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Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
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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.
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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.
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Product details
Hardcover: 332 pages
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (March 17, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679450777
ISBN-13: 978-0679450771
Product Dimensions:
6.6 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
148 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#121,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
In this seminal and ambitious book, professor EO Wilson works to show the need and lays the foundation for the integration of the sciences and the humanities -- a principle he calls consilience. Wilson sees the soloed nature of knowledge as an error of modern and postmodern academic institutions. Then this Harvard professor points the way toward a more holistic view. It is gratifying to see this vision come alive in books such as The Happiness Hypothesis and the works of Malcolm Gladwell, as well as many progressive organizations and insitutions.Wilson sees four major areas of study that need to be integrated: (1) Environmental Policy; (2) Ethics; (3) Social Science; (4) Biology. He makes the case for a return to valuing empirical scientific research as a key to this integration, and he sees postmodern relativism as the primary threat. He defines science as " the organized systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condense the knowledge into testable laws and principles."He further says "the love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science;" and additionally, Wilson says "science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science." Despite his loathing of postmodern relativism he sees the need for criticism by stating that "new ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong." Neither is Wilson a blind advocate for science, and he states clearly that new scientific discoveries lead to new challenges. Thus the need for an interplay between art and science.Wilson sees original scientific discovery as a key to progress, and he celebrates researchers who venture out (for the chances of success are always slim). The qualities he sees as necessary for this journey include the possession of great knowledge and the courage to follow obsessive quests. Within this voyage of discovery, Wilson points to the study of complex systems as the most important focus and pressing need.The social sciences are more complex than the physical sciences according to Wilson, and he laments the lack of interaction by these two camps. Then he goes on for a good bit to criticize sociologists, with good reason. Economists also draw his fire for arrogance and overly simplistic models that, for example, considers the natural environment as an "externality" to an economic system. What Wilson does see the need for models that are simple, widely applicable, congruent with other disciplines, and predictive.This review just scratches the surface of the awesome book. Throughout the pages EO Wilson expounds on observations, hypotheses, theories and laws that cover both the sciences and the humanities. And he closes the book with an impassioned plea to work toward solutions to limit the destruction of our natural environment.The principles of consilience are applicable across most organizations and disciplines. In my work as a marketing consultant I see soloed specialties separated by the competition for capital, budgets and status. I hear this familiar lament from colleagues in other disciplines and human endeavors. EO Wilson points the way toward a better, a more consilient, future.Consilience is a watershed book and provocative read. A singular achievement.Outliers: The Story of SuccessThe Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
Consilience, a book by biologist Edward O. Wilson, is a masterful narrative of an amazing width of topics: science history, biology, Brain Sciences, Ecology, even an eloquant crticism of Post Modernism. In this book, Wilson proved himself one of the greatest writers of Popular science - lucid, clear, and often funny.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.
The purpose of this book is to explore the possibilities of synthesis of the various branches of study from the "hard sciences" to the arts. As can be imagined, this is a daunting task, but Wilson makes real progress in this book. We live in a complicated world, but Wilson makes a wonderful case for the ability of the human mind to make sense of it. He is at his best when he discusses the failure of the ideals of the Enlightenment, brain chemistry and the genetic connection to culture. He is less successful in connecting the natural sciences model to artistic expression.This book is a thought-provoking read and is challenging, but these are important ideas and worth devoting time and attention to exploring them. Wilson is a man of both depth and breadth of intellect and is courageous enough to use those talents to attempt to discover the possibilities of connecting our theories of various disciplines. Sure, it's speculative, but it is also amazing the power that he brings to his argument that the various areas of human understanding can be subjected to universal principles of understanding.Highly recommended!
A truly remarkable scientific and philosophic analysis of the relation of science to the humanities, of individuals to society, and the combination of both to the future of humanity and everything on our planet. Plan on spending a lot of time thinking about what Wilson presents in this book. Then when you're finished, pick up Keith Sewell's "Leaving Truth" to further stretch your perceived ideas about Knowledge.
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