The Colonial Life of Sociobiology

The Colonial Life of SociobiologyIn the Christian imagination, Eden is the place before the world.It is the world before the earth is to be populated.In Genesis 1:28 after God has made the heavens and the earth and filled it with swarms of living creatures and vegetation, Adam and Eve are told, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."Eden is thus both empty and filled with God's creative power.It has its potential in absence-in the lack of sin and knowledge, but also in that this first pair of humans is to fill an empty earth with their offspring.Eden is the grounding belief in the western Christian relationship to land, water, and non-human beings.The desire for a garden empty of others and yet lush with every good kind of fruit and plant.It is through Eden that the English colonized the shores of North America.And it is Eden that lives in the memories of those who wish to claim the dominion over the world that God grants to Adam.In 1969, E. O. Wilson and Daniel Simberloff created an Eden on a set of mangrove islands in the Everglades National Park.With permission of the United States Department of the Interior, they entirely removed the original fauna with methyl bromide fumigation and then observed the colonization of the islands over the next year.They found that the arthropods returned to the previous species equilibrium in less than a year.It was the first time that researchers had established evidence of this kind of equilibrium through direct observation.