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.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he has since taught, and where he has received both of its college-wide teaching awards. He is currently Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He is the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, OOn Human Nature (1978) and The Ants(1990, with Bert Hölldobler), as well as the recipient of many fellowships, honors, and awards, including the 1977 National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1990), the International Prize for Biology from Japan (1993), and, for his conservation efforts, the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (1990) and the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society (1995). He is on the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the American Museum of Natural History, and gives many lectures throughout the world. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with his wife, Irene.
"This masterfully written book is nothing less than a daring challenge to the prevailing world view. It proposes in its place a grand, coherent conception encompassing the sciences, the arts, ethics, and religion. The reader feels lifted up to a high peak from which today's fragmented intellectual landscape below can be seen, and understood, in an entirely new way."
--Gerald Holton, author of Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought
"E. O. Wilson gives us his informed, sensitive, and flat-out brilliantly balanced reflections on the prospects for human inquiry. Consilience may be just another impressive achievement for Wilson, but for the rest of us it is a bright light on a darkened path."
--Loyal D. Rue, author of By the Grace of Guile
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.
Edward O. Wilson has already had three careers and has made major contributions to knowledge in all of them. First, as an entomologist, he elucidated the intricacies of behavior and organization in ant societies. Second, as a sociobiologist, he studied the biologic basis of behavior and organization in human societies. Third, as an environmental activist, he crusaded for the preservation of the natural ecologies that human societies are rapidly destroying. With this book he has launched his fourth career, as a philosopher, attempting to assemble the many issues of concern to the human species into a unified intellectual framework. To his framework he gives the name "consilience," a word invented by the 19th-century philosopher William Whewell, which is derived from a Latin word meaning "jumping together." Consilience is "a `jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation."
The book is a major contribution to philosophy, whether you agree with it or not. It brings together a rich diversity of ideas and stories, some of them arising from Wilson's professional activities in his three previous careers, others from his omnivorous reading. The 20 pages of end notes provide an annotated guide to a vast literature covering science, history, art, and philosophy. The 12 chapters of the book survey all these areas and many more. Wilson's purpose is to tie them all together into a package, with science serving as the string.
His central theme is the assertion that science can provide a firm foundation and a unified basis for ethics, religion, art, and the regulation of human society. Once we reach a scientific understanding of the biologic origins of religious and cultural quarrels, we shall be able to reconcile our differences and solidify our agreements. All men are brothers, and all women sisters, as seen through the impartial eye of science. The extension of scientific understanding to include the whole of human culture will bring with it an erosion of barriers, a unification of the human species, and a deepened respect for our natural environment.
This is a great and noble vision, portrayed with eloquence and passion. The vistas that Wilson sees lying ahead of us, if we share his faith in the all-embracing wisdom of science, are entrancing. The book, as a statement of the faith of an outstanding scientist and an outstanding human being, is exciting to read. It is full of insights gleaned from Wilson's encyclopedic knowledge of ants and humans. Everyone should read it. And yet, I have to confess that I came to the end of the book unconvinced. Although I admire the vision, I cannot share it. To me, the vision is too tidy. It has too much of the flavor of Plato's republic or More's Utopia, societies ruled by benevolent intellectuals with little tolerance for rebellious spirits.
Wilson's view of human nature is narrow, and his view of science is hierarchical. He has little to say about medicine and law, the two professions that lie on the border between scientific rigor and practical wisdom. He writes with undisguised contempt for the many practitioners of the social sciences -- psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics -- who try to understand human behavior without reducing it to biology. He wishes to squeeze the whole of human knowledge into a reductionist mold, reducing ethics and religion to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics. Being a physicist myself, I know how poorly physics is suited to be the root of the tree of knowledge.
It may well be that Wilson is right and I am wrong. The questions that the book raises are important, whether Wilson's answers turn out to be right or not. I hope his answers are wrong, because I value the diversity of culture more highly than the unity of science, the rebelliousness of people more highly than the consilience of ideas. To me, science is only one of many ways of exploring the human landscape, without any overriding authority over the others. In the end, the future will decide who is right. Meanwhile, you should read this book and make up your own minds.
Reviewed by Freeman Dyson
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.
chapter 1
The Ionian Enchantment
I remember very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning. It was in the early fall of 1947, when at eighteen I came up from Mobile to Tuscaloosa to enter my sophomore year at the University of Alabama. A beginning biologist, fired by adolescent enthusiasm but short on theory and vision, I had schooled myself in natural history with field guides carried in a satchel during solitary excursions into the woodlands and along the freshwater streams of my native state. I saw science, by which I meant (and in my heart I still mean) the study of ants, frogs, and snakes, as a wonderful way to stay outdoors.
My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.
I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of A Field Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.
Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.
The thin volume in the plain blue cover was one of the New Synthesis works, uniting the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory of evolution and modern genetics. By giving a theoretical structure to natural history, it vastly expanded the Linnaean enterprise. A tumbler fell somewhere in my mind, and a door opened to a new world. I was enthralled, couldn't stop thinking about the implications evolution has for classification and for the rest of biology. And for philosophy. And for just about everything. Static pattern slid into fluid process. My thoughts, embryonically those of a modern biologist, traveled along a chain of causal events, from mutations that alter genes to evolution that multiplies species, to species that assemble into faunas and floras. Scale expanded, and turned continuous. By inwardly manipulating time and space, I found I could climb the steps in biological organization from microscopic particles in cells to the forests that clothe mountain slopes. A new enthusiasm surged through me. The animals and plants I loved so dearly reentered the stage as lead players in a grand drama. Natural history was validated as a real science.
