ving a conference of a society where i'm the president called the american policy add viewly council where -- advisory council where we're going to talk about security in central europe and also how we can help rescue ukraine from falling into the clutches of russia the old soviet union. >> coming up next pulitzer prize-winning biologist edward o. allson talks about what makes -- wilson talks about what makes us human. he spoke about the topic, the subject of his latest book, at the free lieu prayer of philadelphia. this is just under an hour. [inaudible conversations] >> hi.

before we begin this evening, i have just a few quick notes. firstly, if you haven't already done so, please make sure that your cell phones are on silent. please note that there'll be no flash photography tonight, and after the event there's a book signing upstairs in the lobby. due to time constraints, dr. wilson is happy to sign your book, but he won't be able to do any personalization. we just wanted to let you know. welcome to the free library of philadelphia. my name is michelle sheffer, i'm a writer and editor here for the library, and it is my great pleasure to introduce tonight one of the world's most esteemed biologists and a very good friend of the library dr. e.o. wilson. he's received the pulitzer prize twice for his engaging nonfiction that explores the intersection of biology sociology and the humanities. dr. wilson's research explores the world of ants and other tiny creatures, illuminating how all living things great and small are interdependent. as such, he remains an

impassioned advocate for biodiversity fighting the preserve the wondrous variety of the natural world. his new book bridges science and philosophy to create a 21st century treatise on human existence. dr. wilson's slim new book is valedictory work, according to the new york times. he stands above the crowd of biology writers the way john -- [inaudible] stands above spy writers. he's wise, learned wicked vivid, miraculous. dr. wilson will be interview ised tonight by dr. ian sheffer from temple university hospital. he earned his m.d. from temple university and a master's in bioethics from the university of pennsylvania. he's also my husband, which is perhaps the greatest accolade of them all. [laughter] ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming e.o. wilson back to the free library. [applause]

>> good evening. it's good to finally meet you in person dr. wilson and as i'm sure michelle said, welcome back to philadelphia. so i wanted to start off in just sort of getting to know you this evening as we were having dinner, i wanted to give our audience a chance to do that as well, and one of the things i wanted to ask, you know, as michelle was going through your many accomplishments, you're a very talented man, and you clearly could have been, done extremely well in any field you would have chosen. what made you choose biology? >> well a biographical question, thank you for making it easy. [laughter] >> we have to let dessert settle. >> well, and not starting by

saying what do you mean "existence" t? [laughter] the easy question was i grew up in the deep south where i had access to comfortable outdoor life almost every day and in the course of which -- and i was allowed to, i wasn't allowed my parents didn't know about it -- [laughter] to go anywhere i wanted to go, in the backwoods, swamps and the river banks and so on of alabama. and northern florida. and in the course of which i just came to love natural history. and i decided that very early i would be an entomologist. i decided that when i was 9 years old and i took a homemade butterfly net. we were living in washington for a brief period of time and i went out on quotation,

expeditions. [laughter] i'd been reading about them in the national geographic and gone to see frank buck movies, and i thought that's really what i'd really like to do the rest of my life and be an insect collector, a tropical explorer. and i realized that was extremely -- that's a little boy's dream, and to this day i am i haven't changed. i'm about as immature as i was then. [laughter] >> which i guess gets to my next question, a follow-up question what about this field makes you so passionate about it to have been going at it, you know at such an in-depth level for so many, many years? >> let me put it this way, there are perhaps 60,000 species of creatures that most people call wildlife. they're mostly vertebrates, the

fishes the amphibian reptiles, the mammals. and the birds. and when people talk about seeing nature, they usually mean they go out and they see the flora, and then they see and they look for usually the wildlife the bigger, well known animals. but there may be only 60 or so thousand in the whole world of these, there are overall ought million species -- eight million species of organisms out there by estimate. right now we've discovered and we have a scientific name for almost exactly two million species. but, and the rest somewhere in the city of 6-8 million are still undiscovered by science. and these include what i like to call the little things that run the earth, the insects the other invertebrates that swarm

