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Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by E. O. Wilson
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"A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." --The Wall Street Journal
One of our greatest living scientists--and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants--gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.
Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.
- Sales Rank: #93109 in eBooks
- Published on: 2014-11-26
- Released on: 2014-11-26
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology, and ethology, he has also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means "a jumping together," in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." In making his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia, and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigor and vigor to be brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for "Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." Wilson's wisdom, eloquently expressed in the pages of this grand and lively summing-up, will be of much help in that search.
From Library Journal
Historically, all of the sciences were once united under the rubric of "natural science." Over time, they became fragmented and specialized. Nevertheless, Wilson argues that there is a genetic and neurological basis for knowledge and that all subjects of human inquiry can be reunited under the umbrella of "consilience."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Scientific American
Edward O. Wilson's first "big book" was a slim volume, The Theory of Island Biogeography, written in collaboration with Robert H. MacArthur and published in 1967. It is one of the canonical texts of theoretical ecology. It helped to push the study of populations, communities and ecosystems from a foundation of largely descriptive studies to today's richer mixture of descriptive natural history, manipulative experiments in the field and laboratory, and mathematical analyses (often of complicated nonlinear systems). Sadly, cancer killed MacArthur a few years later. In 1973 a group of his friends and colleagues gathered in Princeton, N.J., for a memorial meeting. At that time, Wilson was about to send the manuscript of Sociobiology to his publisher. Wilson, Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin were staying in the overlarge house that I, recently arrived, was renting from Princeton University, and as we and others walked back to dinner there someone asked Wilson, "What is this sociobiology all about?" Dick Lewontin enthusiastically answered something like: "It is a big book, bringing a lot together, and defining sociobiology as whatever is in Ed's book." Much has happened since then. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis appeared--26 chapters on empirical and theoretical advances in understanding the evolutionary origins of the social behavior of nonhuman animals and a final speculative chapter suggesting that many aspects of human behavior and social organization might be understandable in broadly similar terms. Wilson had looked forward to an academic battle with anthropologists, psychologists and others who had little use for Darwinian interpretations of human culture. But he had (perhaps naively) not foreseen the political battle that erupted, with its epicenter at Harvard University and its apogee the infamous letter from Lewontin and others to the New York Review of Books, comparing Wilson's ideas with those of the Nazis. Wilson's subsequent books have ranged from a magisterial overview of his favorite animals (The Ants, with Bert Hölldobler, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990), through definitive statements about "biodiversity," a word that he made common coin (The Diversity of Life, 1992), to a wonderful autobiography (Naturalist, 1994). Far from backing off his sociobiological claims that evolutionary biology can illuminate aspects of human behavior and culture, Wilson's agenda has, if anything, enlarged over time. Which brings me to Consilience. The word is borrowed from William Whewell, who in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences spoke of consilience as a "jumping together" of knowledge by linking facts and theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. The book's opening chapter, aptly called "The Ionian Enchantment," sets forth Wilson's conviction that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small set of natural laws. The next two chapters take us on a quick tour through "The Great Branches of Learning" and "The Enlightenment," making clear Wilson's enthusiasm for the attitudes of the Enlightenment: "The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship." Off to such a start, I approached the rest of the book with considerable trepidation. The middle part of the book, however, is an exceptionally insightful account of the sciences, including (as do the U.K. Research Councils) the social sciences. Wilson gives a good account of how our still growing understanding of the physical world has given us the power to reshape our environment, deferring to later chapters his observations on the often unintended consequences. Looking beyond today's spectacular advances in unraveling the structure and function of neural processes or in reading the molecularly coded book of life, Wilson points to a future in which this biological understanding will give us the power to reshape ourselves (again deferring the implications to his final chapters). He cuts through much