I had experienced the Ionian Enchantment. That recently coined expression I borrow from the physicist and historian Gerald Holton. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences--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. Its roots go back to Thales of Miletus, in Ionia, in the sixth century b.c. The legendary philosopher was considered by Aristotle two centuries later to be the founder of the physical sciences. He is of course remembered more concretely for his belief that all matter consists ultimately of water. Although the notion is often cited as an example of how far astray early Greek speculation could wander, its real significance is the metaphysics it expressed about the material basis of the world and the unity of nature.
The Enchantment, growing steadily more sophisticated, has dominated scientific thought ever since. In modern physics its focus has been the unification of all the forces of nature--electroweak, strong, and gravitation--the hoped-for consolidation of theory so tight as to turn the science into a "perfect" system of thought, which by sheer weight of evidence and logic is made resistant to revision. But the spell of the Enchantment extends to other fields of science as well, and in the minds of a few it reaches beyond into the social sciences, and still further, as I will explain later, to touch the humanities. The idea of the unity of science is not idle. It has been tested in acid baths of experiment and logic and enjoyed repeated vindication. It has suffered no decisive defeats. At least not yet, even though at its center, by the very nature of the scientific method, it must be thought always vulnerable. On this weakness I will also expand in due course.
Einstein, the architect of grand unification in physics, was Ionian to the core. That vision was perhaps his greatest strength. In an early letter to his friend Marcel Grossmann he said, "It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things." He was referring to his successful alignment of the microscopic physics of capillaries with the macroscopic, universe-wide physics of gravity. In later life he aimed to weld everything else into a single parsimonious system, space with time and motion, gravity with electromagnetism and cosmology. He approached but never captured that grail. All scientists, Einstein not excepted, are children of Tantalus, frustrated by the failure to grasp that which seems within reach. They are typified by those thermodynamicists who for decades have drawn ever closer to the temperature of absolute zero, when atoms cease all motion. In 1995, pushing down to within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, they created a Bose-Einstein condensate, a fundamental form of matter beyond the familiar gases, liquids, and solids, in which many atoms act as a single atom in one quantum
state. As temperature drops and pressure is increased, a gas condenses into a liquid, then a solid; then appears the Bose-Einstein condensate. But absolute, entirely absolute zero, a temperature that exists in imagination, has still not been attained.
On a far more modest scale, I found it a wonderful feeling not just to taste the unification metaphysics but also to be released from the confinement of fundamentalist religion. I had been raised a Southern Baptist, laid backward under the water on the sturdy arm of a pastor, been born again. I knew the healing power of redemption. Faith, hope, and charity were in my bones, and with millions of others I knew that my savior Jesus Christ would grant me eternal life. More pious than the average teenager, I read the Bible cover to cover, twice. But now at college, steroid-driven into moods of adolescent rebellion, I chose to doubt. I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago. I suffered cognitive dissonance between the cheerfully reported genocidal wars of these people and Christian civilization in 1940s Alabama. It seemed to me that the Book of Revelation might be black magic hallucinated by an ancient primitive. And I thought, surely a loving personal God, if He is paying attention, will not abandon those who reject the literal interpretation of the biblical cosmology. It is only fair to award points for intellectual courage. Better damned with Plato and Bacon, Shelley said, than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus. But most of all, Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men though they were, be mistaken? It was all too much, and freedom was ever so sweet. I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist no more.
Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large.
Such, I believe, is the source of the Ionian Enchantment: Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course--a stoic's creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook to adventure plotted across rough terrain. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind. I...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
FREE shipping within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speedsSeller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00086970482
Quantity: 6 available
Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Condition: Acceptable. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00067450736
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: Orion Tech, Kingwood, TX, U.S.A.
hardcover. Condition: Fair. Seller Inventory # 0679450777-4-31824545
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: ZBK Books, Carlstadt, NJ, U.S.A.
Condition: acceptable. Used book - May contain writing, notes, highlighting, bends or folds. Text is readable, book is clean, and pages and cover mostly intact. May show normal wear and tear. Item may be missing CD. May include library marks. Fast Shipping. Seller Inventory # ZWM.R18B
Quantity: 1 available
Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. Good condition. Very Good dust jacket. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included. Seller Inventory # Z04J-00629
Quantity: 2 available
Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.
Condition: Very Good. Very Good condition. Very Good dust jacket. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. Seller Inventory # P05B-03333
Quantity: 2 available
Seller: Better World Books: West, Reno, NV, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. 1st. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # GRP105231961
Quantity: 5 available
Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. 1st. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # GRP105231961
Quantity: 5 available
Seller: Better World Books: West, Reno, NV, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. 1st. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # GRP102278212
Quantity: 3 available
Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.
Condition: Good. 1st. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # GRP102278212
Quantity: 2 available