Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge By Edward O. Wilson

Here are some disparate musings:

If you are really good at manufacturing, you can basically make, at high volume, anything for a cost that asymptotically approaches the real raw material value of the constituents plus any intellectual property. Take for instance the Fleshlight, a ubiquitous household appliance which, as the name might suggest, illuminates the umbral darkness of sexual frustration and serves as a safety net for blind, flagellum propelled, sex cells which originate in the testes (i.e. Michael Phelps). This is a bad example, I’m sorry. But for those curious, perhaps some research into mineral oils and rubber polymers is in order. However, consider this innocuously garbed, cock-snuggy from another perspective: You’re giving the thing hell and your significant other surprises you by coming home early from work. You turn to them and say, “You see, this device has the curious ability to moderate my sensual appetite in a fascinatingly implacable way, to put it mercifully.” Sensing that your mate is still suffering through significant bewilderment, you clarify the issue, “Assembly theory compares how complex a given object is as function of the number of independent parts and their abundances. To calculate how complex an item is, it is recursively divided into its component parts. The 'assembly index' is defined as the shortest path to put the object back together.” Surreptitiously removing your cooling member from the Stoya Destroya. “This gives us a way to characterize the complexity of a thing in a experimentally verifiable way, unlike other molecular complexity algorithms which lack experimental measure.” Clearing your throat and sheathing your saber. “Complex molecules require many steps to be synthesized. And the more steps are required to synthesize a particular molecule, the more likely it is of a biological (or technological) origin. For example, the word 'abracadabra' consists of 5 different letters and is 11 symbols long. It can be assembled from its constituents as a + b --> ab + r --> abr + a --> abra + c --> abrac + a --> abraca + d --> abracad + abra --> abracadabra, because 'abra' was already constructed at an earlier stage. Because this requires 7 steps, the assembly index is 7. The string ���abcdefghijk’ has no repeats so has an assembly index of 10.” Sweat forms on your brow as your partner remains unmoved, causing you to nervously turn and raise your arms until you’ve adopted an immaculate T-Pose, at which point you say, with the kind of solemnity expressed by total strangers at the death of a celebrity, “This is consilience.”

When a portion of the intestinal tract is reeled through the proximal aperture of your sewage system (i.e. your asshole) with the force of Ishmael (a professional bass fisherman) cranking as if high on methaqualone (i.e. quaaludes) and screaming at his unrequited quarry, “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering bass; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! And since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned bass! Thus, I give up the Hamachi XOS GT’n’Doggie Expedition Series Rod with SHIMANO Force Master 400 Electric Fishing Reel!” It is referred to as transanal evisceration. Following the first report of transanal evisceration by Brodie in 1827, more than 70 cases have been reported to date, the majority occurring spontaneously in elderly individuals. Straining, chronic constipation, rectal ulcerations, being ran over by a church van, and crossing the event horizon of a Black Hole, predispose to spontaneous perforation in this demographic. This has also occurred, several times, when an unfortunate soul loitered at the bottom of a pool with the distal terminus of their digestive system (i.e. their asshole) next to a uncovered drain, resulting in a tremendous eruption of giblets from their fargin’ shytehole (e.g. their asshole) (as up to 700 pounds of pressure holds them fast in what is known, scientifically, as: “suction entrapment”), and extrudes their vitals into the epoxy resin casing of the pipe like a giant sausage, requiring a lifetime of parenteral nutrition (i.e. wearing a Fenwick Liquid Titanium Therapeutic Horse Mask) [fact check needed] if survived, and a coat hanger for their sagging epidermal tissues if fatal. This is consilience.

It is interesting to think that, war, with all its attendant ghastliness, has served as a type of formatting device for future civilizational advancement after periods of ossification. With no method of clearing the bureaucratic plaque which accumulates in the creative arteries of all technologically advanced civilizations, do these layers of cholesterol eventually constrict the lifeblood of innovation until an erasure is precipitated? Perhaps, even now, within my brand-spankin-new, Nonvolatile Memory Express Drive (i.e. a next generation solid-state drive that delivers the highest throughput and fastest response times yet for all types of enterprise workloads by utilizing microscopic seraphim who were discovered dancing on the heads of pens) [Dubious] a virtual war rages over proper partitioning protocols, as pornographic data rains down upon fractal circuits like a biblical deluge of medical grade silicon, and binary pairs flee Ark-Ward to radiate renewed speciations from Mount Ararat. This is consilience.

