Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.

— The Book of Proverbs 6:6, Authorized Version

I. A LITTLE AFTER MIDNIGHT

It was a little after midnight on the second of June, the institution long since dark, and I was reading the last chapter of The Meaning of Human Existence by the light over my bunk. Edward O. Wilson is making his closing argument, and the argument is that the story of our species is one of evolution and not of creation, and that to deny this is not a rival position but a refusal to listen. Psychology, anthropology, the history of religion itself, he writes, make no sense except as evolution carried through time; the denial of it he calls “the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears.” Reading the sentence twice, I found I had nothing to say back to it. The evidence for our descent is among the settled things, and a faith that needs it to be false is a faith I have never understood. What I noticed, and half-meant to return to, was that the sentence had been made to carry a second passenger: not only that we evolved, which the evidence shows, but that we therefore arrived unattended, which it does not. I set the thought aside and reached for a stack of notes to copy the passage down, for it had landed with the weight of a thing half-believed for years and only now seen plainly stated.

II. THE VISITOR

Out of the papers, as I lifted them, fell an ant.

It landed on the open book and crossed the very page that carried the lines I had stopped to copy, then went down onto the desk, up the side of the steel locker, and in behind the meal schedule I had taped there, out of sight.

My first instinct was to kill it, which is, I have come to think, almost everyone’s first instinct; the hand goes up before the mind is asked. But I had Wilson open in front of me, and I remembered that he, who had spent the better part of a century on his knees over ant colonies, could never understand the human eagerness to be rid of the ants in the kitchen, and preferred to lay down a crumb and watch. So I let it go, less from any principle than from a plain astonishment that it should be there at all.

I went back to the quotes. As I wrote, it returned: across the top of the desk, and in under a Pilot V5 pen lying near my hand. I lifted the pen. The ant was gone, and I have not seen it since.

I have been in this room ten months. That ant is the only one I have ever seen in it, before or after. The book in my hands had been written by the man who knew ants better than anyone who ever lived. I am not a superstitious man, and I will give the next part as it was, not as it would be easier to have it: I set the pen down and sat a long time with the sense that something had happened.

III. THE ANT MAN

Who Wilson was matters here, because the coincidence, if that is the word, takes its charge from him. The boy who found his calling with a hand lens and never set it down gave us the word biophilia, for the pull a human creature feels toward everything alive, and he wrote of a colony of leafcutters with what it would be dishonest to call anything but reverence. He was also the author of the least consoling account of our situation that modern biology has produced: no designer, no destiny appointed us, no second life held against the close of this one; an accident of the long process that happens, in our case, to have woken and looked around.

He came to it honestly, and not coldly. A Baptist boy on the Gulf coast, born again by full immersion before he was grown, he lost the faith and carried the mark of the loss; religion, he argued ever after, is no message received but an adaptation arrived at, faith having spread because the tribes that shared a creation story outlived the tribes that did not. What stood in for the church was not nothing. It was the ant in the soil, the wonder brought down from heaven to the dirt at his feet. But a man who has carried his wonder down from heaven to the dirt has not thereby emptied the heaven. He has only changed the address.

He held two things at once, and they are not one thing. The first is a finding: that every living creature is cousin to every other, the work of descent and modification across more time than the mind can keep. The evidence is overwhelming, and I will not argue a word of it. The second is not a finding but a stance: that behind the descent there is no one, that the whole of it runs unwatched and unwilled, that we are, in his book’s last word, alone. Wilson passed between the two as though the microscope had shown him both. It had not. No instrument has ever been lowered into the question of whether the engine has a maker; the absence of a designer is not a reading off any dial, it is a place a man chooses to stand.

None of which is special pleading, or not only mine. The Church made its peace with evolution in the middle of the last century, and the man who later mapped the human genome built a whole book on the seamless joining of the two. The believer who grants the descent can in truth scorn its denial more freely than the literalist can, since a faith staked on the gaps science has yet to close has agreed beforehand to a lifetime of retreat; when Wilson likens the denial of evolution to a grown man with his fingers in his ears, the believer who has read his Darwin should take the blow at home and be glad to lose what shamed him. But set the two refusals side by side and they rhyme. The creationist denies what the evidence has put beyond doubt; the atheist asserts what no evidence can touch. One will not look through the glass; the other claims to have seen, down its length, the absence of God. Each has shut a door that is still open, and shut it early, for the same reason: it is easier to have the matter closed than to keep house inside an open question.