through all the habitats of the world x they really run the middle levels of the ecosystems of the world in the sea as well as on the land. so i became aware of that fact early on. and because i focused on that, i only have one functional eye, and i can't hear very well in the upper registers. and what i did was -- but i have sharp vision in this eye, so i took insects as my main subject of interest early on as a boy and soon discovered that i had a whole world almost to myself to explore and discover. and that continued when i got to college. i was working on organisms that nobody else was paying any attention to, and i was making wonderful discoveries easily

from year to year, and i still use that personal experience to recommend to young scientists that they pick a group of organisms or a kind of phenomenon in these little known organisms to study. and they will have much great or or -- greater chance of real success and discovery and scientific endeavor as a result than they would by taking a more traditional path. and that has held me transfixed ever since. and i still go on expedition cans. [laughter] >> fantastic. well i did promise we can't be all biographical this evening so i do want to talk about your book which is fascinating and a wonderful read. one of things that you talk about in your book and that certainly i've come up against in the practice of medicine is

that humanity's modern lifestyle has outpaced or somehow come to be at odds we've pollution. you -- with evolution. our sedentary lifestyle and that sort of thing. but i'm curious with your focus being on the social aspects of humanity if you think that the rapid advance of information and communication technology and social media and that sort of thing has created maybe a similar disconnect between how we socialize and how we live our lives now with the social mechanisms that we acquired through evolution. and what implications do you think that has for how we might interact going forward in the new modern age? >> the -- [inaudible] you might call it has resulted in something far more important and dangerous than stomach aches and early heart attack,s and that

is the fact we're still basically pail owe listic in our minds and the way our brains are constructed and our instinctive patterns. i would call our species dysfunctional because, one, we have paleolithic emotions. i don't think they've changed since the early homo sapiens of 200,000 years ago. we have medieval institutions that we still depend on, and we have god-like power. now, that is a very dangerous and unstable combination. [laughter] and that's what where we are now as a species. >> fair enough. [laughter] >> he didn't say expatientuate please. [laughter]

>> one of the other areas i wanted to touch on, you talk a fair bit about religion, and you've talked about it in your past work. your book would leave one with the impression that you're not terribly fond of religion as a force of meaning for humanity and so i'm wondering if, you know you don't think that religion necessarily gives us that sense of meaning and that we might have outgrown sort of the cohesion and the tribal aspects of religion that made it so evolutionarily add van teenage juice. do you think -- add van teenage us. >> actually the main argument that i make i think it's very natural for human beings to to wonder about that just beyond our reach and this whole

perception of eternity and space and time, and i believe that human beings universally share a strong tendency to share what might be called religion in the theological sense. the yearnings of feelings about the possible existence of god of a supreme designer and maker of the world and the universe. we care about that a lot and it's something important for the development of the human psyche m and we care a lot about whether there's a world beyond. i mean, that comes in constantly. that we will be going to some other existence after death. very natural, it's universal. and that binds people together actually, that kind of searching

in the theological sense. what does not bind us together are the organized religions what we call faith. and what is faith? faith is the belief of a group usually tightly organized by unquestioning belief in it, of a creation story. and accounts of supernatural events. and each faith has -- and there are hundreds of them around the world and beyond that many more in the hues ily of -- history of humanity -- each faith has its own creation story, and it has its own stories of paranormal, actually or supernatural events that occurred. and it's how it identified itself as a faith. but that's not what really binds

it together. what binds it together is the most powerful instinct possibly of the social existence of human beings, and that's to form groups and to belong to groups, to identify your personal self and your future with that group and to submit in a way in the religious realm to the details of the creation myth and the paranormal. can that define cans -- and that defines you. it gives you meaning. and that's what has, i think, begin its enduring power. and it's especially so in the united states where people are, tend to join faith according to accident or according to their liking or propensity. but beyond that what is being expressed is tribalism. the need to belong to a group

and identify yourself with it and depend upon it for all of your needs, your psychological needs, your, the expression of your strongest propensity to cooperate and belong. the problem is that different faiths compete and no matter how gentle -- this is the argument developed. i'm not declaring this as some kind of dogma by any means but the argument goes that no matter how gentle, no matter how charitable no matter how tolerant members of particular faith are they adhere to it, they submit to it, and thaw think of it -- they think of it and their group as superior to that of all other faiths.