polarized nonsense about nature versus nurture or genes versus culture, showing with many examples how both are as relevant to us as to other animals. These sociobiological ideas about kin selection, parental investment, mating behavior, territorial expansion and defense, status and other strategies are shown to have firm roots in evolutionary biology and clear applications to human institutions. As we move on to "The Social Sciences," "The Arts and Their Interpretation" and "Ethics and Religion," things get blurrier. Wilson continually and properly emphasizes patterns that are more or less universal: incest taboos (everything to do with inbreeding depression, and nothing to do with Freud); snakes and serpents in dreams (everything to do with real risks from snakes, and nothing to do with penises). Although I am in sympathy with Wilson's basic premise, I think these illustrative universals are more subtly textured: consanguinity rules, in all their variety, are possibly better understood in economic terms, and I am with the Freudians on serpents. The suggestion that the magically beautiful cave art of Chauvet and elsewhere was born literally of magic--prescientific attempts to explain and influence one's world--I find compelling. I would even agree that "the dominating influence that spawned the arts was the need to impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence." But to suggest this kind of explanation for contemporary art markets may be foolish: I think instead they are to be explained in largely economic terms (which themselves are ultimately, but remotely, grounded on evolution). The reason the annual turnover on paintings alone by Sotheby's, Christie's and the world's other auction houses is larger than the total annual spending on taxonomic and systematic biological research--and why we have synoptic inventories of the world's art and not of the world's living species--is not simply because we favor human handiwork over nature's. The reasons are essentially economic: we have created markets in art (and there is a lesson for conservationists here!). In short, I share Wilson's view that the ultimate basis for art, and even for ethics, lies in the chances and necessities of our evolutionary history. But I think these origins are often deeper and subtler than they are sketched by Wilson. This being said, I love the clear, calm and often cruel phrases that drive his lance through black knight after black knight. On schools within the social sciences: "Each of these enterprises has contributed something to understanding the human condition. The best of the insights, if pieced together, explain the broad sweep of social behavior, at least in the same elementary sense that preliterate creation myths explain the universe, that is, with conviction and a certain internal consistency. But never--I do not think that too strong a word--have social scientists been able to embed their narratives in the physical realities of human biology and psychology, even though it is surely there and not some astral plane from which culture has arisen." On religion: "For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible." Wilson, however, completes this quotation with "but we cannot live without them." Greatly to oversimplify, Wilson offers us a clear-eyed view of the wonders of our evolutionary past, shared with other living creatures, as a satisfying creed to live by. As his final chapter makes plain, acceptance of this view of life carries a call to action. This last chapter summarizes our current plight: teeming population growth; climate change; extinction rates running 100 to 1,000 times above average rates in the evolutionary record and set to accelerate. Wilson, encouraged by his vision of the emerging unity of knowledge, which he hopes will help us rise above outdated irrationalities and short-term selfishness, offers a message of hope. I would like to share his optimism, but I cannot. Insofar as much of Wilson's Consilience is grounded on evolutionary biology, it emphasizes the short term and the individual. The classic problems surrounding the "evolution of altruism" or cooperative behavior--of behavior that puts the good of the group above the interest of the individual--are, as yet, ill understood (excepting for groups of sufficiently close relatives). These questions do not loom large in Consilience, yet they are utterly crucial to humanity's future. Whether the problem is population growth, or climate change, or diminishing biological diversity, the essential difficulty is in asking individuals today to make sacrifices that benefit communities tomorrow. In essentials, I agree with Wilson's hope that we are moving toward a unification of all knowledge, based ultimately on understanding evolutionary processes. But I do not share his optimism that this unity may be our salvation. I fear that the inflexibility of social institutions, rooted in the past evolutionary history of our species, will ineluctably continue to put their emphasis on the interests of individuals and of the short term.
Most helpful customer reviews
247 of 262 people found the following review helpful.
A million years ahead of its time or impossible?
By Dennis Littrell
In this ambitious work, Edward O. Wilson, one of the most distinguished scientists of our times, and a man I greatly admire, goes perhaps a bit beyond his area of expertise as he envisions a project that is perhaps beyond even the dreams of science fiction. "...[A]ll tangible phenomena," he writes on page 266, "from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics."