The brain does a crazy amount of post processing on the vision signals from your eyes. Your brain is constantly trying to forget as much as possible. Memory is expensive and limited. It distills the things that you see into the smallest amount of information possible. It’s trying to not just get to a vector space, but get to a vector space that is the smallest possible vector space of only relevant objects. Two mediocre cameras on a slow gimbal have been charged with your survival, and so if your brain fails to parse the data of a gorilla dribbling a basketball, it’s only because you can’t be trusted with the calibration of your own attention, (much as you’re far too inept to oversee the rhythmic contraction of your cardiac tissues). You’re too stupid, you see. Too prone to wade the attentional thickets of extraneous detail while some beast avails itself of graceful predation in order to embed its natural weaponry in your Brown Pontiac (i.e. your asshole). This is consilience.

Have you ever, upon being drawn inexorably into the sundry notions of GR’s resident fuck-about, corkscrewed your indexical digit into the heart of a piping hot dinner roll, and, having finger-banged a subduction zone of molten yeast vapors, affixed the loaf-specimen to the portcullis of your enamel dungeon (i.e. your gob), before inhaling swiftly and severely in a kind-of Wim Hof Hyperbaric Wheat-Oxygen Therapy, excoriating your mucosa with thermally agitated comestible particulates and causing your consciousness to lurch violently away from the oversimplified simulacra that passes before your eyes like the tenebrous sock puppets which populate Plato’s Grotto (e.g. reality), whilst you initiate a violent upheaval of the night’s dinner arrangements by clobbering the table with your knees and belly, throwing your chair backwards in the neuromuscular deployment of a rapid vertical orientation, disfiguring the once artful presentation of Authentic Hungarian Goulash, ripping the pearlescent tablecloth as you pirouette towards the nearest window, wrapping yourself in the culinary garment like a philosopher king, inadvertently tripping over the raised hackles of the family tabby as you continue to suck down dough-driven convection currents, wreathed in a miasma of haunted bakeries, your frontal lobes rushing forward behind a phalanx of calcified soldiers (i.e. your asshole) [Correction: Your forehead] and battering a rectilinear, non-crystalline, amorphous solid in one violent motion, shattering this transparent human artifice and tumbling into the night with your final declaration stretching to grip the ledge of the balcony as the Doppler Effect shifts your voice an entire octave, “Thiiiiiiiiiisssss isssssssssss consilienceeeeeeeeeeeee!”

So how do these things relate, and what exactly is consilience? You may ask. To the first I say, “Fuck if I know. Although we can be certain that all these events carved channels of causality through a space-time which circumscribes what is possible, and thus none have blasphemed against the deep physical principles of the cosmos.” To the second I say, “It is a concept which stands in defiance of those stodgy gatekeepers who hold their individual disciplines sacrosanct and dare not pollute their sacred methodologies with pertinent tools adjacent to their narrow expertise. And make no mistake, it is with purpose that I reference the space of all possible knowledge in terms of physical proximity, for it is the contention of this new way of thinking that the boundaries between specializations have not been drawn by nature, but by man, and these arbitrary divisions obscure this central truth; all endeavors of the human mind are deeply interconnected. Different disciplines explore different regions of reality, the unity of knowledge (the subtitle of the book) represents the attempt to merge those disciplinary perspectives, and everything from art to mechanical engineering would benefit from the conjunction of these spheres. Although it is reasonable to suspect that interdisciplinary marriages between say, cosmology and plumbing, would not fruitfully multiply, Wilson had this to say, “The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, 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, so go look up Leonard Susskind, and then go fuck yourself.” (citation needed). 9780679768678 At first, I wasn't sure I liked Consilience. E.O. Wilson is frank about his disdain for philosophy, a literary genre I enjoy, and it seemed to me that he might be one of those brash scientists who writes off everything that isn't science as old-fashioned nonsense. I suppose that characterization isn't entirely unfair; but Wilson has thought about it a lot and makes the case in a nuanced and interesting way. At the very least, he presents a useful target for the philosopher who wants to defend his subject from the attacks of reductionism and scientism. Refute Wilson, and you'll find most of the other guys easy.