they have to otherwise they would move from faith to faith. and which social psychologists have shown how this powerful insight manifests itself from early childhood on and that when groups are formed experimentally just for the purpose of testing it and those who participate know that it's just an experiment, they quickly when they form up groups or have the groups formed, they quickly -- and they compete in some games or whatever -- they quickly come to believe the other group is rather alien and, you know not quite up to their level and that they their group is superior. this is highly adaptive in a darwinian sense, to believe in a group and to place your future your life life and your probability of having offspring within the circuit of the tribe

and religion, say religious faith that is interpreted as a form of tribalism. and i would put it in a very strong manner by saying that faith has -- faiths plural have hijacked religion. >> so with that in mind, just sort of the strong tribalism component of religion one of other themes that you mention in your book is this competition between individual and group selection where traits of an individual like extreme competition might make them thrive within a group, but overall a group of extremely competitive folks, you know, might do worse. and i got the sense that that struggle between altruism and competition one of the things at the center of our existence as humans. and it seems to me that most of the effort or in trying to reckon that, or sort of our moral

discussion has been centered in religion, in the study of religion, conducted in religious language. with religion so steeped in tribalism and things that are maybe outmoded, do you think that it can still serve as the place to discuss those moral issues that are pressing, or do you think we need to move past that and have a new forum that's not as, that's not as strongly steeped in the tribal competition? >> well, i think the major goal of philosophy maybe religion as well, in the future is self-understanding. and you just touched on an area where science and human the cities -- humanities could actually come together in a very meaningful way. that's very much on the minds of a lot of scholars, is i how we can bring science and the humanities together.

and what do we mean by self-understanding? and that's why i use the word "meaning." meaning in this case is to the, to understand the meaning is to go past history which began really about the origin about the time of the origin of literacy. to go past it and on into pre-history into the lives and the activities and the development of intelligence and emotion of the species that gave rise to the modern human species. and then to go beyond that into the actual evolutionary processes which are biological that drove the origin of human, the human species. and the way i like to put that

is to say history means nothing without pre-history, without understanding where our species came from in the near time of the last two million years. and pre-history means nothing without biology. we have to, in order to understand the human species to understand ourselves, is to know something about those three great periods in the origin of humanity. and when you start looking into that then, you raise the question of where altruism comes from, where does the religious impulse come from, why are we this particular way and not some other way in our instinctive in our brain architecture and our instinctive behavior? and i run risking going a little afield here -- >> no problems with that. >> okay. [laughter] but one of the things i've done

in studies of social behavior and all kinds of organizisms is to -- organisms is to search for known cases of social behavior in all kinds of organisms particularly animals. and especially terrestrial animals that have developed highly advanced societies. not societies that are organized by intelligence. humans have that ability reasoning and intelligent planning. but those organized by a division of labor. there are individuals that reproduce more and thereby contribute personally more to another group who are able to reproduce and that this is part of a cooperative structure a society that allows caste

formation, division of labor and a highly effective operating unit, the group. this capacity we call it eu social has to the best i can find and others looking for it has occurred in just 20 lines of evolving species in all the history of life, 20 times. conspicuously this the social insects, for example. conspicuously in human beings. and then the other thing that emerged is quite peculiar. in every one of those lines division of labor -- and thus the beginning of highly organized societies -- was proceeded by a particular adaptation the line went

through, one or two species went through, and that is a female or a female and a male build the nest which they protect. they lay the eggs the female or male go out and forage for food and bring it in and raise the young to maturity. that's a rather rare condition that you find instinct-driven in the animal kingdom. it rose 20 times. and it's very rare. and most of those have changed to mass to that level and -- pass to that level and pass over the threshold and now in which the young stay with the parents. and now you have a eu-social society. they generally are extremely successful. the dominant creatures of earth among big animals are humans. and the.com i can't knee -- dominant creatures of the earth among the small creatures are