This in a nutshell is his dream of "consilience." It is also the statement of a determinist. My problem with such a laudable endeavor (and with determinism in general) is this: even if he is right, that the arts and the humanities will ultimately yield to reduction, how do we, limited creatures that we are, do it? It seems to me that in the so-called soft sciences like sociology, economics, and psychology, for example, and even more so in the world of the humanities and the arts, reduction is so incredibly complex that such an attempt is comparable (in reverse order) of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. It's ironic that Wilson uses almost exactly this metaphor on page 296 to explain why once the rain forests are chopped down, they're gone forever. He notes, "Collect all the species...Maintain them in zoos, gardens, and laboratory cultures...Then bring the species back together and resynthesize the community on new ground." Will this work? Wilson's answer is no. He writes, "...biologists cannot accomplish such a task, not if thousands of them came with a billion-dollar budget. They cannot even imagine how to do it." He adds, still on page 296, that even if biologists could sort and preserve cultures of all the species, "they could not then put the community back together again. Such a task...is like unscrambling an egg with a pair of spoons."
This is exactly how I feel about the consilience of human knowledge. I cannot even imagine how reductionism could help us to understand a poem. There is a dictum among poets that "nothing defines the poem but the poem itself." No amount of reduction will allow us to understand what makes the poem tick. This is because the poem is an experience, a human emotional, intellectual, sensual experience dependent upon not only the literal meaning of the words, but on their connotations, their sounds, their rhythm, their relationships to one another, their syntax, their allusions, their history, their use by other poets, etc., and also what the individual reader of the poem brings to the experience. Reduce the poem and you do not have an understanding of the poem. At best you have an essay on the poem, at worst something alien to the esthetic experience. In essence, I should say that the problem with consilience is that our experience is not reducible.
I have read a lot of what Professor Wilson has written, including On Human Nature (1978), the charming memoir, Naturalist (1994), parts of The Ants (1990) and his controversial, but ground-breaking and highly influential, Sociobiology (1975). And I have read some of his critics, most recently essayist Wendell Berry's Life Is a Miracle (2000) and Charles Jenck's piece in Alas, Poor Darwin (2000). What has struck me in these readings is the disconnection between what Wilson has written and what some critics have criticized him for writing! For example it is thought that Wilson is a strict biological determinist when it comes to human behavior. But here he writes, very clearly on page 126, "We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture." Wilson has had to weather more than his share of unfair criticism because, as the father of sociobiology, which some mistakenly see as a furtherance of a rationale for eugenics, he has been made the target of the misinformed. Additionally, Wilson is not the lovable sort of genius we adored in Einstein, nor the heroic scientist overcoming a terrible handicap as in the case of Stephen Hawking, but a slightly nerdish genius from Alabama who spent much of his life crawling around on the ground and in trees looking at ants. Some people make it clear that such a man should not presume to tell them anything about human beings and how we should conduct our lives or how we should view ourselves. But I think they are wrong. Wilson brings unique insights into the human condition, and he has the courage of his convictions. I think he is a man we should listen to regardless of whether we agree with him or not.
Even if its central thesis is wrong, Consilience is nonetheless an exciting book, full of information and ideas, elegantly written, dense, at times brilliant, a book that cannot be ignored and should be read by anyone interested in the human condition regardless of their field of expertise.
56 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
A great book by an important thinker
By adamojr@prodigy.net
As an undergraduate in the early 1980s I was profoundly influenced by the paradigm-shifting academic movement begun by Professor Wilson in his work, Sociobiology. The idea that human social behavior was the product of thousands of years of ancestral genetic competition was a refreshing rejoinder to the dogma espoused at that time in conventional Sociology and Anthropology courses. In the years after university I have watched as Wilson's thesis has gradually achieved greater acceptance. Even many feminists and psychologists who once viewed Wilson's work as an anathema have come to realize that the ideas he popularized have changed forever their fields of study.
