Theodore Gray and Max Whitby in collaboration with Stephen Wolfram have created an amazing iPad app that shows the elements with riveting clarity, the stuff of life and all else constructed of what we call matter. This interactive version of the Periodic Table is a graphic reminder of our state of being, the physicality of our very selves and the world we see around us.

Getting to know what reality is and how it operates is hard, and belief is easy. Belief is compelling, and, in evolutionary terms, adaptive; it’s helped us get this far in a journey that began on the African savannah a few million years ago. But belief is also costly, however much it helps us make it through the hour of the wolf.

Our natural inclination to believe sometimes shuts down our equally natural and also adaptive effort to know. Edward O. Wilson forcefully asserts that this is the century of biology, our opportunity to focus on the life sciences and do the research essential to our solving the problems that Rebecca Costa examines so carefully and pragmatically in this book, problems that will otherwise be ruinous.

Humans have an inescapable longing to invent and sustain meaning.  Just being alive seems not to be enough for us. As Steven Weinberg notes, when you look down from an airplane window high in the sky, it’s difficult to see purpose in the act of being; it can all seem just ornate chemical happenstance, empty of purpose beyond its own imperatives. I find myself increasingly fond of another of Wilson’s assertions --- he said it in a film shoot a couple of weeks ago --- “Better to be too optimistic than to be not optimistic and motivated enough” --- and, in this context, he means not motivated to do what it takes to learn how life works. However we want to deal with our mental circumstance, the haunting thoughts, dreams, imaginings, memories, misgivings, fears, anxieties, and the like, we can sensibly find meaning in --- or attribute meaning to --- life itself. After all, once born or, even, once conceived, whoever or whatever creature you are, there is the concomitant drive to stay alive, to develop and become. This may be the origin of biophilia, which, again according to Wilson, is the set of “connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.” Our innate affection for the living world can be for us a source of fascination, wonder, excitement and meaning. The more we all learn about life on Earth, the better.

Wilson and Costa are trying to wake us up. If we read their writings and follow their guidance, we will prevail. If we don’t, our common fate will remain an open question. We are good at violent anger, illusion, umbrage, revenge, greed, and other damaging acts and states of mind. We are also good at empathy, kindness, constructive labor. We are altruists. We are the problem and the solution.