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Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Edward O. Wilson

3.99 · Rating details · 4,530 ratings · 276 reviews

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 ...more

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Paperback, 368 pages

Published March 30th 1999 by Vintage (first published 1998)

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Oct 07, 2016 Manny rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: People interested in Big Questions

Shelves: science, linguistics-and-philosophy

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 hi 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. ...more

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Mar 07, 2009 Jimmy rated it really liked it

Shelves: sociobiology, evolutionary-studies

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 thi ...more

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Jul 18, 2017 Jen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: giga-ultra-big-brain-shit, i-coomed

If you're someone who despairs over the balkanization of intellectual/academic life, this book won't stop the crying, but it will assure you that you're not alone. If you're someone who has discombobulated on magic mushrooms and grasped, in a sudden terrifying instance, the image of all seemingly disparate islands of knowledge stitched together by an invisible network of mycelium, give it a go.

Reading books like: I, Asimov, and: Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, sparked in me a deep love of poly ...more

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Mar 09, 2020 Jamie rated it really liked it

Shelves: science

"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 t "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. ...more

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Dec 12, 2017 William Liggett rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Aug 30, 2007 Rob rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: non-scientists who have never studied any science or read anything about the history of science

Shelves: didnt-finish

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, the ...more

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May 05, 2008 Michael Austin rated it really liked it

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 ...more

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Dec 29, 2018 Veronica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: scientia, chaos-complexity, computation

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 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." ...more

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May 24, 2020 Kunal Sen rated it it was amazing

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 hi 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.
...more

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Nov 21, 2009 J rated it did not like it

Shelves: sociological, philosophy, science-writing

I've been meaning to read Wilson for a while now, but I regret starting with this. While his wish to unite the various academic disciplines into a single corpus of knowledge seems to come from the right place, his actual efforts to explain what such a system would look like are dull, meager, and at times poorly reasoned. His effort to show linkages between the natural sciences and the humanities in particular falls completely flat. A few paltry examples culled from his own research, while intere ...more

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Aug 18, 2007 Jeff rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfic, science

With the way things are in academia, nobody in the world could be qualified to write this book. The disciplines are too boldly demarcated, it is often said, each a small nation state prowled about by a tight pride of leonine experts who snap at ignorant layman invaders. But accomplished scientist and human nature theorist E. O. Wilson is a dove among the hawks who perceives a need for increased cooperation among all branches of human knowledge. All of them, which he arranges vertically with part ...more

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Aug 24, 2009 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction-read

The summer before my freshman year at SMU, the required reading list included C. P. Snow's 1959 tract, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which described the gulf separating the humanities and the sciences. When I entered the university in the fall of 1965, the curriculum was integrated in an attempt to bridge that gulf. All students were required to take an ambitious program of arts, sciences, humanities, and mathematics that included required courses for all in "The Nature of Man, ...more

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Jan 03, 2011 Sam rated it it was ok

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 dismiss ...more

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Mar 23, 2008 Nick Black rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

There are not enough positive things I can say regarding this book.

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Dec 12, 2015 Graeme Roberts rated it it was amazing

The most exciting, important and beautiful book I have ever read. A must-read for big picture thinkers who understand science.

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Apr 27, 2020 Alina Lucia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites

The main question Wilson tries to address in “Consilience” is the following: What is the relationship between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?

Wilson argues that answering such a question requires that the branches of learning unite, and erase the ill-defined boundaries, arisen from pure ignorance rather than a fundamental difference in mentality. And I could not agree more.

To me, both science and the humanities offer different perspectives on the same ques The main question Wilson tries to address in “Consilience” is the following: What is the relationship between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?

Wilson argues that answering such a question requires that the branches of learning unite, and erase the ill-defined boundaries, arisen from pure ignorance rather than a fundamental difference in mentality. And I could not agree more.

To me, both science and the humanities offer different perspectives on the same question; the question of human nature, a topic relevant only because we all have happened to acquire the ‘human condition’, which allowed this introspection in the first place. (Dogs don’t care about human nature, fact which is directly attested to by my husky which is enjoying a great slumber as I write this; in fact, I suspect my husky does not even ponder his own husky condition; naps seem much more important to him).

Arguing about which is more important, the sciences or the humanities, is a futile exercise due to its very presumption, namely that an ultimatum must be reached. Reaching such an ultimatum often means that some intellectual compromise must be made along the way, a compromise to which a truly inquisitive mind would not subvert. Even Wilson admits: “[…]absolutism; the dangerous Medusa of science and the humanities alike”. The answer often lies at some point within the spectrum, not at the extremes.

