while saving the creek and the lake and the longleaf pine savanna and all the creatures therein, all the while upsetting only a few unreasonable, end-times Christians who believe that the sooner the earth is wasted, the sooner their savior will return.
There is a prescriptive flavor to this tale, a sense that this is ideally how conservation should be done, never mind the shocking demise of a few benighted, if genuinely threatening Christians.
The book comes to life only during the section called "The Anthill Chronicles," a tale of existence within three different ant colonies in a clearing on the edge of Lake Nokobee. Everything in Mr. Wilson’s entomological career has prepared him to write this section of the book: 73 pages that are passed off, improbably, as Raff's brilliant senior thesis, without the measurements and tables and with prose smoothed out by his thesis advisers.
"The Anthill Chronicles" really deserves to stand on its own, without the human narrative that surrounds it. It is a generalized account of how ant colonies grow and perpetuate themselves, or fail to do so. Though written in miniature -- from within the colony -- it never presumes to speak from the ant's perspective because that is inconceivable. As Mr. Wilson reminds us, "the human mind cannot imagine the tumult of chemical stimuli by which such a traveling ant guides every moment in her life, and thus survives."
For all the beauty of "The Anthill Chronicles," it sets up an open-ended correlation between ant and human societies (a parallel urged upon us by Mr. Wilson in his prologue) that spins out of control. "The ant societies" -- this is now Professor Norville speaking -- "proved different in most fundamental ways from those of humans -- of course -- yet also convergent to them in other, also important ways." Mr. Wilson -- a k a Raff -- is careful, of course, to avoid anthropomorphism as he writes about the ant colonies at Lake Nokobee. But there is no stinting a veiled, almost structural anthropomorphism here.
Every ant colony is a superorganism, the subject of one of Mr. Wilson's most important books. But one of the Nokobee colonies mutates, thanks to "one gene in the hereditary code of the ants," into what the novel calls Supercolony, a rapacious, devouring ant-empire that, unlike most colonies, tolerates the coexistence of many queens.
At its apex the Supercolony "had mastered the environment, subdued its rivals and enemies, increased its space, drawn down new sources of energy, and raised the production of ant flesh to record levels." Its death is not natural, not a matter of exhausting its resources. The Supercolony is sprayed out of existence by humans, who look to the ants like "tree-trunk gods." What has changed in ant history is that now "the entirety of all of it, ant, colony, and ecosystem was at stake."
Uh huh. Got it. Ant Supercolony equals human Supercolony. But what's being suggested here? That the human Supercolony is the result of a chance genetic mutation? That we should be gassed?
The moral of "The Anthill Chronicles" is that life moves in cycles, and nature will right itself. Balance will be restored. But what keeps the world of Nokobee in balance in Anthill is an in-house lawyer, a small-scale environmental holocaust and -- I won't go into it -- a shotgun in the hands of a possible lunatic. This is perturbation indeed. It makes me eager for Mr. Wilson's next work of nonfiction, in which he will be more careful, as he has nearly always been, to shepherd his implications.
Education Notes Online
2010-04-15
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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