Reductionism is often presented as a bad thing, but Wilson spends a large part of the book arguing that when correctly used it isn't just good, it's indispensible. A distinguished biologist born in 1929, he watched from the front row as quantum mechanics reduced chemistry to physics, then as DNA reduced biology to chemistry. He knows the details and is well aware of the problems involved. Of course each level of structure is hard to describe usefully in terms of the one below. Of course the higher level always presents emergent phenomena that hardly even seem to make sense at the lower level (you don't discuss software bugs in terms of the motion of electrons). But at the same time, the coherence - or, as he likes to say, consilience - of the different levels adds enormous power. It may at first seem out of the question to think about the behavior of living creatures as a chemical process. But once you've invested the necessary person-millennia of work and sequenced the human genome, it no longer comes across as ridiculous. There are pieces of DNA, that create proteins, that have effects on the body. You can trace all the links and conclude that a specific piece of molecular structure causes a specific disease; then you can design gene therapies to attack that disease.

The reductionist program has been stunningly effective in all the hard sciences. Geologists use physics to quantify the mechanisms of plate tectonics, cosmologists to explain the history and structure of the whole universe. Wilson's central claim in this book is that we now have to take the next step and extend it to the soft sciences. Economics, ethical philosophy and literary theory are all products of human thought, and are typically analyzed as depending only on human thought. But human thought depends on the human brain, which belongs to the realm of biology. There must be a bridge which goes from biology, through neuropsychology, to ethics: it must in principle be possible to analyse ethical behavior as a biological phenomenon. Wilson is an expert on ants; he gives detailed examples of how the program works there, and how the behavior of ant society can be broken down into the study of the chemicals individual ants use to communicate with each other. Of course, human society is enormously more complex. But just because the task is very difficult, there's no reason to give up and say it's impossible. In 1916, the reduction of biology to chemistry would have seemed at least as difficult. A century later, DNA splicing is mainstream technology.

The most surprising thing about the book is that one expects Wilson's underlying message to be cold and inhuman, but as it approached the final chapters I found the exact opposite was true. Critical decisions in the world are usually made by politicians who have received their training in the humanities, in disciplines that are not grounded in the empirical sciences. They are as a result cut off from the underlying biological reality, from empirical understanding of living creatures as they really are. As Hume pointed out over two centuries ago, conventional ethical reasoning is grounded in abstractions that have only a tenuous connection to the feelings of real people. In the same way, modern economics models human agents in terms of simplistic folk psychology, assumptions about rational decision-making that have little to do with the way people actually think. There is even less attempt made to model the complex ecosystems in which these humans are embedded. It's not hard to believe that some of the very bad decisions made by politicians and economists are due to the conceptual isolation in which they have placed themselves.

