Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (University Press Audiobooks)

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Summary: Obvious, clearcut and understandable - but not an easy read.
Review: If other religious or scientific books were written as well and clear, we might have less problems in this world. What disappoints me is that only so few people on this planet will understand his most logical conclusions due to a lack of education and be able - as Wilson suggests - to come to their own terms with faith, science and nature. I admire his presentation of the scientific facts suggesting a unified natural principle without being righteous or requiring blind faith in anything. He achieves exactly what he wants - he makes you think!

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Summary: A Must-Read For Anyone Not Thought-Impaired.
Review: Look. I'll be real brief. You can read some good reviews on this page for this wonderful book. But my suggestion is this. Turn off the tv. Go out and buy this book. Read it. Discuss it with your friends and loved ones. Go out at night and look at the stars. If you live in a city, take some time off, then go out where you can reflect for a moment on the vastness of the universe, and the razor-thin biosphere that protects us from cold blackness of space. Read this book again. As Wilson says "There is no one looking over our shoulder. Our future is entirely up to us." Find a place to start, in some small way, to make the world a little better. Life (as in yours and mine) is short. The clock is ticking. The time to start is now... You can do no better than to start with this book.

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Summary: Exciting Plea for Science to underly all the Humanities.
Review: Wilson knows a lot about how science works, and also has seen it applied to societies. The book shows how he thinks the scientific model can be employed in helping us understand such difficult subjects as mind, culture, human nature,art, religion. For me, he is surprisingly successful in his attempt at this grand unification. It should noted how our views have evolved so much so recently. In my community, 40 years ago it was nearly impossible to talk about conscious-ness and mind. Now, the idea of mind as an inter-locked collection of clever signal processing tricks, slowly evolved over the millenia to aid the survival of their short-lived host, is easily accepted. But the mind was NOT evolved to explain itself! For about 1/3 of the book, Wilson does a great job in teaching us a little about the measurements, experiments, facts behind this emerging view. Then, he leads us on an early foray in using such an insight for the vital subjects that most concern mankind. Such as Ethics and Religion. To me, he goes a long way beyond nearly all of the great heroes of humanity who have written and preached on these themes. Do expose yourself to this modern synthesizer!

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Summary: Pure insight into the dilemma of departmentalism
Review: I have read only the two excerpts from Wilson's marvelous book that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the first chapter. I assigned the first chapter to my Introduction to Philosophy class knowing that he glosses over some of the philosophical problems in his essay, and that he may be too "optimistic" (for some in this age any step away from pessimism is too far). But he is an important thinker for beginners in the study of philosophy simply because he wishes to have a "consilience" between the branches of science and social sciences and because he demonstrates that philosophical thinking goes on in all fields of thought. It may be difficult, or impossible, to bring a true raprochement, witness the uproar from the "soft" and "hard" sciences over the Sokol hoax; some minds don't want to meet except on their terms and on their turf (true of the hard heads and soft). But for my students his examination of the enlightenment, Cartesianism, epistemology, etc., was a revelation that true philosophy and science are always compatible. In the second essay which is more difficult to grasp for sophomores ("Biological basis of morality"?), the leap is even grander, for he attempts to find an empirical foundation of ethics rather tha a transcendental one which has by all accounts failed to achieve much of anything but "words, words, words." I give him an A+ for the courage, imagination,and a glorious prose style. (Why is it that so much first rate prose no is in the possession of scientists?) The great thing about this book for us non-scientists (I taught humanities)is that it preaches holistics without the mumbo-jumbo in to a trascendental higher-hubub.

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Summary: Good read, but too optomistic
Review: Great book, but I think Wilson is being too optomistic about the future of "soft" sciences. I don't think there will be a peaceful coexistence and give 'n take relationship of hard and soft sciences like Wilson suggests. In my veiw, as soon as the hard sciences have the capacity to tackle complex social ineractions they will blow the soft sciences out of the water.

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Summary: Bohm has been there, done that.
Review: Wilson has brilliantly described the inherent wholeness and interconnectedness of everything. However, I searched in vain for a reference to David Bohm's pioneering work in this area, as exemplified in "Wholeness and the Implicate Order." Joseph Jaworski has translated the implications of Bohm's theory into a model for sucessful business practices in "Synchronicity." And earlier, John Bell did the same in the realm of quantum physics through his famous proof of the EPR paradox. As the physicist Nick Herbert noted, "A universe that displays local phenomena built on a nonlocal reality is the only sort of world consistent with known facts and Bell's proof." These are just a few of the many previous reflections, coming from a wide variety of "separate" disciplines, that demonstrate the holistic and consilient nature of all that is. I hesitate to criticize Dr. Wilson for the narrowness of his research for "Consilience," but a modest reference to Bohm's work would have helped.

