Thinking, technique and writing

 Science is a way of thinking.

There are many ways. In ancient Greece, some people who were intrigued by a question consulted oracles. Some listened for whispered voices as the wind rustled the leaves in a sacred grove. Some, like Herodotus and Aristotle, went to look for themselves. They spoke of making inquiries and investigations.

Our sciences grew out of that impulse to observe and make a record of our observations. If you’re a scientist, you subscribe to that way of thinking. You subscribe to certain habits, routines and systems. You look for answers in a certain way because you frame questions in a certain way.

Reading E.O. Wilson’s memoir reminded me of those rare moments in college when my teachers talked — not about a research project, techniques, analytical tools or a discipline — but what it was to be a scientist, what it’s like spending a life thinking in a certain way.

I enjoy the writings of scientists who take a stab at that topic.

Many writers have tried to do something similar for people who write. My list would include Annie Dillard, William and Kim Stafford, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Virginia Woolf and Rainer Maria Rilke.

As in the sciences, technique is vital. But it seems to me that questions about technique and craftsman follow more basic questions. I think it makes sense to talk about an attitude toward writing or an approach to writing — and how approaching things in different ways could lead to different practices of writing.

Craftsmanship is vital. But I don’t think it’s the place to start. We need to go elsewhere to find the first lesson.

A theory of mind

 Embedded in E.O. Wilson’s views on sociobiology is a theory of mind. It’s not specifically his. Other scientists seem to fall into something similar almost as a default position.

Wilson’s starting point: Social behaviors are transmitted by culture, but culture is a product of the brain. Our inherited traits limit what kind of things we can consider — what kinds of things are possible.

Wilson thought that the question of how genetic and cultural evolution interact was one of the great unexplored realms of science. He called it “gene-culture coevolution.”

 

Over the course of a lifetime, the mind of the individual person creates itself by picking among countless fragments of information, value judgements, and available courses of action within the context of a particular culture. More concretely, the individual comes to select certain marital customs, creation myths, ethical precepts, modes of analysis, and so forth, from among those available. We call these competing behaviors and mental abstractions “culturgens.” They are close to what our fellow reductionist Richard Dawkins conceived as “memes.”

 

Philosophy of mind is a thorny specialty, and I enjoyed watching a biologist, rather than a philosopher, tackle of its questions. Saying what a human mind is like is difficult, but I like the ancient metaphor. In some ways, an individual mind is like a collection. What’s in your cabinet of curiosities is different from what’s in mine. We might collect some similar items, and so we could say we have some shared interests. But we can’t assume that everyone else will be interested in the same things.

The activity of collecting is important, I think. It’s the idea behind forming canons in literature and other arts. I think it’s vital that each generation examine its cultural inheritance. It contains fabulous riches but also deadly poisons.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, p. 351.

Start with a circle

 A person who is interested in natural history gradually becomes aware of a cycle of learning and discovery. You can discover the relationship between yellow-billed cuckoos and the tent caterpillars in your neighborhood for yourself. But you can do so only if you’ve learned to identify some birds and bugs.

You have to learn some things from teachers and books to be able to discover things for yourself. Those discoveries might help you learn more things from teachers and books.

E.O. Wilson, the great naturalist, pointed out another element to that cycle. Here’s his description of his sophomore year in college:

 

My resolve to be a biologist was reinforced when I discovered the ideal social environment for developing a scientist — or at least one of several possible ideals. It is the same as for a political revolutionary. Start with a circle of ambitious students who talk and work together and conspire against their elders in order to make their way into a particular discipline. They can be as few as two or as many as five; more than five makes the unit unstable. Give them an exciting new idea that can transform the discipline and with which they can advance their ambitions: let them believe that they own a central truth shared by few others and therefore a piece of the future. Add a distant authority figure, in this case a scientist who has written a revolutionary text, or at least a circle of older revolutionaries who have generated the accepted canon. The farther away these icons are from their acolytes, the better. At midcentury, Europe was best of all.

 

I love that description of a circle of friends learning together. The notion of collegiality in colleges seems endangered to me, though I’m no expert.