Thus, I would imagine that science is the subject of human nature, while the humanities are a projection of it. If one may use the analogy of old movie cassettes, such would follow: The movie itself is encrypted in the cassette tape, while what we experience is the projection of it. Two mutually inclusive events, equally important events, in the whole situation of ‘being at the movies.’ Science and the humanities are two mutually inclusive events, equally important events, in this whole affair of ‘being’.

A failure to grasp this view, a kind of lack of cohesion of thought, can only have chaotic effects at the individual level, and then propagate itself to the group level. ...more

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Jan 09, 2022 Joe Stack rated it it was ok

To understand the story of the human condition, genes and culture have to be studied together, not separately. Biology and brain science is the core to Wilson’s thesis, and he provides intriguing examples supporting his ideas about achieving unity of knowledge. The issue for me, the reason for the 2 star rating, is he provided me too much and I was disinterested before some of the chapters ended.

I give 4 stars to each of the last two chapters, “Ethics and Religion,” and “To What End?” In “Ethic ...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Keith Swenson rated it it was amazing

Wilson's point is that there was a time when a single person could know all the formalized knowledge that there was to know. Of course that was a long time ago. Today there is a zillion times more to know, and the problem is that to be an expert, we have to focus on one particular narrow domain. This is necessary, but the problem is that each stovepipe tends to be ignorant of the other stovepipes, and that is a problem.

This book, is then an attempt to encourage us to step back, and try to unders Wilson's point is that there was a time when a single person could know all the formalized knowledge that there was to know. Of course that was a long time ago. Today there is a zillion times more to know, and the problem is that to be an expert, we have to focus on one particular narrow domain. This is necessary, but the problem is that each stovepipe tends to be ignorant of the other stovepipes, and that is a problem.

This book, is then an attempt to encourage us to step back, and try to understand the big picture. It would be impossible to unify all knowledge in one book (as the subtitle claims) but if anything he gives us motivation to try and do this. Social scientists should know more about biology. Biologists should know more about ethics. Ethicists (if there are any in America) should know more about Physics. And so on. It is not suitable to isolate yourself in one narrow field.

It is an extremely intriguing idea. He then takes us on a romp through a number of different field, to show how they are related and how they should be more involved with each other.

In the chapter on natural sciences, he talks about complexity, and how reductionism from the enlightenment is cause of separate domains of knowledge. Science is the practice of reductionism. This is "why so many accomplished scientists are narrow foolish people, and why so many wise scholars in the field are considered weak scientists." Wilson, both a wise scholar and an accomplished scientist, did not write this to take a cheap shot at some scientists, but rather to say there is something going on at a level of complexity which can not be seen when you reduce to simple, experimentable problems.

In "Ariadne's Thread" he touches upon the intersection of mysticism and science. On dreams, and on the relationship between symbols and dangers that our ancestors had to know to avoid without training. Again complexity theory enters to which he gives his own definition as "... the search for algorithms used in nature that display common features across many levels of organization."

Chapter 6 is on the "supremely important" subject of the mind. "Today, people know more about their automobiles than they do about their own minds." He touches on consciousness, moods, and free will. "The hidden preparation of mental activity gives the illusion of free will." At the same time, not only do we have free will (at out level of organization) but belief in free will is a survival instinct.

Chapter 7 ponders the genetic roots of art and culture. Genes prescribe epigenetic rules (regularity of sensory perception and mental processing). Culture forms from this, and also controls which genes survive in a kind of feedback loop. Chapter 8 on Human Nature poses similar questions, followed by chapter 9 on Social Science, and Chapter 10 on Arts and Interpretation. There are patterns that appear only if you consider multiple fields at the same time.

Chapter 11 brings us to Ethics and Religion, a chapter worth reading several times. He has built up to this point, and you know there are no simple answers. Then the book is capped off with a summary chapter.

There is no question it is an important book. It is not a light read either, but a book that is rich and profound. The goal is audacious: the unify knowledge. No single book can do this, but what he achieves is some compelling examples of how things are more related than we might think. What he motivates, is the idea that true understanding of the real universe will take a non-reductionist view of the big picture in order to see the phenomena that occur only at the aggregate level.

And ... it also greatly expanded the list of books I now need to read as a follow up. ...more

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Oct 07, 2011 Ivan Soto rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Loved it! Loved it! Loved it! E. O. Wilson's writing is such a delight. The book argues for mutual cooperation between biology and other branches of knowledge, as well as for protection of and conservation in the planet. Here's the concluding paragraph:

"I believe that in the process of locating new avenues of creative thought, we will also arrive at an existential conservatism. It is worth asking repeatedly: Where are our deepest roots? We are, it seems, Old World, catarrhine primates, brilliant ...more

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Feb 25, 2019 György rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, biology

The book "Consilience..." written by a biologist Mr. Edward O. Wilson is an evidence of our eternal struggle toward the peace of mind. Every attempt of a human to unify the bodies of knowledge on disposal, is a prove that we, the highest order complexity beings, can't stand the chaos.
But, no matter how beautifully devised this book is, and no matter how joyful this read is, I've clearly missed the loud A-HA. I felt like something, like the "corpus callosum" not that does not connect, but is to n ...more

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Dec 28, 2016 Jigar Brahmbhatt rated it liked it

I have been fascinated by the idea of a convergence of different schools of thoughts into a single whole. Call it "theory of everything", or consilience, a word chosen with great care by Edward Wilson. He tries nothing less than proposing to bring not only the sciences but humanities under a single umbrella.