the social insects; ants, termites bees wasps. so that explains part of it. but then what's going on? i mean, how does it happen that groups can form like that and actually divide labor and be cooperative and be altruistic? because that's the key questions when we start asking the meaning of humanity what made us like that? and the answer -- and here i've just emerged from a controversy but i have on my side some mathematicians of very considerable ability and a growing group of younger scholars. it is not as it used to be thought that kin come together. kin helping kin makes it possible for -- to be altruistic providing they have some degree of kinship with you and that that's the starting point for

advanced society. that's new to dogma, the dogma for almost 50 years. now we've overthrown that by showing that's mathematically impossible. you can't organize and evolve a system like that. and no demonstration of it has ever been made with any kind of a measurement. the correct answer is -- [laughter] >> oh dear. [laughter] >> -- is what we call, forgive the technicality of this and yet this is the sort of thing that ought to be argued about and talked about in high school -- is multilevel selection. that is to say you have groups, they're formed. within the groups individuals are competing. that doesn't mean, you know they're all having wrestling matches, it's just that some, with some genetic combination you're more likely to survive to adulthood, you're likely to have healthy children who survive.

that's darwinian. and the individuals are competing within a group. between groups, on the other hand you're having whole ensembles of individuals competing with other whole ensembles of individuals. that's group selection. and the result of this is that there is a opposition of selection pressure which are intuitively familiar to all of you. and we use the mantra, the following mantra: within groups where individuals, you know individual selection it's called where individuals are competing within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. when it's competition between groups altruistic groups groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. so social traits evolve but

group selection -- by group selection, and the two are constantly evolving to create the totality of a social behavior. and all the instincts that organize to it. and yet it's an unstable combination, and we're constantly driven from one toward one extreme or toward the other, back and forth, and it cannot ever settle down and be stable. and we've come, we have a word for that, that's called conscience. the conscience. and it is a source of so much of our creativity in the creative heart, our stories much of our art, our music, our jurisprudence deals with the conflict of these two impulses that created us. and that's the explanation that i think is emerging from biology. >> and i wanted to, i'm glad you

brought up that struggle and how that informs the humanities because i wanted to ask um, in addition to having this knowledge of pre-history, what other ways do you think science can income the humanities -- inform the humanities besides just knowing our past and knowing the roots of that struggle that produces such beautiful art? >> we have just begun i think to find ways to bring whole areas of science now in contact with the humanities in very creative and positive ways. in terms of the origin of humanity the -- we should, we should i think we should understand that if you're going to deal with pre-history -- see the humanities deals with history mostly -- but if you're going to deal with pre-history and where we all came from and so on, then you're going to have

to be dealing with a lot of biology which i just spoke of and yet that's not so hard to understand once you start thinking it through. but science generally is going to impact the humanities or, how shall i say, form synergistically unions with the humanities. because science needs to study what's in the humanities just as the humanities need to know what the foundation of aesthetic sense, artistic impulse is boyle lodgey why it is such and not some other. this cannot be done by all scientists. never ask an astrophysicist about the meaning of human -- [laughter] you know, they they may try to answer it, and you are respectful, but they have no chance to do it. never ask an astronomer, never ask a chemist, never ask ask the majority of psychologists -- [laughter] never ask even my colleagues in

molecular biology. they're too far removed from the subject of interest. who do you ask? and here i'll sound like i'm being dogmatic but i'll defend it. you ask the following: evolutionary biologists. they're the ones that study the genetic history of whole lines of species that go from one kind of life to another. ..

