E. O. Wilson

At Edward O. Wilson's speech he stated two questions that he is trying to answer. The first is Where do we come from? and the second is What are we? He said that we are now or getting very close to acquiring enough information to answer these bold questions through support of what we confidently know about the real world.
A solution to these questions he said was drawing on our consciousness. He said that our consciousness deals with memory and how it piles on stories that happened, didn't or future stories. Our minds then pick and choose from these to make up our consciousness. He said that in order for progress in answering the questions above we have to make ethics, which uses our conscious to answer moral questions, work with science. He tied it all together by saying we have to use science to understand matter and ethics to understand history of human theology and moral solutions. "Until we understand our surroundings we can not begin to answer the problems of how to live in that surrounding."
Wilson's ideals pertain to what we are learning in class especially when it comes to Ibsens' "Enemy of the People."
Ibsen seemed to deal with people as scientific matter to answer the two hard questions. He tied his study of human beings together with the ethics of past moral questions. It was Wilson's answer to why human beings refuse to believe in evolution that really sparked a connection to "Enemy of the People." He stated that because humans are tribal and they believe in individual level selection leads to act to their own benefit. He said that "humans can not survive without allegiance to a group." This lead me to think about Dr. Stockman's view of groups at the end and his final words -- "that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."
I am not comparing Wilson with the Stockman character because Wilson understood human nature for what it is and didn't compare the public that didn't believe in evolution to vermin. But Wilson's idea to except evolution you have to leave behind stable society does relate to "Enemy of the people."