Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge - Hardcover

Wilson, Edward O.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316645699 ISBN 13: 9780316645690

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

An enormous intellectual adventure. In this groundbreaking new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience--the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Professor Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world as it most profoundly, elegantly, and excitingly is.

About this title

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 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0316645699
• ISBN 13: 9780316645690
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384