I find it difficult to make up my mind about Consilience. There is something naively utopian about it, and I am not sure that it will necessarily be a good thing to continue extending the empirical reductionist program until it reaches the human sciences. Maybe it will help us better see ourselves as part of the world's biosphere and stop destroying it; unfortunately, it seems at least as likely that it will just give the ruling elite more efficient ways to manipulate us. But there's no doubt that the book's worth reading. This should measurably change your view of the big picture. 9780679768678 I was shelving in western philosophy the other week (I don't really have a choice against eavesdropping on bookstore conversations, and they're pretty much all inane to the point of inflicting brain atrophy on the listener, i.e. me). As I walked down the aisle with a handful of Wittgenstein, a customer approached. Sure enough he had a lame excuse for a beard, and deliberately mussed-up hair atop his excessively squinty facial constitution; fucking college kids. As I looked down I saw, of all things, a pristine Black Flag sweatshirt (as in, like, not a hoodie). I sigh; one that seems to have echoed in my head for the past month or so as a sort of mechanical reaction to the rich tapestry of assholes and contrived eccentrics that color my retail-working existence. He says that he's looking for a sort-of-general-introduction to philosophy. I don't want to be a complete asshole myself, but I hate this sort of question. I'm not really big on giving book recommendations in general, only because I've had nothing but miserable experiences with customers and the act of offering my own intellectual honesty regarding what they should read. So, I tell him that they would be shelved in philosophy anthologies. Of course, he attempts to sound somewhat snarky - the part which basically makes no sense to me - telling me that he is looking for an introduction. I sigh again, explaining why that would be shelved in anthologies. Then I make a passive attempt to placate him by recommending Bertrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy in the most sincere way possible, explaining that it's really funny and informative. Anyway, that's what I read, back when I gave a shit. Now he's changing his story though because he proceeds to ask me if there is any political philosophy in it. I feel inclined to say yes, and explain how and why, but my brain is seriously upset at this point and I just point him in the direction of general politics in the next aisle. He disappointedly intones, OK thanks. I'm happy to clean my hands of the entire interaction though. I ask myself, Who the fuck wears a Black Flag sweatshirt anyway, Neal Pollack?.

My days are full of interactions like this. It's not annoying that he was asking for help, and because I'm too hep to want to help a clueless tool like that. It's because, about eight years from now, that kid will probably be polluting a lecture hall with a bunch of made up bullshit about dialectical materialism and Gramscian hegemony. He'll do it effortlessly too because he isn't very bright, but he's confusing an artistic temperament with a desire to exercise serious critical thinking in order to solve incredibly ornate social issues, so he'll probably do just fine in the philosophy department. I'm assuming all of this because, as I mentioned, I was eavesdropping, and I was hearing a lot of not-so-confidently stated gibberish about Heidegger's methodology of phenomenology and something supposedly profound that his professor said about it. In other words, his professor said something profound about Heidegger basically saying something profound about perception that Heidegger stole from Husserl, or some bullshit. And believe me folks, it's bullshit. It just sounds profound, but profundity should never really cost that much. Most academic profundity is a complicated version of a street proverb dipped in gold. Fucking Black Flag sweatshirt?

I'm making sweeping generalizations about continental philosophy here. Feel free to call me out, but I've no delusions about what I'm doing. In fact, I feel entitled to make them because I can empirically explain some popular motives for getting into seriously complicated philosophical doctrines. I suffered from this same desire to alienate and condescend every person I came across, even if I knew for a fact that they were considerably smarter than myself. Reading philosophy, more specifically philosophy in the convoluted tradition of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, etc, is sort of a notoriously popular shortcut to sounding intelligent. Not only is a majority of philosophy concerned with mental abstractions, metaphysical paradox, and unsolvable ethical dilemmas, which sounds like enough of a waste of time. There is also no way of scientifically testing a majority of the theoretical propositions that most heavy philosophy puts forth. Add to that, the fact that a lot of it - most specifically the tradition that I'm attacking here - is couched in such a dense, made-up vernacular, that the interpretations of what so and so really said are basically as endless as that of what Jackson Pollock's paintings were really trying to say. This should all seem fairly obvious, but I've come across far too many mentalities that are as serious about some of these ideas as some people are about the law of gravity. It just doesn't add up.

It does, however, sound appealing if you fashion yourself an intellectual, but have a bad memory and even poorer critical thinking skills. When I started working at the ole' bookstore, I was more than ready to become this self-styled, autodidactic intellectual. I wanted to be a leftist, spouting everything I knew about Lukacs that he knew about Marx. I attempted to pontificate on Kant's categorical imperative, on Derrida's notion of difference, and Nietzsche's call for philosophers to philosophize with a hammer. I thought I came close to understanding Zizek. Shit, I thought that had come such a long way from digging Plato's cave allegory. I thought that all of these ideas and tidbits of information were practical and useful knowledge that I would eventually be payed to write about. I alienated people, I talked about James Joyce a lot. I drank too much, and slept surrounded by partially read books. I also felt terribly scatterbrained half of the time, and luckily I never came across anyone (such as my older self, or any other reasonable intellect) who was willing to wittily put me in my place.