The stars given are not a judgement on the writer's erudition and intentions at all, but show my inability (and the lack of enjoyment as a reader) to grasp everything the writer was trying t ...more

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Sep 16, 2007 Nathan rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: People who want to understand LOST.

Shelves: science, science-social-theory-etc, history

Basically, Consilience is a well-written manifesto in favor of inter-disciplinary studies. Edward O. Wilson argues that fields of study may have become too rigid and isolated, at the expense of the "unity" of human knowledge. A good case is made for a wider relationship between arts, sciences, histories and religions.

NC ...more

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Feb 28, 2019 RAD rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own, history-intellectual, location-e4, audible, science-biology, reading-again, complexity

The Latest (Last?) Queen

In the 13th century, Aquinas christened theology as the queen of the sciences in his Summa Theologica. Kant stole that mantle in the 18th century and placed it on the shoulders of philosophy. In the next century, Gauss insisted that the true queen was mathematics. Einstein transferred that title to physics early in the 20th century. (Just a few years later, Yeats could be said to have used literature to clear the decks with “The Second Coming”, rendering all of it moot). ...more

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Jan 07, 2015 Miles rated it really liked it

This is probably my favorite of the books I’ve read by Edward O. Wilson, although it did not alter my worldview as profoundly as On Human Nature did when I read it back in early 2012. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is an eloquent explication of the ideas and dispositions I hold in highest regard. It is arguably the most enterprising work of an ambitious career, which makes it both stunning as well as outlandish. Despite my awareness of numerous respectable critiques of Wilson’s propositions ...more

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Jan 26, 2022 Yates Buckley rated it really liked it

Shelves: curious, technical

A difficult book that tests your definitions of science, progress and beliefs. The author crosses issues looking both ways and taking careful account of the scientific ecosystem and into the broader human condition.

The term consilience is applied to many scenarios so it is not always crystal clear. The author suggests that extending our investigation into the natural world by connecting activities to their biological, neuroscientific fundamentals we could understand social sciences like even eco A difficult book that tests your definitions of science, progress and beliefs. The author crosses issues looking both ways and taking careful account of the scientific ecosystem and into the broader human condition.

The term consilience is applied to many scenarios so it is not always crystal clear. The author suggests that extending our investigation into the natural world by connecting activities to their biological, neuroscientific fundamentals we could understand social sciences like even economics as emergent from principles that go as far down as the physical sciences.

The author’s definition of free will is my favoured one that ultimately the argument on its existence is pointless given the impossibility of reconciling the scale of degrees of freedom, sensitivity to natural phenomena. Those that state it does not exist have no realistic way to demonstrate as much.

The book initially does not indicate what the big picture choices of values could or should be. It is not tech positivist but rather science method-ist bridging to all areas of human activity. The idea is we should study all without limits in the key of biological sciences particularly looking at impact of heredity and adaptation.

In the first part of the book the author takes as a fundamental truth a certain kind of enlightened progress. The idea is that consilient knowledge would help humanity “advance”. The problem with this is the author does not address how some areas of study themselves can be pandora boxes for important risks. From dividing society to technological developments that increase existential risk. Though the author underlies the importance of ethics there is little dedicated to precautionary principle, particularly where in the bioscience we have already run into problems.

At the end of the book the author introduces the problematic balancing of the growth based economies of the world and the impact on environment. This end is a sudden twist to the plot becaus now we take into implicit consideration the values of sustainability of civilisation. This consideration and focus should have been a lens from the beginning of the book as it would reframe consilience and its potential controversies around the bigger risk of environmental collapse.

I am surprised that the author does not directly address how some new ideas, technology and knowledge can increase existential risks over the long term. Consilience between areas of knowledge is not exempt from this problem. Case in point the author describes economics with a glossy picture (very different from my own) and explains that connection to psychology and neuroscience can unlock a whole new world of possibilities. I would say that since publicatiom many neuroeconomics learnings are applied in an exploitative way. Who cares? But this is the sort of activity could drive tail risks way up…

Basically across most of the text what is good for the author is a kind of evolutionary transformation of knowledge. But in this area he does not consider the risks in some of his ideas and directions. And when we reach the drama of the final chapter and it presenting only the space for a narrow escape for humanity I wonder how he can reconcile that it would be thanks to consilience that humanity “survives”?