IV. THE COLD READING

There is a cold reading of the night, and I will not dodge it; Wilson above all would have made me start there. The brain is a finder of patterns before it is anything else, and it errs by design in one direction: across a few million years it has cost less to mistake the wind for a predator than a predator for the wind, and so we are built to lay intention over events that hold none. Carl Jung named the feeling synchronicity and believed it pointed to something real; the cold reading’s whole work is to show that it points only inward, to a brain made to find connection where there is only chance. Nor do the base rates favor the marvelous. Ants are among the most numerous animals on earth; a federal prison is not a sealed jar; ten months is a long time for one insect to find a seam and a desk. The single thing that made the moment feel addressed to me was that I was reading Wilson, and no one else, when it came; any other book, and the ant is an ant. This is selection, the oldest of the mind’s frauds against itself: it keeps the one hit and forgets the thousand misses. As an account of cause I think it very likely right.

All of which I hold to be true, and none of what follows needs it to be false. The cold reading tells me how the ant came to the page. It says nothing, not one word, about whether its being there was meant. Those are two questions, and the answer to the first does not begin to answer the second.

V. THE OPEN DOOR

That second question kept me up. I do not suppose the ant broke any law of nature to reach me; it came, I assume, by the dull sufficient means the cold reading lays out. But a letter comes by the ordinary machinery of the post, borne in good faith by people with no notion of what it says, and the route of the envelope tells you nothing of whether a hand ever set pen to the page inside. Mechanism is not message. To trace how a thing arrived is not to learn whether it was sent. In his last pages Wilson runs the substitution the other way: he shows, and shows beautifully, how we came to be here, and then offers the how as though it had settled the whether, as if an account of the road were an account of the one who laid it.

He has a consolation ready in place of the one he takes. Meaning, he says, is not let down into the world from above but made within it; its source is the accident of our history and not the intent of any maker, and what remains to us is to choose what we become. Half of that is plainly so. We make meanings without pause, and a great many are ours and no one else’s. But it does not follow, and he nowhere shows, that making is the only way a meaning can reach a person. A meaning can also be given. The door he shuts so firmly, the one with a sender on its far side, he shuts with his hand and not his evidence; the shutting was never his to do, and when I rose and tried it, that night, it stood open.

To trace how a thing arrived is not to learn whether it was sent.

VI. THE RAISED HAND

There remains the first instinct, which was to kill. I write this inside an institution built on the premise that some acts must be answered, swiftly and in something near kind. A place like this runs, at bottom, on the raised hand: the reflex that meets what it dislikes by ending it. I have had long to study the reflex, kept as I am inside its largest and most deliberate form. What stayed my own hand over the ant was no principle worked out in advance. It was Wilson, and the half-second of wonder he had set between the impulse and the act.

Mercy is mostly that half-second. The ant had no claim on me: no right, no standing, no use, no witness, and no cost to me either way. What it had was a chance I could not dismiss, that it had not come at random; and a chance is enough, because you need no proof a thing was sent to keep from crushing it. You act on the possibility that what stands before you is worth more than you can see. That is nearly the whole of it. A man learns the truth about the order that holds him by what he does, unwatched, to an insect.

There is a colder way to put it, and I no longer think it cheapens the thing. Sparing the ant cost me nothing: not a minute, not a calorie, not a risk. Against that nothing stood a chance, small but real, that what crossed the page had been set there on purpose. When the price of an act is nothing and the stakes on the other side are not nothing, the sum is not hard. You keep your hand down.