So, anyway, the thing about pontificating about Kant or Zizek is that even if someone is familiar with half of the esoteric phrases that you are randomly connecting and explaining, they couldn't logically criticize you for articulating shameless intellectual fallacies because their opposing take on it, at best, is really just a difference of opinion. Mathematical algorithms on the other hand, are pretty much set in stone. The table of elements; not much room for improvisation. You can't argue what the labor value of any given human organ is, or if one species of canine is socially oppressed by the other. Neuronal signaling is not an abstract mechanism in the big impressionist painting of the phenomenology of perception.

The biologist E.O. Wilson is concerned with how seriously people tend to take some of this stuff. The focal point of his polemic, in terms of philosophy (a huge part of the social sciences), is the postmodern or poststructural variety and its intentional attempt to cause intellectual anarchy by proposing ideas such as science being a social construct, all knowledge being impossible, and some pretty over the top theoretical propositions about moral and cultural relativism. In the first chapter on the Enlightenment, Wilson discusses his dream of intellectual unity, and makes mention of his rule of thumb concerning philosophy and the social sciences, To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong. Here are a few snippets on both Derrida and Foucault.

On Derrida:

Nor is it certain from Derrida's ornately obscurantist prose that he himself knows what he means. Some observers think his writing is meant as jeu d'espirit, a kind of joke. His new science of grammatology is the opposite of science, rendered in fragments with the incoherence of a dream, at once banal and fantastical. It is innocent of the science of mind and language developed elsewhere in the civilized world, rather like the pronouncements of a faith healer unaware of the location of the pancreas. He seems, in the end, to be conscious of this omission, but contents himself with the stance of Rousseau, self-professed enemy of books and writing, whose work Emile he quotes: ... the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say I too am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.

On Foucault:

To Foucault I would say, if I could (and without meaning to sound patronizing), it's not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains.

I quote Wilson on these two particular philosophers because it elucidates his theoretical project of consilience. Throughout the entire book, Wilson goes through the long list of the academic social sciences, coming up with sound reasons why many of these disciplines truly require a little consistent natural science or basic empirical observation in order to make knowledge more communicable and useful; poststructuralism is many things, but a useful theoretical application it most definitely is not. To sort of paraphrase Wilson's thoughts on the social sciences, what he is basically trying to say is that many of these texts and ideas are kind of intellectually neat, but in the end they really just make for nothing more than very eloquent reading, or possess a purely literary value, including some commentary on subjects such as politics, economics, and social interactions.

I've come to feel the same way myself. Maybe it's a sign of aging, but I've have a hard time mustering up the energy to read a really long, dense philosophical text in recent years. I'll often just choose a novel instead because it's a way of reminding myself that this is the reading that I set aside for emotional escapism. These books are for that abstract, romantic, ponderous side of me, that, despite the way this review might make me sound, is definitely still there. In other words, I'm a dreamer, but I don't sleep all of the time.

Consilience was a wonderfully enhanced wake up call to many of my thoughts regarding philosophy, the social sciences, and the invariable superiority of the natural sciences. This is just one aspect of this great book, and a big part of Wilson's proposal to create a sort of synthesis of the two academic worlds. It's a lofty one, and also one that is probably neglected by practicing scientists because, as Wilson mentions, they are mainly specialists working in esoteric fields, with far too much work on their hands to dedicate any time to giving such a theoretical project much consideration at all. As for academics working in social science departments, they clearly wouldn't want to be involved because the notion of consilience, in essence, really utilizes a majority of the methods and approaches of the natural sciences to explore more complicated and abstract social concerns, thus eliminating the role that the actual sociologist or philosopher plays at this point. I actually have a few friends (ones who I disagree with a lot) with graduate degrees in social science departments who typically scoff at me when I mention Wilson's name, or the concept of sociobiology. That, in and of itself, is an entirely different Pandora's Box that I'd rather not crack open right now.

