Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

by Edward O. Wilson

Genes do not specify elaborate conventions such as totemism,

Instead, complexes of gene-based epigenetic rules predispose people to invent and adopt such conventions.

behaviors they affect to evolve convergently

The conventions—evolved by culture, biased by epigenetic rules—are then spoken of as...

expanding the norm of reaction of the prescribing genes to indefinite degree,

cultural diversity to explode.

the prescriptive genes can design the brain to learn and respond with equal alacrity to any experience.

slipped its genetic instructions, or somehow suppressed them.

strategy is influenced by the cardinal fact that women have more at stake

while that of women is to be coy and selective.

Instead, one capacity, the detection of cheating,

For the most part the flaws are due not to contradictory evidence but to a scarcity of relevant information.

direct links between particular genes and behavior underlying the universal culture traits.

The observed fit between theory and fact is based mostly on stat...

genetics and vocabulary of color vision.

The epigenetic rules that guide behavioral development are also largely unexplored,

incest avoidance.

Have no sexual interest in those whom you knew intimately during the earliest years of your life.

we do not know the exact psychological source of the Westermarck effect.

the natural and social sciences. The question they raise is as follows: What is the relation between the Westermarck effect, which is biological, and the incest taboos, which are cultural?

But even here incest was viewed as something special if not abnormal.

humans appear to pass from pure instinct to pure rational choice. But do they really? What is rational choice anyway?

satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules.

understand their lives and control their future.

happen if society selects one course of action over another.

to do so largely without linkage to the natural sciences.

moderate ethnic conflict,

partly because the root causes are poorly understood.

have been achieved in basic research and others are expected at any time, perhaps leading to more and more noninvasive,

understand and encourage one another even as they compete in the race for discovery.

disunity and a failure of vision.

spurn

They are easily shackled by tribal loyalty.

Ignorance of the natural sciences by design was a strategy fashioned by the founders, most notably Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud, and their immediate followers.

cultural relativism

biological anthropologists attempt to explain culture as ultimately a product of the genetic history of humanity, renewed each generation by the decisions of individuals influenced by that history.

Boas,

CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY STANDS even farther apart from the natural sciences than anthropology.

Where a representative sociological topic is the relationship of family income to American divorce rates, a typical anthropological topic is Sudanese bridewealth.

the nonbiological end of the culture studies spectrum.

Nisbet cites Herbert Read’s preferred goal of great art as not just the satisfaction of personal needs, or even the representation of philosophical or religious ideas, but the creation of a synthetic and internally consistent world through images that “tell us something about the universe, something about nature, about man, or about the artist himself.”

But the SSSM also sees culture as an independent phenomenon irreducible to elements of biology and psychology,

Human minds do not create culture but are themselves the product of culture.

determinism, the social sciences are intrinsically compatible with the natural sciences.

in which each topic is examined by many scholars of differing viewpoints and cultures.

the organizational levels.

devalues intellect.

“We are interested in the here and now, the fine analysis of life in particular complex societies, and cause and effect across recent history.

Behavior is guided by epigenetic rules.

chapters, are innate operations in the sensory system and