It was with this background that I jumped into Consilience, hoping for new insight. What I discovered was a cogent argument for the need to break down the very same academic barriers that I recognized years ago as an undergraduate. In another book I read recently, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that the fallout from Darwin's work on evolutionary natural selection has completely disrupted and changed forever the intellectual landscape in which we live. Wilson makes essentially the same argument, but his book is more often prescriptive than diagnostic. He argues that the same synthesis which has been tenuously achieved in "hard" sciences such as physics, chemistry and molecular biology can be achieved in all branches of learning. He suggests roadmaps for achieving this integration in the social sciences as well as the arts and religion.
Most interesting of all is Wilson's discussion of the need for greater understanding of the biological underpinnings of morality and ethics. Wilson correctly recognizes that for all of humanity's scientific and technological achievement, if our species is to thrive well into the future we must come to terms with ourselves and recognize certain truths that our biological history has imposed on us. That recognition will necessarily entail major changes in the way we live, both at the individual and the societal level. Ultimately, however, Wilson is a conservative - not in the ideological sense, but in recognizing the need to preserve many traditions that anchor us to our cultural heritage.
This is a wonderful, well-researched, engagingly-written book by one of the most important scientists of the 20th Century. Readers looking for a peek into the future of intellectual discourse need look no further than Consilience.
49 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Procrustean argument or prophetic vision?
By Amazon Customer
E.O.Wilson has come up with an arcane word for the title of his book, the meaning of which you will not find in your regular OED. I eventually read elsewhere that CONSILIENCE is the convergence, jumping, or bringing together of knowledge. The long time spent in frustrating dictionary searches has caused me to yield to temptation and toss an equally odd word at Wilson's book in this review. Is it indeed Procrustean by being a created and arbitrary standard that he demands intellectual conformity to, or is he simply ahead of his time and has a real vision of a coming "unity of knowledge"?
For persons in the humanities and social sciences this book may sting a little. Wilson is used to criticisms of his own work because of his insistence on using sociobiology as the lens through which he sees all. Long ago after having a jug of water dumped on his head and being told he "was all wet", Wilson seemingly realized that in order to be read he would have to develop a moderate, well reasoned, and mild writing style. You'll never read one of his books and come away thinking "diatribe" or "polemic". He even writes with a recognition and acknowledgement of his own biases. He says here that "ethics is everything" and for Wilson this largely means environmental ethics, and if after reading his book, critics want to say he's a reductionist, Wilson admits he's "guilty, guilty, guilty." Wilson however is quite able to give as good as he gets and the subject of his critical penmanship is the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and their "ideological committments" and lack of a "web of causal explanation." He thus sees them as weak in comparison to the natural sciences and poor templates for explaining all we see around us. Furthermore he looks back on the Enlightenment and says that those thinkers "got it mostly right" and achieved a wholeness in contrast to what we have now where divisions in academia are "artifacts of scholarship."
My background is in economics and geography and I don't have a problem with him saying there should be more rigidity and rules in those fields of study, and I agree that there should be more environmental awareness in economics. Maybe Wilson is onto something and sociobiology as a synthesis science might be a forerunner of the blended knowledge that will finally give us a clear view of the Big Picture. Who knows? His argument does tend to falter a bit though when he grasps for the humanities and discusses the laws that might be applicable in art and philosophy. It's a tenuous grip indeed as he is unconvincing in explaining how you achieve "objective truth" by "contemplation of the unknown" which he admits is was philosophy is. And please tell me what law governs the interpretation of a work of art?
It's a fascinating book and very well written. It's obvious Wilson has done a lot of research on the subject and he's a brilliant thinker and he may be mostly right. But Einstein the great unifier himself, once said that "imagination is more important than knowledge", so i'm inclined to go with that until Wilson or someone else can prove otherwise..
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