A 'Consilience' of Science and Poetry at PBK Exercises

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

A group of "borderland disciplines" are bringing about a major shift in our understanding of human nature by weaving connections between the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, said E.O. Wilson in a talk Tuesday morning at the Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises held in Sanders Theatre.

Wilson, the Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus, the world's foremost authority on ants, and the author of several influential and provocative books about biological discoveries and their human implications, delivered a talk titled "The Coherence of Knowledge," which summarized arguments contained in his latest book Consilience (Knopf, 1998).

The Phi Beta Kappa Exercises also featured the reading of a poem by Jusef Komunyakaa, a professor of creative writing at Princeton and the winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book Neon Vernacular.

Harvard's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, founded in 1781, is the oldest uninterrupted chapter of the organization in the nation. The Radcliffe chapter was founded in 1914, and the two were merged in 1995.

The invocation and benediction at Tuesday's exercises were given by Rabbi Sally Finestone of the Harvard-Radcliffe United Ministry.

The Phi Beta Kappa Exercises have taken place in Sanders Theatre since 1876. The ceremony also featured the presentation of the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Awards, which were instituted in 1981.

Wilson drew laughs with his opening remarks, assuring his audience that he would not be drawing political or moral lessons from the animal kingdom. As an entomologist who has spent much of his life on his hands and knees studying ants, Wilson has been asked many times what humans can learn from these "highly organized and super-efficient" insects, and his answer has always been an emphatic "not a thing!"

As models of social behavior, ants have the further disadvantage of being extremely warlike, staging savage battles between colonies that anyone can observe on the sidewalks and lawns of the Harvard campus. "If ants were given nuclear weapons," Wilson observed, "the world would end within a week."

Turning to the more serious subject of his talk, Wilson observed that until now, seemingly unbridgeable gaps have always existed between the natural sciences and the social sciences and between the social sciences and the humanities. So persistent have these discontinuities been that some observers have found the ways of thinking within these disciplines and even the nature of truth to be fundamentally different.

Wilson disagreed with this assessment, stating that "the line between the great branches of learning is not a permanent epistemological break. . . . It is instead a broad domain of largely unexplored phenomena awaiting cooperative exploration from both sides."

In Wilson's view, the sciences that are accomplishing this cooperative exploration include such disciplines as cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, environmental science, cognitive psychology, and biological anthropology. These "borderland disciplines," Wilson said, "offer the prospect of characterizing human nature with greater objectivity and precision. . . ."

Wilson said that he would take the bold and perhaps reckless step of defining human nature as "the epigenetic rules, the inherited regularities of mental development. These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make."

As a concrete example of such an epigenetic rule, Wilson mentioned the incest taboo or Westermarck effect, which can be found in all cultures. He predicted that many other behavioral universals would be found, eventually allowing science to arrive at a precise understanding of human nature that will transcend disciplines. Wilson's name for this new synthesis is "consilience."

In contrast to Wilson's look into the future, Komunyakaa, in his poem, "Lament & Praise Song," offered an elegiac meditation on the past. The poem's subject is Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), an African woman believed to have been born in Senegal and sold as a slave to John Wheatley, a Boston merchant.

Encouraged by her owners, Wheatley learned to read and write in both English and Latin and published poetry while still a teenager. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773, making her the first published African-American woman poet.

Komunyakaa, who is himself African American, describes his first reading of Wheatley as a personal encounter, charged with adolescent excitement over perceived similarities:

We were teenagers

when I fell for her

portrait of composure

crosshatched like tribal marks

on an oval frontispiece

The poem shifts between evocations of Wheatley during her visit to Cambridge, England, following the publication of her book, and her later life of obscurity (she was freed in 1773 and died in poverty).

The poem asserts that "We are blessed with her/on the streets of Cambridge,/in her heroic couplets,/rescued by our imagination" and ends with an image of her shaking the hand of George Washington on her return to America.

Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Awards

Teachers in four different areas received the 1998 Phi Beta Kappa awards for Excellence in Teaching.

Glenn Adelson, lecturer in environmental science and public policy and a preceptor in expository writing, Nataliya Chirkov, teaching assistant in Slavic languages and literatures, Kamal Khuri-Makdisi, assistant professor of mathematics, and Rebecca Krug, assistant professor of English and American literature and language received this year's prizes.

Candidates for the Prize in Excellence in Teaching are nominated by undergraduate members of Phi Beta Kappa, and were chosen by a committee of Phi Beta Kappa marshals, officers, and former prize winners.

Adelson won acclaim for his Junior Seminar, "Conservation Biology and Diversity," which he teaches with a previous winner, Dan Perlman. "He guides his students to self-discovery with hands-on learning both in the classroom and in the field," one of his nominators wrote. "Since taking his Expository Writing class," stated another, "I have had 30 other teachers in courses large and small, and none surpassed him."

Chirkov, a former theater director in Russia, has in each of the past four years organized and directed a Russian language play that has helped bring together the Slavic Department community. Her enthusiasm was a primary force in sparking the interest that brought in the three Slavic concentrators from the Class of '98. Her students, when traveling in Russia, are consistently told that they don't have American accents.

Khuri-Makdisi teaches both freshman and graduate mathematics courses, and has consistently achieved top scores in the CUE Guide (Committee on Undergraduate Education) ratings. "Not only are his lectures flawlessly planned but also his problem sets," one nominator wrote, while another noted Khuri-Makdisi's legendary accessibility and the many interactions outside the classes themselves.

Krug teaches a course called The Seven Deadly Sins, which has won high praise from students. One senior wrote, "Not only is she the best professor I have had at Harvard, but she is the best teacher I have had in 16 years of schooling." And another commented, "She has been an amazing teacher since her first class here, Magic in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. In a class of over 35 people she managed to know everyone by name and was able to get even the most reticent students to participate."