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| Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge | 
| Authors: Edward O. Wilson, Edward Osborne Wilson
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  149 reviews
Sales Rank: 12988
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 067976867X
Dewey Decimal Number: 121
EAN: 9780679768678
ASIN: 067976867X
Publication Date: March 30, 1999
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| Customer Reviews:
Where do you stand? Where do we? November 19, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My reading of the then most recent book by this reknowned entomologist, widely accorded the title of "father" of sociobiology, was immeasurably heightened by knowing that I would be able to toss him some questions the next day, albeit indirectly. My friend, colleague, and boss, John Huie, would be interviewing Mr. Wilson first thing Monday morning, for the environmental journal I edited -- what an opportunity! CONSILIENCE offers a grand vision of the future of science as perceived by a brilliant and fearless thinker. Wilson believes that, just as physics and chemistry have deepened biologic understanding, so biology is poised to inform the social sciences and the arts, to bring all human knowledge into one coherent world view. His explanation of the way genetic and cultural evolution shape each other is very difficult to confute. Wilson is not without his critics, many quite heated. Wendell Berry even went so far as to write a book (Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, Counterpoint; New Ed edition, 2001) refuting his stance, which utterly removes God (gods, etc.) from action beyond that of Prime Mover, and posits our experience of self (soul) as a construct of perception. Perhaps most deeply unsettling to many is his suggestion that free will probably doesn't exist, but since we will probably never be able to prove it, the illusion is secure. A profound statement from one of our era's heaviest intellectual hitters, I highly recommend this book no matter which side you might take on its fundaments.
 Religion, a natural evolution November 3, 2007
The more you know about any subject, the higher the need for systems thinking and the more you should try to understand the relationship of everything with the whole. Social and natural sciences are intimately connected. That is what Edward Wilson wants to explain with his thesis of the unity of knowledge. Nothing could be more challenging taking into account the limitations of the human mind on one hand -reasoning capacity, time availability, reading & listening speed, understanding ability- and the uncontrollable growth of human knowledge, on the other. Doctor Wilson succeeds in the transmission of his message. The fact that, as Doctor Wilson states, "human mind has evolved to believe in gods not in biology," complicates the issue. Consequentially, religions are a natural outcome of evolution. The biologist does not refer to any religion in particular, even though he acknowledges his Christian background. He quotes Spinoza on the interchangeability of the concepts of God and nature. Buddhism is not even mentioned in the book. But I find that "consilience' as a word is very close to "Dhamma," the Buddhist expression for NATURAL ORDER. And both the Buddha and the scientist agree that moral is a very human subject.
Call in the Devil's Advocate! September 21, 2007
This book tries to pull everything and everyone on earth into itself and, using scientific methods, organize them all - or plan their organization - into one big master survey and plan.
Dr. Wilson is a real polymath. He's brilliant, intellectually honest, and benevolent. But I didn't always get the feeling that he had really digested all the material he had used, especially the parts about philosophy and art.
I have to admit I don't usually read this type of book. I came to it via Tom Wolfe's excellent collection of essays, "Hooking Up." In the essay, "Sorry, Your Soul Just Died," Wolfe says sociobiologists (such as Wilson) contend that, not only is there no God, but also, no soul and no free will. Wolfe, though no scientist, is a wise observer of human nature, and his exploration of the ramifications of the trickle-down effect of this and other, similar scientific theories (in "Hooking Up" and another book, "I Am Charlotte Simmons") are well worth examining.
But I think both Wolfe and Wilson himself overestimate the strength of sociobiology's (and consilience's) arguments. For one thing, Wilson himself seems, excuse me, but not at all a critical thinker, at least not as far as non-hard science texts are concerned. I mean, here's a guy who, as he says in the beginning of the book, read the Bible, cover-to-cover, twice, and still believed it was literally true until he went off to college. Didn't it occur to him to ask, at least, where Cain's wife came from?
Wilson talks about how science and the arts will someday be conjoined theoretically so that, for instance, biological and neurological principles will be used to understand how a painting is analyzed. But he greatly oversimplifies the task of analyzing a painting. Many people who are not real art lovers think that we are taught art appreciation like we are taught biology: that it's a matter of memorizing why this painting is significant, why it is art, what its meaning is, as if there is an objective consensus which, once reached, is definitive. They completely leave out the individual response, or else, plot it on a bell curve. But I think most artists, writers, etc., would say art is all about subjective (and even preferably untaught) response. Off-the-curve responses are just as legitimate as typical ones. And the rules are constantly shifting, because art is based on expectation of response of the observer by the artist.
An example of Wilson's formulaic attitude is found on page 28, when he starts a section with, "All histories that live in our hearts are peopled by archetypes in mythic narratives..." as if that were established fact. I know that's a major theory nowadays - even the Disney scriptwriters use it - but I don't accept this dry cutting-and-bundling as fact. Besides, how is this proveable in the scientific sense? It would have to been done through survey, which is inherently subjective. Or somehow found in our genes, which hasn't been done yet.
In general, throughout the book, Wilson over-depends on Delphic decision-making: when faced with a difficult subject, such as art, you survey the opinions of the top experts, choose the opinion which seems most true, then treat that opinion as if it were established fact. I don't think these opinions can be relied upon: they tend to reverse every generation, and often are arrived at, not by rational debate, but by the intellectual bullying by the loudest and most politically cut-throat of the faculty members of some "top" university. Devil's advocates are in short supply in such places!
In regards to the contention that, if neurobiology can in the future completely predict an individual human's behavior, then that would prove we have no soul... well, Wilson backs off that question by saying that it'd be too much work to do this, and that no one would bother. (!) But he seems to suggest that the brain will be so well understood that science will be able to predict virtually all mental responses. (He didn't give examples, so I was left wondering: predict what? presidential elections? who should marry whom?)