This is a cousin of Pascal’s wager, and I know the charge against that wager: a man cannot will himself into belief by counting its payouts, and a maker worth the name would see through a piety adopted as a bet. But the wager I mean is not about belief, and asks for no piety. It is about conduct, and the conduct is mercy, and there is no branch of the tree on which the mercy leaves me worse. Spare the ant in an empty universe and I have lost nothing, and have been, for a moment, a man who does not crush what he could; spare it under a watched sky and I have done the fitting thing. The shape holds for most of what a life is made of: small acts, cheap whichever way they fall, done in no certainty that anything keeps the count. It costs almost nothing to live as though the larger thing is there, and the wager pays in mercy spent, redeemed or not. I cannot defend a whole life lived that way as a theorem. I am no longer sure I can defend living it any other.

The old book and the new agree here, if nowhere else. Go to the ant, says Proverbs; consider her ways, and be wise. Scripture and Wilson part on nearly all that matters, on creation and design and the fate of the soul; on the ant they speak with one voice. Consider her. That is the whole instruction, and it is enough to be going on with.

The raised hand is the first thought; wonder is what the first thought becomes when it is made to wait.

VII. CODA

I looked for the ant the next morning, behind the meal schedule and along the seam of the locker. Nothing was there, and I had not thought there would be. Whatever the night was, it was not a matter to be settled by turning up the insect that began it.

The book open under the lamp, in the minute the ant came down the page, was pressing one claim above the rest: that we are alone, that nothing stands behind the world, that nothing is sent and nothing watches, and that the silence is what we had better learn to love. I was under the spell of it when the ant crossed the two sentences where it was set down. Of every book I might have been holding, I held the one written by the man who gave his life to ants; and the only ant I have seen in ten months chose that page, in that minute, while the page told me nothing comes on purpose. I know the odds, roughly. I know every way the mind swells them after the fact, having set those ways down a few pages back. And I cannot, having set them down, make the night come to nothing.

It read less like a coincidence than like an answer; and the answer was short, and not in Wilson’s voice. You are not alone. I will not ask you to hear it. I can say only that I, on a bunk with the book still open, could hear nothing else, and that the account which asks the least of me is not the one in which the world is empty and the timing was luck, but the one in which the thing was addressed.

Wilson’s last word was that to be alone is to be free. I will keep the freedom; he was right about its price and its worth. The solitude I cannot keep on his word, for it is the one claim in that beautiful book he could never demonstrate, and because for the length of a half-second, a little after midnight, I held the power to crush a life that might have been sent to me, and let it walk.

I have nothing to show for any of it. No specimen, no photograph, no proof that would stand a minute before a skeptic or a court; only the memory of a visit, which is the one thing here they cannot search, confiscate, or sign away. And if I read the night rightly, then as the book in my hands was proving that no one is there, someone with a long reach and, I have come to believe, a tenderness for small jokes set the least of his creatures on the one page in the cell where it could answer the argument, let it answer, and drew it back before morning.

§ NOTES AND REFERENCES

PRINCIPAL TEXT

Wilson, Edward O., The Meaning of Human Existence. Liveright / W. W. Norton, 2014. The closing chapter, “Alone and Free in the Universe,” supplies the line about the denial of evolution as “plugging one’s ears,” and the claim that meaning has its source in the accidents of history rather than in a designer.

ON ANTS, BIOPHILIA, AND THE NATURALIST

Wilson, Edward O., Tales from the Ant World. Liveright / W. W. Norton, 2020. Source of the disposition toward the ants in one’s kitchen: leave the crumb, watch what follows.

Wilson, Edward O., Biophilia. Harvard University Press, 1984.

Wilson, Edward O., Naturalist. Island Press, 1994. On the Gulf-coast boyhood and the Baptist immersion.

ON EVOLUTION AND BELIEF

Collins, Francis S., The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Free Press, 2006. The author directed the Human Genome Project.

Pius XII, Humani Generis (1950); and John Paul II, address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (1996), on the compatibility of evolutionary descent with belief.

ON COINCIDENCE AND THE MEANING-MAKING MIND

Jung, C. G., Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Princeton University Press (Bollingen), English ed. 1960.

Shermer, Michael, The Believing Brain. Times Books, 2011. On patternicity and the agency-detecting brain.

SCRIPTURE

The Book of Proverbs 6:6. Authorized (King James) Version.