The following letter is adapted from remarks delivered at our opening Middle School meeting in Eliot Chapel on Tuesday, August 19.
Good morning, Middle School! It is so wonderful to see all of you here as we kick off the new year together. To those of you who are returning to campus, welcome back! And to those who are just beginning your MICDS experience, I am so excited to join Mrs. Schuckman and our faculty in welcoming you to your new school home. We are very lucky to have you with us.
Speaking of our faculty, please take a few seconds to look around the chapel and see all the teachers and staff who will be committed to advancing your learning and growth this year. They are a talented and dedicated group of professionals, and I am privileged to work with them. If you ever wonder exactly what my job is as Head of School, you are looking at it. My job is to ensure that MICDS is staffed with fantastic teachers to inspire, guide, challenge, and support you every single day. Teaching excellence is the strongest guarantee of the health and improvement of our remarkable institution this year and into the future. Please join me in a round of applause to thank our faculty and staff for their investment in you! It begins anew today.
I know that all of your teachers—and of course Mrs. Kavanaugh in the library as well—remind you often about the importance of reading, so I thought I should share with you some reflections on a book I am currently enjoying, titled Consilience by Edward O. Wilson, that has inspired me as we begin the new year. I don’t think I had ever heard the word “consilience” before I picked it up earlier this month. You might know the word “resilience,” which means something like strength through adversity—toughness in the face of difficulties—but you might not know that resilience literally describes the ability to “jump back.” Its root syllable, “sil,” comes from the Latin verb “salire,” meaning “to jump”; so “consilience” means “jumping together.” Consilience describes the idea that all theories and knowledge are interrelated—that they “jump together” and connect to reveal universal truths about the natural world and our experiences within it.
Dr. Wilson, the book’s author, lived an extraordinary life. When he was only seven years old—the same year that his parents divorced—he injured and blinded his right eye in a fishing accident, subsequently developing 20/10 vision in his left eye. The combination of his increasing independence, his love of the outdoors, and his ability to notice details led to a particular fascination with insects, especially ants, and over the course of his long career as a biologist, Wilson would ultimately identify more than 400 species of ants. The more that he learned about ant colony behaviors, the more interested he became in how they compared to social behaviors of other species, especially human beings, as they emerged over time, and the more that he wondered about the consilience of evolutionary theories to explain them.
Wilson reminds us that our species, homo sapiens, has existed for about 300,000 years. You MICDS Middle School students, on the other hand, have existed for an average of 12.5 years. To put the difference between the two of these timespans in context, imagine that a 100-yard football field represents the 300,000-year evolution of humanity. On this scale, your average age of 12.5 years measures a little more than an eighth of an inch—which is to say that, from an evolutionary perspective, your lives are far more influenced by the genetic coding and cultural behaviors that human beings have evolved over the last 99 yards, 2 feet, and 11 ⅞ inches than by whatever has been happening in that last eighth of an inch since you were born.
I would like to suggest that our relative insignificance on such an expansive timetable is actually good news. Our attention is so often preoccupied by current events and other contemporary phenomena (artificial intelligence, social media, and political discord, for example) that we overestimate their importance while underestimating the importance of time-honored human instincts and values—Wilson calls them “forms of social behavior that confer the greatest Darwinian fitness”—that are the happy inheritance of the last 300,000 years. In particular he cites reciprocal altruism—behaviors like resource sharing and mutual defense—as well as the priority that our species assigns to effective communication, social learning, and education. (Go Rams!)
This morning in the fifth-grade hallway I noticed a sign by Mrs. Jones’ classroom that says, “You will never regret being kind.” You don’t have to take her word for it, though. Just listen to your own DNA. Our values at MICDS are shaped by time-honored behaviors that have advanced humanity for the better part of a half-million years; and when our meeting here ends, in this space that has inspired so many generations of students, teachers, and staff, we will all say, “Do the right thing, ‘cause it’s the right thing to do.” These words are both our Middle School tradition and a powerful legacy of human evolution.
So yes, you are small in the grand scheme of things, but your eighth of an inch is the latest and greatest iteration of homo sapiens, and Wilson also reminds us that “except for identical siblings the probability that any two human beings share identical genes, or have ever shared them throughout the history of the hominid line, is vanishingly small.” In other words, each person is unique. All of us—even identical siblings, who chart separate paths from birth—are living lives that have never been lived before and that will never be lived again. All of us must be accountable to the distinct privilege of our uniqueness in history, the honor of being a one-and-only, in the common cause of our humanity.
Finally, I wanted to share with you that the author of Consilience, Edward O. Wilson, who was one of the most important and influential scientists and intellectuals of his long lifetime, had an IQ of only 123—which is to say that he was estimated to have above-average intelligence but not exceptional intelligence. How often we overrate such measurements! In a 2016 interview, when he was 86 years old, Wilson shared his belief that “passion, commitment to a subject, excitement over adventure, an entrepreneurial spirit–all these are more important than a very high IQ.” He remained throughout his life the child who loved to be outdoors, to discover ant colonies, and to wonder at life. Wilson’s above-average IQ mattered, but his curiosity, and the work ethic it inspired, mattered so much more.
Please forgive me if I have talked for too long! My remarks to you this morning boil down to four observations. First, consilience. Everything in the world is related to everything else. As this new year begins, please make connections—in your schoolwork, in your activities, and in your friendships. Second, community above self. Each of us alone is small, even insignificant, in the scale of the world and the progress of time, but together we are strong. We inherit habits of cooperation and mutual care from our millions of ancestors. Engage these habits every day. Third, be confident in yourself. Your genetic makeup and your place in space and time have never happened before and will never happen again. Make your mark! Fourth, be curious and work hard. These, not high IQ alone, are the fundamentals of human genius.
That was still a lot of words! Let’s make it just four: consilience, community, confidence, and curiosity. Still too much to ask on the first day of school? Okay, then please remember just this one: curiosity. Curiosity is the parent of them all. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, a highly evolved primate in Africa wondered “why?,” and homo sapiens was born. Keep wondering!
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you all for a joyful weekend with your families and friends.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist is Boom Boom Back by Hinds (Apple Music / Spotify).