I've focused on one aspect of this wonderful book, but aside from its central thesis, there is so much practical information on evolution, neuroscience, biology, and basic intellectual history, to be gleaned from it. Not everyone will agree with Wilson; especially the sociologist, anthropologist, political scientist, or philosopher. However, those that are willing to acknowledge the inherent faults of the social sciences while embracing their value as mere earnest reflections on terribly complex social issues with no conceivable answers, will enjoy Consilience as a sort of canonical statement of intellectual honesty spread across several disciplines. None of this is to suggest that philosophy is a waste of time. It can truly be a lot of fun, but there seems to be a large crowd of readers out there who just aren't willing to admit how flawed it can be. That or they're just not curious enough about the natural world to want to read anything other than a bunch of esoteric babbling about the essence of their own being. In other words, life is too short to be a douchebag. I found this out the hard way, though I can say that I do know better than to wear a fucking Black Flag sweatshirt. 9780679768678 The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, 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 is an obvious truth, and the fact that so many people passionately object to it tells us more about society than science. Some are committed to the numinous, where an ineffable presence guides humankind without reference to the physical processes of life. On a more practical, if not cynical, level many adherents of the soft sciences got there because they could not hack calculus, and are not kindly disposed to Wilson’s argument that their chosen fields of study could be improved with a better grounding in mathematics.

The book’s central theme is the relatedness of all knowledge, from physics to psychology. For those who don’t see the connection, consider this:

The etiology of culture wends its way torturously from the genes through the brain and senses to learning and social behavior. What we inherit are neurobiological traits that cause us to see the world in a particular way and to learn certain behaviors in preference to other behaviors. The genetically inherited traits are not memes, not units of culture, but rather the propensity to invent and transmit certain kinds of these elements of memory in preference to others.

Accepting this idea would add some rigor to the social sciences, which are notoriously squishy in terms of their underlying scientific background. It is easy to see why Wilson’s premise has met with such determined resistance and ridicule from those who have made their careers building ever more complicated theories of mind and society that do not take biology, chemistry, or physics into account. The deconstructionists and postmodernists, in particular, seem to bring nothing to the discussion but clever nihilism, asserting that all knowledge is contingent, all theories nothing but social constructs.

Despite the opposition, science continues to move toward Wilson’s vision of consilience. Biology today is incomprehensible without chemistry, and chemistry relies on physics to make sense of its data. Geologists, cosmologists, and many other branches of science are equally dependent on the recognition and acceptance of the fundamental forces at work. As time goes by the realization of this underlying unity may spread to the softer sciences as well. Consider how much ink and blood have been shed over the idea of free will as a metaphysical construct, and then see how Wilson brings it down to earth with a few empirical observations:

The hidden preparation of mental activity gives the illusion of free will. We make decisions for reasons we often sense only vaguely, and seldom if ever understand fully. Ignorance of this kind is conceived by the conscious mind as uncertainty to be resolved; hence freedom of choice is ensured. An omniscient mind with total commitment to pure reason and fixed goals would lack free will. Even the gods, who grant that freedom to men and show displeasure when they choose foolishly, avoid assuming such nightmarish power.

Another reason that Wilson’s view is gaining ground is simply that the nature of science is changing, from how much you know to how well you can interpret what you know. “Profession-bent students should be helped to understand that in the twenty-first century the world will not be run by those who possess mere information alone. Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis.”

The book was published in 1999, and not all of Wilson’s predictions have come true. In one case, he repeats the now discredited geneticists’ maxim OGOD, One Gene One Disease. Further understanding of the genome has proven that not to be the case at all, which explains why, for all the understanding of genetics that we have gained over the past two decades, we still have a long way to go in identifying the root causes, much less finding cures, for many DNA-based diseases.