Basically the issue is scientific investigation according to whatever style or means is almost always a consequence of a political direction. It seems simplistic to think consilient knowledge would solve these problems alone.

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Oct 30, 2017 Carlex rated it really liked it

Four and half stars.

(I know there could be some mistakes in this review. I’m trying to improve my English, thanks)

Previously I had read from Eduard O. Wilson "The Diversity of Life", an impressive work that among other issues announces the sixth great extinction caused by human activity (previously of the Elizabeth Kolbert's best known book). So this is my second reading by this author and "Consilience" not dissappoints me.

Explained in a very summarized way, a very interesting treatise that intr ...more

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Mar 21, 2012 Ryan rated it it was ok

I read this soon after reading Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and it was a nice basis of contrast for Wilson's eloquent, off-the-charts intelligent, narrowly conceived, and misleading book. Most of Wilson's proposed compromises for "Consilience" are expected from the arts and social sciences and it is a stunning demonstration of how the positivist torch has been passed, and it could prove a perfect reference point for an updated take on Marcuse's ideas. This book is an incredibly well th I read this soon after reading Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and it was a nice basis of contrast for Wilson's eloquent, off-the-charts intelligent, narrowly conceived, and misleading book. Most of Wilson's proposed compromises for "Consilience" are expected from the arts and social sciences and it is a stunning demonstration of how the positivist torch has been passed, and it could prove a perfect reference point for an updated take on Marcuse's ideas. This book is an incredibly well thought out praise of the scientist and the accomplishments of science, but it lacks any understanding of most areas of study outside of the natural sciences except for those with direct application of principles of biology, as found in biological anthropology. Having been raised Baptist, he gives a very balanced consideration of religion and ethics, as he has elsewhere, but fails to do so in other departments, especially modern art, philosophy, and sociology, most likely due to his own lack of a firm grasp of them. Natural science may understand, to an extent, the genetic basis of "bricks" of human nature, but it currently says little about the societal structures that we have built with them, and his near complete neglect of social science in this regard is stunning. The most mind-blowing part of the whole book for me was his dismissal with a "it's not so bad" of Michel Foucault's analyses of the diffuse nature of power and its evolution in the west. The crude characteristics sketched by the epigenetic basis for human nature still have little to offer such analyses 30 years after Foucault's death. Overall, I think what this book most clearly demonstrates, further shown by near-unanimous praise of Wilson, is that natural scientists are increasingly out of touch with the humanities, and are themselves preoccupied with seeking the "holy grail" of specific mechanistic determinants which have little bearing on the immense problems we face today. These problems are largely political and far beyond the current scope of epigenetics, and this has not changed in the 14 years since the book was written. There is, of course, ample room for astounding breakthroughs which could clearly be achieved by interdisciplinary collaboration between those with highly focused scientific training and social scientists, but instead what wilson proposes is a largely one-sided demand that the humanities need to get on board with science. If you want a well-written book on consilience within the natural sciences, which gives lip-service to other disciplines, this is pretty good. If you are looking for an olive branch, look elsewhere. For someone trained as a scientist, it is really kind of incredible to me how much of a book strictly about natural science this is, for all of its pretenses. ...more

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Feb 10, 2008 Matthew rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

The entire thesis of Consilience is one so shockingly obvious that I was astounded to discover that true controversy surrounded it. The thesis is simply that all realms of knowledge, from biology and geology to psychology and politics, are ultimately reducible in explanation to more fundamental explanations in another discipline - physics. This seems abundantly obvious in virtually every discipline I could imagine:

Example: My psychology is determined by physical states (both biological and chemi ...more

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May 05, 2010 FiveBooks added it

Shelves: fivebooks-on-neuroscience

New York Times columnist David Brooks has chosen to discuss Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject – Neuroscience, saying that:

“…In Consilience Wilson makes the prediction that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that is actually happening with neuroscience: there’s a field of neural economics, neural th ...more

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May 15, 2020 Henry Barry rated it liked it

Shelves: misc-nonfiction

Consilience was fascinating and covered a lot of important topics. The takeaways were valuable. However, 20 years later, the book feels not only dated but unnecessarily wordy. I would only read this book if you are ready to settle in for the long haul, are a lover of science, or have a very long attention span. Even then, there are more recent books that cover many of the topics in this book in more detail.

Many of the topics Wilson writes about have seen so much progress since publication that i ...more

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About Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson

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Edward Osborne Wilson, sometimes credited as E. O. Wilson, was an American biologist, researcher, theorist, and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical m ...more

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“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.” — 51 likes

“Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.” — 41 likes

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