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Summary: Only Nixon could go to China......Only Wilson could.....
Review: Is there any other human who knows more about the battles that rage at the interface of the "hard" and "soft" sciences? Is there any other man who could know better what venomous complaints to expect from readers of "Consilience"? The comments from [e-mail] are just a polite taste of the arrows that will be shot at this book, and we can thank amazon.com for protecting us from Wilson's more energetic critics who do not even bother to read his books because they can not understand the science upon which they are built. The "soft" sciences are "soft" because they deal with complex phenomena by treating the complex systems which generate those phenomena as black-box systems. Rather than admit that such black-box science is just a quick-and-dirty, best-we-can-do-until-we-find-the-key-to-open-the-box, first approximation method of doing science, many people from the "soft" sciences make the silly assumption that there is no need to open the black-boxes that they study. Worse still, these lost souls are so sure that they are correct that they are ready persecute anyone who has the timerity to suggest that Consilience between the "hard" and "soft" sciences is even possible. Thanks, Edward, for having the vision and the nerve to tell it like it is.

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Summary: Perspicacity without perspective...
Review: In the genre of popular science publications, E.O. Wilson's new book (along with the his other titles I have read) rates highly in terms of its accessability and argument. Undoubtably, he does an amazing job of circumscribing the most difficult philosophical questions of human existence within the got-a-problem, we'll fix-it framework of the sciences. It seems most enigmatically interesting that amazon.com has links from this title to most of its other listings in philosophy when this is the one area in which Dr. Wilson is most weak. His book even attempts to argue for naturalistic prejudices (pro-science, anti-"traditional" philosophy) in an age that he himself acknowledges is divorcing itself further and further from any natural predispositions (perhaps I'm too skeptical in this contradiction?). Philosophical rigor would have only helped Dr. Wilson's book, which seems at times tinged with a rosy optimism. But perhaps this is just what we need, a good dose of delusion, if our future shall be mass produced according to the whims of fashion in the... science... of human engineering.

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Summary: Wilson is courageous and correct!
Review: I have interviewed Dr. Wilson for HEMP TIMES magazine, and I have read all his books. Anybody wishing to comment on CONSILIENCE needs to at least have read and understood his books on sociobiology, human nature and biophilia. Wilson's scientific methods, attention to detail, and academic honesty are beyond question. The premises and conclusions of his new book, especially as they relate to impending environmental crisis, are solidly researched and provable. People who diagree with Wilson seldom do so because they have a knowledge base which can legitimately criticize his work. Instead, his critics are defenders, whether they know it or not, of the dominant paradigm which is responsible for the ongoing death of nature written about by Bill McKibben, Dr. Wilson and others. I respectfully suggest that people who criticize CONSILIENCE and other Wilson ideas examine their own hearts, and see that their objections to Wilson result from worship of the mindless status quo which is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Humans ARE creatures of nature, and we ignore this at our own peril! Our ignorance of this is also destroying the other creatures and ecosystems that we share this planet with. Dr. Wilson has provided a wake-up call. Will we heed it?

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Summary: Why sociobiology is important
Review: Even though I have not read his new book yet, however, I have read a lot of his work to defend his position and sociobiology. I particularly interested in commenting the words of "[e-mail]". SIOW specifically argued that biological theories are very limited in explaining our social behavior, as this approach is strongly espoused by Wilson. SIOW noted that even though biological paradigms to some extend are able to explain our basic behavioral repertoire, such as marital behavior, however, they are completely handicapped in terms of explaining our more complex behavior such as our trading and economic behavior. I am completely disagreed with SIOW. I believe sociobiology, evolutionary biology and psychology, are limitless if used cautiously, especially accompanying with empirical data and well reasoned hypotheses. Take the example of our economic behavior. Even though it is complex because of its own jargons, and multitude of "hardcore" numbers, such as trades and bonds, they are all underlined by a few complex mechanisms, which are the results of natural selection: cheating and cooperating. There has not been a single human society without cooperation. Even in non-human primate societies, cooperation is not an exception but a rule. Our cooperative behavior is what made out of our economic system of today. To understand this, take the example of the 1930's Great Depression. One basic element which caused the Great Depression is the Stock market crash. Why it crashed is well understood. When there are easy money or profits with fewer costs, everybody is going to follow. To see why this happened is to look at the cognitive processes behind this phenomenon, which in turn is the result of our genotype and millions of years of evolution. According to evolutionary psychology framework, our cognitive facultive in dealing with social exchange is a very specific system which looks at cost and benefit in an asymmetric ways. In almost all cooperative exchanges, cost is always l! ess than benefit, which implies that the faculty has a cheator detection algorithm. So if everytime an exchange produces more benefits than costs, which is usually happened in Stock exchange, people will constantly putting money to make this happen. This, however, will unavoidably lead to stock market crash. The behavior is by no means accountable by biological based theories. Imagine. If a dollar as a cost to buy a stock, 100 dollars is the return (B=99>C=1). Now if 10 millions as a cost, there will be 100 times of 10 millions as a return. But people don't always calculate the future. If eveybody thinks of this as an easy money, disaster is ensued. By theorizing our cogntive system in terms of sociobiology is not only limitless but may explain things we might think impossible.