What my five-year-old could teach the Tea Party

There they are: his plastic dinosaurs. Sixteen of them. (Bless his overgenerous mother!) Taking over the front room sofa, my favorite place to read the morning paper.

Am I pissed? Absolutely not. It's as exciting (to me) as his fascination, at age five, with snails, bees, spiders—anything small that moves. Is this a future entomologist I see before me? Or better yet, a paleontologist?

Danny's insatiable curiosity is what I entirely missed with my first batch of kids (now in their late 50s) because I was so absorbed in succeeding professionally: When Michael was five in 1957, I was doing a Carnegie post-doctoral grant to create an innovative course on mass culture; with Catherine at the same age (1959), I was on the faculty at Penn's Annenberg School; when Timothy hit five in 1961, I was founding director of the Institute of American Studies at the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii.

Sorry, kids. I was absorbed elsewhere.

Lightning strikes

But now I too am hooked on dinosaurs. Books and magazines on the subject jostle for space on our tables. I, who was taught 85 years ago that mankind was a mere 4,000 years old, must absorb the truth that it took 5 billion years to evolve to our current status.

The 82-year-old retired Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson, in his eighth book, The Social Conquest of Earth (Liveright, 2012), tackles the toughest last chapter of the human adventure— from animal to social being. Take up that story with lightning starting a fire in the woods where our emerging humans were hunting for animals to eat.

With their still clumsy tools, they drag the cooked beast back to their lair, where they can defend their take against the competing hungers of other animals. And it tastes so much better. And easier to consume.

They even drag a smoldering trunk "home" so they don't lose their new "tool": fire. Little did they yet know that the cooked food gave them larger brains, so much advanced that the ultimate miracle, speech, is theirs!

From Alabama's woods

Dazzled by his book, I research Wilson's personal evolution. As a poor Alabama boy, he hunts in the woods around him. An adolescent accident destroyed one of his eyes, leading him to make small insects, especially ants, his specialty.

He wants to enlist for World War II so a poor boy can use the GI Bill to finance his higher education. Rejected because of his damaged vision, he gets his undergraduate education at the University of Alabama, where his brilliant scholarship wins him entrée to Harvard.

Wilson is such a great long-distance teacher. If you don't believe me, read his seventh book, Anthill: A Novel (Norton, 2010). The queen runs things, with drones and freer workers bringing home the nutrients that make a huge colony prosper.

A Communist benefit

Now serendipitously, while we were spending our last week of vacation along the Baltic coast, Rostock's Zoo just opened a new $30 million-plus "DARWINEUM," a thousand animals to illustrate the central concepts of evolution. And the designers had the savvy to invite Darwin's great-great-grandson, a Brit who now researches ancient forests in India, to celebrate their opening. Fossils are at the center of the research they are popularizing.

Now I'm speculating that the high interest in this Darwinism is one of East Germany's more positive legacies: that late Communist country's secularism was refreshingly antithetical to the numbskull "Christianity" that, for example, promotes the study of creationism alongside evolution in Texas public schools. Such Tea Party foolishness helps remind me why I relocated to Germany. Danny, my five-year-old German-American son, already knows better!