An Intelligently Designed Union

In June of 1860, less than a year after the publication of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species,” Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and biologist Thomas Huxley addressed the claims of the controversial book in a highly publicized debate. Wilberforce, speaking first, ended his oration by asking Huxley whether his apish ancestors were to be found on his mother’s or his father’s side. Huxley’s reply, now a cocktail party quotable for Darwinists the world over, was no less uncompromising: “I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.”

So the increasingly contentious debate has gone until today, with theology and science unrelentingly deadlocked. In November of last year, the latest round of God vs. science played out not in a lecture hall, but on the pages of TIME, where practicing Christian and prominent geneticist Francis Collins faced off against Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling “The God Delusion.” A host of competing theories have sprung up between the extremes of creationism and evolution, among them Theistic Evolution and Intelligent Design, but in the 150 years since Wilberforce met Huxley, the controversy has come no closer to even the most uneasy of resolutions.

All of this makes the reemergence of aging entomologist Edward O. Wilson a welcome development. Because for Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus in Entomology and author of “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” the apparently insurmountable opposition between scientific inquiry and religious thought evaporates in the face of a common concern: an environmental crisis that is already upon us.

Given the nature of his half-century of scholarly and popular writings, Wilson’s latest “appeal” should come as no surprise. If any one quality might be said to unite his corpus of work, it is his unceasing wonder—boyishly eager, religiously fervent—at the natural world. Now, Wilson has turned his gaze toward the preservation of the life he has spent the entirety of his own studying.

In his inspiring new book, Wilson, a self-professed “secular humanist” who unequivocally acknowledges the “seismic divide” between Christian doctrines and natural biology, seeks to enlist the support of science’s most unlikely ally: the Wilberforces of the modern world.

Composed as a series of letters to a Southern Baptist pastor, Wilson’s work paints a dismal picture of the dramatic and widespread deterioration of the Earth’s various ecosystems.

Wilson includes a compelling array of facts, but the true significance of these facts—and, indeed, the true worth of his book—lies in his anecdotal digressions. He recounts, with infectious enthusiasm, his decades-long investigation of the tropical fire ant, a pursuit that took him from the depths of Spanish colonial history to the expansive uplands of the modern Dominican Republic. Wilson island hops in the South Pacific, ferries out from the Florida Keys toward the Gulf of Mexico, and celebrates the remarkable recovery of the Mauritian kestrel.

There is a subtle method to Wilson’s reminisces; his musings on the mandibles of the Thaumatomyrmex (Greek, he explains, for “wonderful ant”) are not without purpose. Only when the wonder of each species and ecosystem is understood, Wilson suggests, will humans cease to dominate and instead begin “to serve them as their stewards.”

And so it is that from Wilson’s meditations on the marvels of his own career that a moral philosophy of nature, one compatible with Christian ethics, emerges. “Nature is a heaven on Earth,” Wilson writes. “Here, Pastor, we surely agree.”

Wilson touches on the economic cost of the matter only briefly, and the political not at all, but that, in a sense, is the point. For Wilson, what matters is our moral obligation to the natural world, an obligation borne of an unceasing appreciation for its beauty, complexity, and diversity.

Together, Wilson argues, science and religion, the two most influential forces on Earth today, “can save the Creation.” In the book’s final chapters, he focuses on the importance of cultivating “savage” children appreciative of the natural world; he cites the efficacy of so-called “bioblitzes,” and advocates a new way of teaching and learning biology.

Even Vice President Cheney, however, has dismissively acknowledged that while “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue,” it is inadequate as the centerpiece of a comprehensive energy policy. Wilson eloquently frames the dilemma of modern environmentalism in moral terms, but he fails to provide any practical proposals that might rescue his account, fluent and heart-wrenching as it is, from the realm of implausible idealism.

But short of viable policy proposals, Wilson has produced a broad-minded, argumentatively sound call that bridges the age-old divide between science and religion. And if such a union is the next step in the environmental struggle, then let them ally. Because if they don’t, the difference between two apes and a primordial Eden won’t make any difference at all.

—Reviewer Samuel J. Bjork can be reached at sbjork@fas.harvard.edu.