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| Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge | 
| Author: Edward O. Wilson
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy Used: $1.03
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Avg. Customer Rating:  149 reviews
Sales Rank: 277882
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0679450777
Dewey Decimal Number: 121
EAN: 9780679450771
ASIN: 0679450777
Publication Date: March 17, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Some wear on book from reading, spine creases, wear on binding and pages.
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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.
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 144 more reviews...
 OK, I'll Give it Three Stars Because He's One Smart Hombre August 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
First of all, those who attempt to come to an understanding as to the origin of the universe, the how and why of it all, ultimately, the answer to the big question--where we came from, why we're here, and where we're going-- . . . well, what's being attempted here needs to be put into perspective.
According to Stephen Hawking, if we find the string theory (or a third theory to tie together quantum and relativity) then we will know the answer to everything. We'll know the mind of God. Now, I must say that even if you aren't religious (like Einstein, but he knew--God doesn't play dice with the universe), you've got to realize that the universe is made of 100's of billions of galaxies. And the great intelligence or organizer of it all (very little chance that such finely tuned matter merely randomly arose out of cosmic chaos) can make galaxies, planets, and stars. Me? I can barely make a good omelet. Case closed.
So my point being, we're basically a peanut trying to keep up with a jaguar (I used to use the ant analogy for my students, until I realized that was too kind). How can we in our infinite ignorance ever understand anything of such complexity?
Well, the answer lies in the non-answer. String theory is not even wrong. What's that mean? There are so many possible outcomes that it can't even be considered. Maybe it's the Great Intelligence telling us by design that the answer lies not in our imperfect mind but in our potentially perfect heart. But that's another argument.
Well, even physicists will tell you they aren't dealing with reality. How can they be when the string theory, in order for it to be worked with, dictates that seven dimensions are required. If our brainiacks need four additional dimensions to describe the ultimate answer to reality--key word there: reality--then I think we've run aground. And nothing at all against the brilliant mind of Edward Wilson but I think all this theorizing, to a great extent, is a waste of time. The same reason I've gotten out of the college / university vacuum. Too much thinking with little real life application.
It all reminds me of Swift's great thinkers in Gulliver's Travles on the Island of LaPuta. Here these men use their fascinating intellect to come up with such inventions as sunlight extractors--taking sunlight from cucumbers--or the feces reader which tells the user whether or not the person being analyzed is telling the truth. What is most interesting of all is that while these great thinkers are coming up with their abstract, impractical inventions the earth below is in shambles--people are starving and wasting away under the cloud of the great Island of LaPuta.
Grand thesis, disappointing delivery April 25, 2008
EO Wilson is one of the most brilliant modern biologists I know, and as a physican-biologist I have long been a huge fan. His over-arching thesis for this book, that all human knowledge can be linked and united, from the physical sciences and mathematics to the visual and performing arts, is a revolutionary and important one. Nonetheless, in the course of developing his argument he focuses on very specific examples of the ways in which this knowledge is connected, making it difficult to draw generalizations. Thus, his thesis is by and large inadequately supported, and I found myself yearning for more comprehensive and illustrative arguments. The end of the book, a discussion of the human impact on our planet and how our technological development is unsustainable, is a non sequitur, but nonetheless marvelously written, and an important topic -- written several years before Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
With all this in mind -- four stars. I would have given five, if only Professor Wilson had supported his brilliant thesis in a more comprehensive manner.
God's dream for Science March 8, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Anybody who has participated in University education can attest to its disarray. None of the disciplines communicate, and if they do it is only to hurl invective. I cannot count the number of times I have met a very bright student of history who was completely unaware of evolutionary psychology; or how many times I have talked to evolutionary psychologists who couldn't tell you what happened in 1066. The state of affairs is truely sad. We are learning more and more about less and less. We are seeing the blades of grass, but missing patterns in the fields.
E.O. Wilson's dream is to put an end to this nonsense. Consilience is the ambitious idea that all human knowledge fits together naturally- like a lego construction. There is no need to act as if humans are not a part of nature- we are.
The goal of uniting knowledge under rigorous scientific methodology and darwinian theory is laudable.
Here is a quick example of how it could work:
Let us say I wished to study love. Who de we love? Why? Etc.
From an evolutionary view, I could ask why natural selection would create a species where two members pair bonded.
From the neuroscientific view, I could explore the brain mechanisms and neurotransmitters responsible for creating this feeling.
From a Sociological view, I could look at who pairs up with whom, what effects it has on the surrounding society, and how love's expression has changed over time.
ETC.
ETC.
In the traditional view, their would be no inherent connection between the different answers reached by different disciplines. In the consilient view, they all belong together and interconnect. If the sociological view is not consilient with what is known about human biology and neuropsychology than one or both views must be wrong. From the view of consilience, the more our mutually seperate investigations fit together, the more likely our answer is a good one. Not only that, but our answer is much more satisfying.
This is consilience in a nutshell. A way to unite knowledge and provide deeply meaningful and satisfying answers to the question of what it means to be human, while not losing any scientific rigour.
My only qualm with the idea of consilience is its almost metaphysical nature. Anybody who does research and actively reads scientific journals knows just how hard true consilience would be to achieve. There are so many methodologies, units of analysis, debates, uncertainties; and there is SO MUCH information. It is hard to see how all of it can be united in a reasonable manner. I wish that more people would work toward such a goal, but academics, like the rest of us, have egos and niches to carve out.
In the end, E.O. Wilson's vision remains an ideal yet to be realized. Is it realistic? Probably not. Is it worth striving for? Like true love, it most certainly is.
 Reductionist Science and Transcendentalism February 17, 2008
As an earlier reviewer (Howard Taylor) probably correctly points out, there are many mysteries reductionist science may never lead us to fully understand. That is, assuming that we are even competent to achieve this mysteriously exalted state: assuming the human mind is not just another circumscribed object with no more of a chance to encompass a full understanding of anything else than any other object in the Universe. Anyhow, be that as it may, our very awareness of these unresolved mysteries is to a large extent the result of reductionist science. Getting to a point where you know something is complex or even intellectually intractable is a sort of understanding. Seen in that light, it's hard to argue that reductionist science has failed to increase our understanding. In my opinion, reductionist science has gotten us a lot further than have the millions of transcendentalist mystics who ever sat cross-legged humming on some mountain top; or the legions of true believers who ever pressed forehead to tile in abject submission to unconquerable ignorance. And a capitulation to complete ignorance is what transcendentalism finally boils down to. You may get a nice wooly-headed buzz from it, but it doesn't help you to know that you don't know. Reductionist science will, at very least, get you that far. E.O. Wilson is, if not on the right track, quite possibly on the only viable one available to our poor species at this point in time.
A third Pulitzer Prize"? December 3, 2007
Wilson already has two Pulitzer prizes. With this book he could, and should, get a third. Not just in Letters, but in Science - if there is such a category for that prize. Wilson not only places science and culture in an evolutionary context, which makes them both more understandable than either, together with the other, was before, and he provides leads and notes to his sources for anyone who wants to follow up. He writes with enviable clarity, untangling, what are often, convoluted, subtle arguments, which upon reflection, often become self evident. The Science that he brings to bear is always fully explained, and at just the right level. There are few books that change the way we look at the reality around us - this is one of those books.
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