to study how the brain works. i believe that is the understanding of nature of consciousness. that is front-page news after the collapse. the narrow scientists about the meaning of humanity because they zero would on the centuries of the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. the nature of mind and they are going to have a lot to contribute to self understanding of humans. but then let's go to technology. ask those working on artificial intelligence and ask those perky non-robotics. that is where we actually carry

on something like experimental and theoretical work on how a brain might work. because these folks just to talk about some of these. these are very ambitious. they are not trying to produce supercomputers and robots that remembers what you want for breakfast. they are zeroing in on what are called the robot avatars. but his robots construct did to think and act like a human being. not because we want to open the possibility of allowing robots to replace human beings, but by creating models of the brain of decision-making and so on and robots we can find out more and more about how we do it. so i've gone on a long time but this is important.

to ask those experts be back and he has given me the heads up to one more question. i'm glad you brought up astrophysicist and folks who deal in a cosmic scale. one of the more widely cited passages of your book you sort of put humanity into perspective and i'll read this quotation now. you've relate to the universe as the second if it's sitting on a flower petal in the garden in new jersey for a few hours this afternoon. we can spend a lot of time on why it's new jersey, connecticut or what have you. i was curious. you've also been your book make a case that we have a unique role as the guardians of the

bouncy biodiversity we have. it is in the grand scheme of things and i'm a cosmic scale where we are expected to stand on the beach. why does it matter if we get any of this right if we understand our meeting if we act as the mind of the planet? >> for one being we are wifebeating out the other 8 million species out there. most of them we don't even know yet. we know to million species roughly and very little about any one of them. their 6 million would estimate that haven't even discovered yet. these create the biosphere the razor thin layer around this little planet that creates the condition within the biosphere. necessary for the millions of

species including mass. and what happened was that we didn't just create having the right atmosphere in the right amount of freshwater and so on in temperature regimes and so on. there were always there. wiffleball does the species over particularly the last 6 million years to be exquisitely adapted to what is in that biosphere. and as we wipe out the biosphere, we are taking it on ourselves to be super engineering in the future, to handle a lever that pushes the keys and take all the measurements to keep up is maintained on a mannequin by the biosphere previously. we have to maintain it now ourselves amidst expenditures of energy. that is a crazy way to go. that is why we should have as

part of the overall environment movement not just attention to climate change and pollution and so on. it should be devoted to the living environment because if i might quote myself again. [laughter] i have a little role and it goes like this. if you save the living environment those other 8 million species, then you will also automatically save the physical environment, which is what our minds are on right now. in order to save the 8 million species, we have to stabilize and return to some degree of previous normalcy the physical environment. we understand not, but we don't really understand that we were cannot have to do that in order to save the living environment.

however if you save the nonliving, the physical environment, you lose the vote he can see taken away the foundation of the means of existing at the other a species and the biosphere of shield. >> understanding how we came to get their is just a matter of resolving the internal conflict with the matter of survival. >> we do. i am inclined to think this is getting too blue sky even for my latest excursion. we really do have to think of ways of making our moral reason transcend that. for example i have mentioned the theological forms of waterman and belief and the

holding of this in the thinking of it. transcendent, meaning it is shared by everyone. you have to make the world more like one tribe and then turned to what you might call by definition one tribe to mock the whole thing out. he developed one tribe and you will have transcendent moral values. we have some. one transcendent moral value is to save the living world. i know you are a doctor. i am going to borrow a rule from madison, from the medical days to apply to this very important part of our lives and this rule is do no further harm to the

biosphere. stop right now. [applause] >> we have some time for audience questions and it works as he usually does. we have folks on the isles. if you just hold off on your question so you got a microphone. the gentleman over here in the great insight. the >> good evening, professor. two quick questions. what do you think of our cryptology because in math mannix that calculates the equation. we calculate mathematically. what an experimental science when we calculate that domain up an equation we calculate and determine the equation.

according to experiments, that is my first question. >> we go to the first question and talk about that right now. wait a minute. >> i will try my best. i just want to make sure that i get this right. i'd like to comment on the mathematical validity of the study of paleontology. >> here is the problem. unfortunately pretty much here as biology and mathematics, the mathematician not that i. but here's exactly what i said. we determined that the demand of an equation in a mathematic way but in an experimental climate, do not bid determining the

equation is supposed to be subjected to the limitations of the experiment itself. may i give an example? >> how we married that sort of abstractness of mathematics that the constraints of the real world. >> well, you just ask out his mathematics or science, the role of management in science in this area of biology is so different than what it is in physics and chemistry. mathematical analyses provide the models that are tested for measuring age for example of the capability of organisms to survive under different environmental conditions. we experiment with it.

we used the mathematical's and the abstraction and expand into areas space and time where we can't do solid empirical work but we can test the mathematical model by any number of tests. and if the results of those tests intersect in what was predicted of the trigger to re molecular fish decline then gradually we build an understanding of the process that we call science. >> time for another question right here. >> making it easy.