This is, nevertheless, a brilliant book, a masterful account of how science is moving toward a greater convergence of knowledge and understanding. Those social scientists who continue to reject Wilson’s thesis are whistling in the dark; unless they are prepared to add some science to their studies they will find themselves more and more detached from the kind of deep understanding which is, after all, their reason for being. 9780679768678 E. O. Wilson is one of my heroes. He is a life-long scientist with the courage to take on the deniers that his writing brings out. This book was the first of his that I came across almost 20 years ago now. What struck me was the breadth of his consideration of the scope of human discovery. His term consilience was defined as the coming together of all knowledge—the power of drawing insights from many disciplines in a era when science is increasingly compartmentalized. I especially appreciated his retracing the history of the enlightenment and the power of man's intellect. As we struggle with problems to be solved from climate change and the loss of species to political and economic unrest, we need the power of human intellect more than ever. E. O. Wilson models what this looks like. 9780679768678

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. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

for me, this was so horrible that after 100 pages i simply could not bring myself to go on. i guess this book was written for congressional staffers to read, and all the flowery language was supposed to inspire them to tell their boss to give scientists lots and lots of money.

basically, i think Wilson knows he is never going to do any good science again, so the next best thing is to write a book about how scientists (i.e. himself) are the angels of humanity.

everything is simply asserted, then the reason it's important is because he quotes some old dead guy, then the reason it's true is because he says so, and the reason it's wonderful is because he uses a few four-syllable adjectives to describe it.

and maybe the most infuriating thing is that somewhere under all the pompous claptrap, his main point is actually pretty interesting: that science and the humanities, which parted ways centuries ago, did so to their mutual detriment; that there should be a unity to all knowledge; that all types of deep intelligence come from the same mental stuff but the connections have been lost in our time, and that this causes problems in society, academia, business, government, etc.

but i hated this book. it doesn't prove a thing. 9780679768678 Gene-culture coevolution, the Ionian enchantment, dreaming is a kind of insanity, a rush of visions...

The labyrinth of the world is thus a Borgesian maze of almost infinite possibility. We can never map it all, never discover and explain everything. But we can hope to travel through the known parts swiftly, from the specific back to the general, and—in resonance with the human spirit—we can go on tracing pathways forever. We can connect threads into broadening webs of explanation, because we have been given the torch and the ball of thread. There is another defining character of consilience: It is far easier to go background through the branching corridors than to go forward.

Take the ‘edge of chaos’, one of the most frequently cited paradigms of complexity theory. It starts with the observation in a system containing perfect internal order, such as a crystal, there can be no further change. At the opposite extreme, in a chaotic system such as boiling liquid, there is very little order to change. The system that will evolve the most rapidly must fall between, and more precisely on the edge of chaos, possessing order but with the parts connected loosely enough o be easily altered either singly or in small groups.

The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, 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.

Neuron systems are directed networks, receiving and broadcasting signals. They cross-talk with other complexes to form systems of systems, in places forming a circle, like a snake catching its own tail, to create reverberating circuits. Each neuron is touched by the terminal axon branches of many other neurons, established by a kind of democratic vote whether it is to be active or silent. Using a Morselike code of staccato firing, the cell sends its own message outward to others.

Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experiences. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of sensory impressions...Consciousness consists of the parallel processing of vast numbers of such coding networks.

The etiology of culture wends its way torturously from the genes through the brain and senses to learning and social behavior. What we inherit are neurobiological traits that cause us to see the world in a particular way and to learn certain behaviors in preference to other behaviors. The genetically inherited traits are not memes, not units of culture, but rather the propensity to invent and transmit certain kinds of these elements of memory in preference to others.

Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the regularities of sensory perception and mental development that animate and channel the acquisition of culture. Culture helps to determine which of the prescribing genes survive and multiply from one generation to the next. Successful new genes alter the epigenetic rules of populations. The altered epigenetic rules change the direction and effectiveness of the channels of cultural acquisition. 9780679768678 E.O. Wilson is one of the few people in the 20th century who can actually claim to have given birth to a movement that did not disappear. His early work in Sociobiology, once roundly rejected by liberal academia, became the nucleus of the stunningly successful discipline of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s and beyond. In Consilience, Wilson sets himself the impossible task of arguing that all human knowledge can be reduced to key scientific principles. This is a somewhat different task than actually articulating those principles, but he gets a pretty good start on what they might look like. And they look a lot like evolutionary psychology.