Wilson wrote about science as a social activity. If I had another life to live, researching that activity — that cycle of learning and discovering — would be a good way to spend it

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, pp. 107-8.

For an explanation of cuckoos and tent caterpillars, see “The case of the missing caterpillars,” July 22, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-case-of-missing-caterpillars.html

A caterpillar with horns

 Foresters speak of “skeletonized” leaves. If you see an oak with leaves that have been eaten back to the main stem and veins, you’re looking at the work of orange-striped oakworms, Anisota senatoria.

Most of the caterpillars are still in the trees eating, but we were hiking after a storm, which knocked some to the ground.

They were about an inch and a-half long, black with eight yellow stripes. As the common name suggests, some have orange stripes, although the ones we found did not. The caterpillars have two black spines behind the head. I imagined a tiny longhorn.

The moths are about an inch long, reddish brown with a white spot on the forewing. The female lays about 500 eggs — imagine tiny green BBs — on an underside of a leaf. The caterpillars hatch in about a week and start eating.

When they are grown, the caterpillars dig a hole in the ground and pupate, say the entomologists at the University of Georgia. That I have not seen.

Stone Mountain, early August

 The tall goldenrod, Solidago altissima, is suddenly shoulder high. Georgia has about 35 species of goldenrod, and this is the one I can identify. Later this summer, the plants I saw might get to 7 feet.

Height is a rough way to identify a plant. Sorting out the other species is beyond my abilities.

But since I know what a basal leaf is, I can distinguish two groups: clumping and rhizomatous. Clumping goldenrods have basal leaves. Each plant will spread its seeds, of course, but the plant itself will stay put. Rhizomatous species, like S. altissima, also spread by their roots. S. altissima is the most common goldenrod here because one soon becomes many.

The ripe berries on American pokeweed, Phytolacca americana, are mostly gone, picked over by songbirds.

What’s blooming in the woods: Liliturfs, in genus Liriope; pigeonwings, Clitoria mariana; and wild potato vine, Ipomoea pandurate. I saw some Asiatic dayflowers, Commelina communis. They are a lovely blue — the blue in the French flag — but invasive. I also saw one Hibiscus, which escaped someone’s garden and seemed to be thriving in the woods.

On the ground: persimmons, hickory nuts and green muscadines knocked down by the storms.

Lesson learned

 When I was a boy, my grandfather found a wasp’s gall. He cut it off with his pocketknife and put it in his shirt pocket, next to the Prince Albert tin.

He had intended to sit in his easy chair and, with the 8-year-old version of me as an audience, dissect the gall with a spey blade, showing the wasps within.

But he forgot. Grandmother found the gall while sorting the laundry.

In some families, certain offenses require all the women in the family to weigh in. Grandfather had two daughters, one of which was my mother, and I think at least one great-aunt was visiting. Grandfather was thoroughly blessed out. The lesson I learned had nothing to do with the biology of wasps but with the social order within human families.

I thought of that lesson when I was clearing the blackberry vines off the path to the woodlot and came across a gall. It was made by a blackberry knot gall wasp, Diastrophus nebulosus.

The gall was big enough to have several chambers, and I thought that a dissection might reveal at least six little wasps.

But I learned my lesson. The gall is still on the vine, the one still standing by the path.

It's not a trick of grammar

 The Wise Woman, who earned a Ph.D. and taught college English, is skeptical of books about writing.

She saw many students who were terrified of writing. They came to her classes thinking that they were about to confront 10,000 rules, each of which would show them to be wrong about something, possibly in a way that suggested stupidity.

Telling stories is one of the things that makes us human, the Wise Woman said. How did this deeply human activity become so anxiety-ridden?

I had asked about good books on writing because I was thinking about what I’d learned in a lifetime of writing. But there was fire in her voice. I let the matter drop, and we tramped down the trail through the woods quietly.

Along the way, I remembered that one of the writers of one of the rule books had said something on the subject. I had to look it up.

 

Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.” This moral observation would be out of place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what a man is, rather than what he knows, will at last determine his style. If one is to write, one must believe — in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message.

 

• Source: William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style; New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1972, p. 77.