Abstract
David Sloan Wilson is a professor of biology at SUNY Binghamton and author of several popular books on evolution, including Darwin’s Cathedral (2002). The Neighborhood Project describes his effort to apply evolutionary reasoning to the challenges facing the formerly industrial city in upstate New York, Binghamton, where his campus is located. The project recruits SUNY students, community leaders, and neighborhoods to reduce large differences in quality of life in different parts of the city.
The book is a good read. There are interesting biographical sketches of important figures in the story, with an emphasis on paths that can lead to a career in science. Wilson is a strong advocate for the view that evolution is not just Mendelian selection by genotypes, but a process through which organisms adapt to the results of past developments and to the characteristics of their environment. As he develops this theme, there are clear explanations of biological experiments and investigations, bolstering his case that evolution is more than recombinant DNA and biological inevitability. There are also nicely told anecdotes from Wilson’s discovery of the city linked to somewhat chagrined recognition of the limits on his connection to a place where he has lived for decades.
He presents wasps as a parable of the impact of neighborhoods on life choices. Wasps are found in many different settings from solitary females to giant underground cities, homes of thousands of individuals. Wilson observes,
Once we have groups, then we must weigh the costs and benefits of cooperation at two scales. A cooperative group might survive and reproduce better . . . . Within a group, though, cooperators might fare less well than individuals who behave in ways that we would call selfish in human terms. (p. 67)
Within-group selection favors individuals who can make the best use of the environment to thrive. Between-group selection favors behaviors that fit into a “super organism” and thus contribute to the success of the group as a whole. Which will dominate in a given case, Wilson argues, is a matter of chance. Evolution doesn’t favor niceness (cooperation) over self-interest any more than it favors the reverse. “We are lucky to be alive at this moment of intellectual history. Can we use our new scientific understanding to improve the quality of human life in a practical sense?” (p. 79).
But, he observes, our unaided faculties for perception and reflection are limited to those that the evolution of the human species has given us. In order to perceive “the laws acting around us,” humans need tools such as electron microscopes and multivariate correlation—products, he says, of cultural evolution, operating over centuries. “Unless we use the tools of science to listen and reflect on the human condition, fuhgeddaboudit, as the Brooklynites like to say” (p. 140).
To illustrate, he describes the “Good Behavior Game”—“a program for creating a culture of cooperation in elementary-school classrooms.” He tells of its implementation in some (but not all) classrooms in Baltimore schools and of its success in changing the atmosphere in the rooms where it was tried. Behavior can be changed, quite strikingly, by a shift in the social setting. Not much of a surprise there. The surprise, though, is in the lasting effect. Students whose elementary schoolrooms included regular use of the Good Behavior Game were markedly more successful in high school, had better chances of graduating, and even when attending college demonstrated greater success and less at-risk behaviors than peers whose grade-school years did not include this intervention (pp. 220-224).
Wise management is an essential theme of this book. “Both our genes and our cultures,” he writes,
have served us well in the past—we’re here, after all—but there is no guarantee that they will serve us well in the future. Evolution has no foresight . . . It’s up to us to become wise managers of evolutionary processes, which requires understanding the complex interactions among our genes, our cultures, and our lives. (p. 304)
For an examination of how we might become wise managers, he turns to Governing the Commons, the 1990 book by 2009 Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom’s focus is on the question of why exploitation of available resources doesn’t always ruin a commons. (Free riding is rife, but not universal . . . why not?). Wilson quotes her eight rules—generalizations based on research around the world—that increase the chances that a group will be “able to manage its own affairs” (pp. 346-347). In Wilson’s view, these case studies describe practices by which communities in a wide variety of cultural and ecological settings have managed—or not—to preserve their commons for general use.
“Human cultural evolution,” Wilson writes,
is in part a raw process of variation and selection. Life consists of many inadvertent social experiments, and only a few endure. The rules that work are truly unknown to the people who follow them. They weren’t consciously invented but merely inherited, like genes. People also consciously invent their own rules, which can be regarded as guided mutations . . . At the end of the day, we need to try out multiple solutions, designing them as best we can, and select the ones that work based on a careful evaluation of the consequences. We need to manage the process of cultural evolution. (pp. 353-354)
For Wilson, Ostrom’s research offers case studies and examples of how that has happened.
The book ends with a description of Binghamton’s “Design Your Own Park” program. He discusses the way the city’s offer of financial support in return for neighborhood sweat equity acted as a catalyst to allow one neighborhood’s project to go forward in spite of many doubters and the endemic cynicism of a run-down part of town. He takes this success as a promising sign for the future of his “neighborhood project” as an ongoing effort. The book is a bit of a tease on this front, though, since there are no other anecdotes documenting efforts to realize the promise of applying the observational and analytical techniques of evolution studies to civic improvements.
Coming to the end of the book, the reader might feel that Wilson is a little too enthusiastic with his metaphors. For example, the phrase “the hammer blows of natural selection” appears in many passages where just “natural selection” would serve as well. Fuhgeddaboudit is repeated five or six times in the course of the book to flag lost causes. And it is a disappointment that the closest he comes to citing any of the extensive community development literature is the section devoted to paraphrasing Ostrom’s work. The absence of attention to the large body of work on these challenging questions by others is a serious omission from both the book and the planning for the neighborhood project itself.
Wilson is welcome, of course, to use the term “evolution” as he does to describe any “process of variation and selection.” But to fully develop his argument, Wilson needs to do more to demonstrate precisely how cultural evolution is subject to “the same laws acting around us” as the influences on the shape of finches’ beaks. The very premise of his book—that human cultural evolution can be managed by the application of human intelligence—depends on extending the concept of evolution to use it as a label for the ways we humans can, with intelligence and will, learn from our efforts to build healthy communities and improve our chances of success. At the end of the book it is, I think, still an open question whether using the term in that way provides much in the way of additional rigor to addressing the ongoing challenges faced by neighborhoods around the world. This is not to say that it’s a waste of time to pay close attention to the conditions that lead people to behave in certain ways in distinct cultural environments. Success for projects like the Good Behavior Game is not inevitable.
Wilson is assuredly right that there is no automatic gene-machine that controls our lives and reduces any attempt at improvement to wishful thinking. Attention to the choices people will make in response to variations in their surroundings is obviously a good strategy to employ. But putting the results into practice will, for better or worse, require some form of politics. Wilson’s style of evolutionary thinking can only carry us part of the way along that path.