As a humanities professor, I should probably be more offended by Wilson's reductionism than I actually am. Without a doubt, he believes that everything dear to humanists--the universal human love of literature, the drive to find meaning in religion, the desire to construct and understand our own history--can be understood through a competent understanding of biology. I don't agree, but I am intrigued nonetheless.

I don't think that Wilson's model explains, or ever can explain everything. But I think that it can and does explain a lot of things, and that is quite a task for a single book.

9780679768678 I may not have come across this remarkable book unless I read the review written by a fellow Goodreads reader, whose opinion I have come to trust. That, to me, is the greatest utility of Goodreads. Reading in an expensive activity, especially at my age. There are only so many books I can manage to read before my ability to absorb them fades away. Therefore I want to minimize the chance of reading something and then discovering it to be useless. I don’t need to agree with the author, but it is highly desirable that I am transformed in some way between the before and after. This book definitely met that criteria.

Transformative non-fictions come in two variety – books that expose some unknown intellectual territory, and books that connect things that were already known in some surprising way. This book falls in the later category. It allowed me to make better sense of my intellectual landscape, and more importantly, it covered all aspects of my curiosity, be it physical and biological sciences, philosophy, social sciences, or the arts. In fact that is the central thesis of the book.

Science, as a way of thinking, has surpassed all other modes of thinking in terms of successfully explaining the world around us. No other discipline can claim nearly as much progress in their entire history as much as achieved by science in just a few hundred years. If Plato attends a modern day academic seminar on Philosophy, once he crosses the barrier of language and terminology, should have little difficulty in following what is being said. But no such luck for a scientist from even two hundred years ago. The reason for this lies in the methodology of science. The entire body of scientific knowledge must ultimately agree with each other, no matter from which branch of science. No biological principle can contradict anything in chemistry or physics. If we find a single observation that contradicts a theory in physics then either the observation has to be proved false, or the theory is wrong, no matter how many great scientists may be involved in creating that theory. This rigor is what made science progress at the rate it has progressed.

The author wants to bring this same methodology and rigor into the humanities. He admits that the domain of humanities deals with systems and processes that are far more complex than what science deals with, and therefore, achieving similar success will be incredibly more difficult. However, that that is no reason to give up and not even try. Ultimately, all branches of humanities deals with activities of human beings, and as a creature we are bound by the same laws of physical sciences. No matter how we want to view ourselves, we cannot deny our biological self and our evolutionary history. Following this argument the author tries to establish why denying our biological nature is not only inadequate, but can actually lead to neatly self-consistent, but wrong understandings of reality.

Even though I agree with his argument, some people may find his dismissive attitude towards conceptual pillars such as Marxism, Post-modernism, and Cultural Relativism a little too harsh. I think Steven Pinker does a more thorough job of dismantling these views in many of his books. Anyone interested in this topic will probably benefit from reading this book along with Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and The Blank Slate.
9780679768678 I don't agree with the overall thesis, nor do I agree with the way the arguement is made. I am especially skeptical of Wilson's use of history and art - fields of inquiry which he seems to be grossly oversimplifying in the service of his arguement. He may well be as versed in 18th century French history or the contemporary novel as he is in science, but if so this book does not establish it. There are some truly eye-rolling moments in his discussion of the Enlightment and in his two page dismissal of post modernism - which, think what you will about the subject, is certainly worth more serious treatment than Wilson is able to give it. The sections concerned with science are obviously more interesting and better written and his arguments are clearly more at home in the realm of the quantifiable. Overall, I disagreed but found the book interesting and thought-provoking, at least in certain ways. The argument is so wide-cast that it is a bit difficult to go into it without getting lost in a lot of details. 9780679768678

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