[laughter] 's speed mac one of the teachers that human society is language. i would like to speculate on the origins of human language. >> language. >> language, yes. >> that is an area that has not been studied in any great detail in terms of its origin by evolutionary process. we still are not completely sure whether species as distant as our direct ancestor iraq is and also our first cousins of the neanderthals really have language. i am pretty sure. i just had the feeling they probably did have languages.

in order to have the language you have to have a vocabulary. that is what you call grilled language. you have to have a vocabulary that is flexible. you need to select objects and named them with a named them with a sound particularly the feds we audio, visual species. one of the very few in the world, most species in the world are ceremonial nrb audiovisual. it makes possible to have a language. audio and visual we couldn't involve a language. but we don't know what the intermediate steps were. though we think we can see what it would eat in a primitive form. we know that one of the most powerful instinctive drives propensities to learn parts of human nature is that of children to learn language as you know.

i mean, this is as impulsive and a child dosages of foreign groups. so that is not a very satisfied answer. but it is a subject that we should be addressing. >> hopefully inspire young scientists in the audience to take it up and discuss it later on the stage. we have another question over here. gentleman on the left. >> dr. wilson, when you talk about one tribe and then i think you also say that stan to self understanding. self understanding is some team that has to happen like one individual at a time. so how does that happen when you have within the group or society

such as here in the united states where you know, the selfish win? >> now we are using self understanding on two levels. you are speaking about the usual intuitive self understanding of the individual who comes more and more to recognize and analyze them know what he or she feels the way they do. what i was talking about was something quite different and that is the species self understanding. just as an individual needs to know when and where they were born and what their parents were like and what big events occurred to their lives to make them react and feel certain

ways, that is what you are referring to then a much broader space-time level. our species should understand where we came from. the real question to be answered for self understanding of humanity are the three basic questions i suggest of philosophy and religion. they are, where do we come from? what are we? where we go when? i think we are pretty close to answering where we did come from. we are beginning to approach. but the sooner we bring science and humanities together in a meaningful way we are going to know what we are. and then we will have a much better chance of deciding where we are going without committing

species suicide. >> straight back in the center. the >> there have been a number of groups lately who have claimed that the development of artificial intelligence will prove to be the greatest disaster for humanity. what is your thinking on that score? >> well we have already created artificial intelligence. what would be an amazing achievement close to that is something else. and that is what the artificial intelligence people who are mainly interested in practical uses of improving artificial intelligence. but the grail to find in terms

of robotics is nowhere near it. there is a name for it. whole brain emulation is and that is all of all of these will that are developing artificial robotics. that is to create a robotic brain of a human brain to emulate the human brain. but you are not duplicating. you come close to but the human brain has and is there of course where we can eliminate any real risk that robots can misbehave and multiply themselves and no one. but there is actually a controversy going among those who are working on the whole emulation of the artificial

intelligence and that is whether the brain is truly binary digital or whether it operates more as an analog computer. i won't go into details because i'm not sure i understand itself very well. the point is there are two streams of thought going in that direction of the whole brain emulation and one of them is analog. i believe the human brain is very different than any digital device we create because it does operate in an analog fashion with masses of cells working together almost like masses of people to bring to perception and decision-making.

>> one more further back this time but still in the center. just keep your hand up there. there we go. >> while i find the idea of the unity of the humanities and sciences very appealing, i cannot help but wonder even if we have a complete description of human evolution and an understanding of consciousness would have really informed moral philosophy? how would that telecine about moral reasoning to be an entirely different sphere? >> you mean how can we further develop moral philosophy? is that the question? using modern technology? >> my question is even knowing everything about human evolution and the source of consciousness how would that foreign debate for moral reasoning?