And, does Wilson really have a grasp of how complex thinking is? As far as I can see, he seems to think it's sort of like mapping the Earth's oceans and all their inhabitants and all interactions - (my analogy, not his). Then you could, for instance, know where an individual whale could be found at any time. In fact, it's even more of a problem when you consider that, every time we have a chat, read a book, or look at a painting, we're interacting with another brain or, in effect, mixing our ocean with another planet's, separately evolved ocean. That whale would be awfully slippery, even if you did tag him with tracking device! Throw in self-awareness (the whale knows he's being hunted?) and the thing seems impossible.
Let me say, the book is very readable, and well worth reading for its explanation of epigenetic rules - the proof that we are hard-wired, so to speak, to, for example, find incest repulsive. These certainly will be, as Wilson states, useful in banishing the "There Is No Absolute" theory that has so weakened the productivity of intellectual thought lately. But the idea that we can discover all these rules and then build a more consistent code of ethics is, I think, naive. What if we find a gene that makes some people homosexual, and another that makes other people repulsed by homosexuals? Scientists are not Solomons.
Wilson says that a better knowledge of ourselves through the understanding of epigenetic rules will make us happier. I think it could certainly contribute. But it's far from a panacea. What about the Dostoyevskian idea that suffering is what makes us compassionate? Or Socrates' question, "What is the Good Life?") These are very vital moral questions demanding consideration.
It would be great if Wilson could get together with Tom Wolfe.
A sketch of the future of social science January 1, 2007
3 out of 9 found this review helpful
Edward Wilson, the founder of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, is now retired. This has given him time to absorb himself in the social sciences and arts: literature, sociology, anthropology, theology, psychology and economics. What would these be like if they were informed by the concept that individual and social behaviour is constrained by an evolutionary history, whose drivers are increasingly understood?
Wilson believes they would be a great deal different, and Consilience is his attempt to imagine the future reconceptualisation of the humanities within an overarching scientific (Darwinian) framework. Does it work? Yes, mostly, if you are scientifically trained: probably not at all if you are not.
I suspect most adherents to the `Standard Social Science Model' will simply conclude that Wilson is just making endless category errors in trying to insert sociobiological constraints into the high domains of culture, ethics and theology. But sometimes you have to just come off the fence: they would be wrong in this judgement. Nevertheless, the current generation of social science academics will never accept Wilson's approach. The eventual triumph of sociobiology (if anyone will still be using the term) will be the end-point of generations of research.
Where does Wilson fall short of his own high standards within his own paradigm? I think in a couple of areas.
1. On p. 127 the philosopher David Chalmers is quoted as distinguishing the `easy' from the `hard' problems of consciousness research. Everything is hard of course, but investigating how, for example, vision works is a research programme in signal processing and pattern recognition which has been producing results for more than thirty years. This is one of Chalmers `easy' problems. A `hard' problem is the experience of agonising pain. We think, for example, we know in principle how to make a robot which could see: there are few people who believe they could sketch out an architecture for a computer which could honestly be said to experience pain (and thus be tortured). Wilson completely fails to address this issue in his glib assertion that `the hard problem is conceptually easy to solve' (p. 128). No it's not.
2. One of the shocking consequences of an evolutionary analysis of humanity is that there is no point to any person's life, or to humanity as a whole, other than the successful reproduction of genetic material - something we share with any bacterium. Even as we know this to be true, we instinctively shy away from it, looking for deep meaning here, there, anywhere ... . We never find it, but we 'know' it must be somewhere. One of the triumphs of evolutionary psychology is to identify the `instinct' for deep meaning in life with the sanctification of tribal or community life, which is a powerful asset in group cohesion, and therefore strongly selected for. The dilemma is that even though we understand scientifically why we feel this way, that understanding does nothing to address the emotional need. Somehow we need a deep belief in the meaning of life (usually expressed through some kind of religion or group values) even though scientifically we know this is simply an effective adaptation for group cohesion. Wilson concurs that there is absolutely no solution to this problem, but still, mysteriously, dabbles in `deism'.
A key dilemma which will confront future generations, not so far away, is the power to change the human genetic code. But if there is no point to human existence, there can be no guides as to which way to change it (once obvious defects have been fixed). Wilson accepts the point but limits speculation - there is a whole book's worth of thinking to do about this issue, but perhaps it's too early for it to be written.
People have been kind about Wilson's merits as a stylist. I didn't find the book a gripping read: the writing is rather discursive and lacks bite. In this it shows its own ancestry as a compilation of articles and talks. `On Human Nature' is much better, as it seems to have real emotion around it - a response to his critics - and a more polemical style.
Wilson is currently a lobbyist for conservation and against climate change. The final chapter on this topics is superb, and a welcome antidote to over-familiar `save the planet' narratives driven by inaccurate science and fuzzy emotionalism.
 Don't judge this book by it's title. December 4, 2006
5 out of 16 found this review helpful
This is a pretty good science book.
But the bias is clear. Wilson argues for consilience of all of academia under science, largely ignoring any contributions that the other approaches to knowledge may contribute. Wilson explains how the arts, political science, psychology, history, etc., could benefit from science. He does a pretty good job of discussing that. But he is completely blind to how these other approaches to knowledge might help science.
I read the book hopeing for some insight into how all the different ways of seeing the world might be reconciled, and instead I just find more of the same overly reductionist modernist approach, with science being the only valid perspective. What a waste!
I do, however, enjoy science, and Wilson is a pretty good science writer, so I rate this book as OK. But had he even tried to show how science can likewise benefit from the approaches used by historians or artists or novelists or sociologists or musicians - it could have been a terrific read.
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