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Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge Hardcover – March 17, 1998
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length332 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAlfred A. Knopf
- Publication dateMarch 17, 1998
- Dimensions6.75 x 1.25 x 10 inches
- ISBN-100679450777
- ISBN-13978-0679450771
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Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Scientific American
From The New England Journal of Medicine
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.
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From Kirkus Reviews
Review
"As elegant in its prose as it is rich in its ideas...a book of immense importance." --Atlanta Journal & Constitution
"Edward O. Wilson is a hero. . . he has made landmark scientific discoveries and has a writing style to die for. . . . A complex and nuanced argument." --Boston Globe
"One of the clearest and most dedicated popularizers of science since T. H. Huxley ...Mr. Wilson can do the science and the prose." --Time
"An excellent book. Wilson provides superb overviews of Western intellectual history and the current state of understanding in many academic disciplines." Slate
"The Renaissance scholar still lives.... A sensitive, wide-ranging mind discoursing beautifully.... Wilson's buoyant intellectual courage is bracing." --Seattle Weekly
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
--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
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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...
Product details
- Publisher : Alfred A. Knopf; First Edition (March 17, 1998)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 332 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679450777
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679450771
- Item Weight : 1.55 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 1.25 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #109,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #46 in Epistemology Philosophy
- #3,009 in Schools & Teaching (Books)
- #5,830 in Science & Math (Books)
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About the author
Regarded as one of the world’s preeminent biologists and naturalists, Edward O. Wilson grew up in south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where he spent his boyhood exploring the region’s forests and swamps, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants—the latter to become his lifelong specialty. The author of more than twenty books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Ants" and "The Naturalist" as well as his first novel "Anthill," Wilson, a professor at Harvard, makes his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.
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Wilson's has seen how profoundly consilience has altered biological science in his lifetime. And he argues in this book that a lot of other fields of endeavor might be improved by an analogous transformation: psychology, economics, sociology, and the arts. He makes a number of very intersting points.
The biggest conceptual problem I have with the book is that Wilson skates around the problems of knowability. He views the world as being ultimately knowable. But those who have a bit of knowledge about quantum physics, turbulent fluid flow, Goedel's incompleteness theorem, or chaos theory understand that many systems that can be described with great accuracy cannot be predicted very well. There's a lot that we cannot know. It's not very clear how consilience's bound's are affected by this limit, for Wilson does not go there.
But this is not a problem that should ever keep someone from reading the book. Wilson's knowledge is deep and wide. His reasoning is lucid, his prose articulate. It might be a slight exaggeration to say the book is a steady stream of quotable passages on biology, science, art, knowledge, ethics, religion, and culture; but only a slight one. Almost eighty post-it notes mark the passages in my own copy that I find worthy of quotation. And I'm a very tough critic. This is a monumental book that is mandatory reading for any person who cares about how science might inform any of a host of other human endeavors.
There are few areas of human study left untouched by WIlson's analysis. Most of it is hopeful and optimistic; but Wilson airs a number of concerns in the last chapter. Here he talks about the biological future of man and how it is limited by resources. He recounts peaks we have already passed, such as the peak in food production in 1987. He shows how burgeoning populations in the face of limited resources either collapse entirely (the model described by Diamond ) or go through the throes of murderous wars ( the Rwanda model described here) . The final chapter seems to say "Consilience is important. It is crucially important to every field of endeavor. And if we trace population dynamics back to the fundamental laws using ideas from consilience, we will soon discover that this field of study more than any other desparately needs the illuminating effects offered by this approach. Like a pack of hyenas eying a single child on the savannah at dusk, the problems are staring at us. They are undeniable. They will not go away. The longer we turn our back on them, the more desperately we risk losing everything to them."
Some of these topic.S I've heard write about by him already.Depending on which books you've read, but he does a good job of delving into history and going all the way back to the ancients for introduction.He then moves on to more in depth topics.The book is not too thick that you're discouraged but there's enough content and depth in there to keep your attention.
But Consilience is more than just a popular science book. It is a call for a new kind of science - a unified discipline, a thread of knowledge leading from physics, through the key element of biological evolution, to the social sciences and even the humanities, art, religion, and the ecology.
In a sense, Consilience is very similar to Daniel Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Both books deal with a huge array of items, also categorized as a chain leading from Physics to Ethics (and, in Dennet's case to God - or to the inexsistence of God. Wilson, more modest, stops at religion, and leaves a place for some sort of a deity in his cosmology). Ultimately, although Wilson's prose is superior, and some of his ideas are wonderful (especially early in the book. I loved the suggestion that Logical Positivism can be saved through biological information on how the brain works. There is a paradox there, but it is an approach to the question I never considered), Dennet's book is more considered and is the better of the two.
The reason for that is, as a scientific program, rather than as an ideology, Consilience doesn't hold water. First, the term is incredibly unclear. Sometimes, in its strong form, Consilience really is a call for one science, explaining a phenomena in all levels, from the human action to the evolutionary explanation for this phenomena, and finally to the physics behind the biology.
But one is struck by how little Wilson actually explains through this. His examples are remarkably minor. He can trace dreaming about Snakes to old world primates innate fear, and he explains which color words will be more frequant then others (black and white tend to be higher up the hirarchy then Orange - hmm), but no explanation to any discrete historical event is ever offered. Does Consilience, in this strong regard, has anything to say about Keyensian economics? Can you trace the fall of the Weimar republic back to physics? Do we understand Hitchcock's movies better through an evolutionary perspective on human motives like greed and love? I don't think so.
Then, sometimes consilience means only that different disciplines should engage in dialogue. There's nothing objectionable in that, but it is far from tearing down the discipline barriers. And it is constantly done anyway - the latest winner of the Noble price in economics won it for work in psychology.
Wilson's Consilience keeps switching between these two extremes. Part of the problem, in my view, is that Wilson over emphasizes the links between the different levels of explanation. In particular, in the 'nature vs. nurture', debate, Wilson clearly believes everything is in the genes.
Wilson constantly denies that he believes in genetic determinism. Strictly speaking, that is true, but if Wilson closes a door by allowing for culture, he opens a window by talking about predisposition - human culture works based on preexisting biological directions ("epigenetic rules") - it intensifies and elaborates them, but rarely or never ignores them. That's an interesting twist, but it amounts to little but a longer road to the same destination.
Ultimately, the greatest problem I had with Consilience is that it isn't pragmatic. Yes, Unity is a wonderful thing (and despite my reservations, I tend to agree to that), but how do we get there? Wilson offers very little concrete steps. At the end, Consilience leaves you with a vivid description of the impending ecologic crisis, and a warm fuzzy feeling that consilience can solve it - but with very little about how consilience will be achieved, or indeed, what it means exactly.
I don't want to end my review in such a sour note. Wilson's prose is powerful, and he is a fascinating thinker. Even if I don't agree with him, the vision is provocative and fascinating, and in a sense, that is the greatest compliment possible.