>> make sure i have this correctly. no in the evolutionary antecedents of why we came to think the way we do and why we came to be the way we are how would that help us and for making decisions are exploring how we should best relate to one another. >> how do we provide the moral reasoning? >> i didn't get that far to tell you why it matters the scientific studies because i just explain the origin of internal conflict and the operation of what we call conscience. it is based upon any feelings that are essentially moral in nature. we know increasingly well or we think we know in the early stages of this research and there is such a thing as an

amoral pinholes. jonathan hayes at the university of virginia and not is created by group selection. if you have group selection which puts a premium on cooperation and the exercise of the better angels within the group which is what group selection produces, then there is no limit to what kind and degree of moral reasoning behavior that can be developed genetically. it requires group selection. and so think in mind we are a very peculiar species.

we are brand-new. we are a very new species. we can't understand ourselves yet as to where we came from and out we should make science and scholars even the think tanks in washington in the op-ed page of "the new york times" should start thinking seriously about the real problems, which should deal with those domains when the science and humanities come together. >> we have time for one last question. >> dr. wilson, i have heard you speak about the biological probabilities of intelligent life elsewhere. with those intelligent creatures elsewhere have a creation story

elsewhere, must we have one? >> i think that is a great question. is et boro? does et have creation stories that have proponents of different religious faith tribes killing one another for territory? yeah. in the early stages of the revolution before they finally woke up and saw what they were doing. i think they would. because every line of the origin of advanced social behavior and also in humans said just -- that suggest everyone of those went through the same sequence of

events to get a highly evolved social system. i think the principles are so basic. they are like having to have a genetic code to create a system of reproduction. it is so consistent that we would expect to see it occurring another planets where life evolves. i don't think they would want to kill us. i don't think they will ever want to land here. even if they wanted to land here, here is something to think about and maybe say stop worrying about et or ufos. even if they wanted to land here, they couldn't. because the result would he have biological train wreck. there are just two different

system. hg wells got a right. i've even thought in my writings of honoring a man and calling it the wells effect. in order to inhabit another habitable planet, it is first necessary to limit all lies down to the last micro. when you totally sterilized it you can bring yourself with you. >> unfortunately now with a group alerts they don't have to leave home to have a look around. thank you all very much. [applause] thank you, dr. wilson. [applause] we will have a book signing in the main lobby. thank you very much.

[inaudible conversations] >> okay, i do. tell me about the divide. tell me what it is and how you came to read a book about it. >> so i have covered wall street corruption for many years and i did a lot of stories about white collar crime and i started to notice they all had the same ending which is nobody got indicted, nobody went to jail. a few years ago i decided to do a story about why there were no indictments and no criminal prosecutions on wall street and i ended up doing this book with which compares how wall street is treated versus poor nonwhite

defended scenarios that street crimes. this is a tour of the different sides of the justice system. >> what's the difference? >> two completely different systems. >> highlights are six years after the hugest crime waves in the history of wall street, we don't have a thing of successful prosecution of any individual. we are still waiting for that. on the other side we are the biggest prison population and i document people who did time for standing on the street corner and pedestrian traffic in new york. 80,000 arrests. so it is two completely different systems. one is very automated, very ruthless, almost industrial and the other one is very individualized and much more

geared to coming up with resolutions that are friendly. >> so did you find that there was more lack of an inclination to prosecute or what it was -- is there another option other than not? >> there's a lot of different factors. i think one of the big problems is that federal prosecutors are afraid of taking on big companies like jpmorgan chase and goldman sachs because they know they will be in a fight for 10 years. they know they go up against the best lawyers in the world. they have to devote enormous amount of resources to winning the case. they also worry that juries don't understand the material. we can go after 100 drug dealers are one bank when we are going to win this case is that we might lose this case. a lot of it comes down to not than they decided me and the