Rating: 
Summary: A daring-- and fatally flawed-- vision for humanity
Review: Edward Wilson' s book, while filled with a grand ambition (some would say hubris) ultimately fails on several counts.First, Wilson automatically accepts as true Darwinian macro-evolution, but fails to acknowledge recent probing criticisms by people like Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Neil Broom, Dean Overman, or even committed naturalist critics like Fred Hoyle, Francis Crick, and Robert Shapiro (who agree with a naturalistic view of the world, yet acknowledge large problems with current Darwinian explanations). It is unwise to build such a massive superstructure on such a tenuous foundation. If scientists find the genetic information problems insurmountable, for example, or continue to remain baffled (when their honest) on the issue of how life arose from the prebiotic soup, Wilson's project will be worth very little. Second, Wilson never makes clear how his project of consilience is to be achieved. He has a proper fear of totalitarianism, but it is difficult to imagine a majority of Americans accepting some kind of Wilsonian consilience project willingly, and in a free and democratic society, that is the only way a program like Wilson's should be achieved. (There are also problems with the way science is funded which would militate against Wilson's vision, unless again there were some kind of government coercion). Third, as Wilson's book progresses, and he moves further and further from his main area of expertise, his book (and examples) become more and more fanciful. Simply because people fear snakes, for example, is no reason to assume an "epigenetic rule" for fear of snakes. Bringing in visions of snakes by artists doesn't help prove his point, either. Sociobiology, like Freudian analysis, can prove everything-- so it proves nothing. Finally, Wilson's section on religion and ethics borders on absurd. The books he lists as the "best sources of which he is aware", especially on religion, are hardly impressive. His treatment of religion is condescending to the extreme; there are far better arguments to support religion than Wilson makes here. (One such is made by C.S. Lewis on behalf of Christianity, for example, in "Mere Christianity.") He also seems to conflate several systems of ethics, from utilitarianism to evolutionary to emotivism (his central conviction, it seems) to cultural relativism. He never disentangles them, and he never provides good reasons which would ground ethics in any way: good is simply a combination of our innate epigenetic rules and our own particular culture. Wilson's relativism can ultimately provide no final authority for ethics, despite his sincere efforts to do so. (For more here, I recommend Paul Chamberlain's little book, "Can We Be Good Without God?") While the book is ultimately simplistic and disappointing, Wilson deserves kudos for his lucid writing style, his broad and humane learning, and his noble attempt (in this age of hyper-specialization) at building a unity of knowledge. He simply picks the wrong "Ariadne's thread" for doing so. Indeed, there is far too much complexity in the world, and in humans and human relationships, for any naturalistic attempt at consilience. Readers of Wilson would be better served by going back to Cardinal Newman's "Idea of a University" for a related (though more modest) and better attempt at doing so. One final humorous note: did anyone else notice the comment on incest avoidance taboos and how they could be overcome by "increasingly self-understood personal experiences" (or something to this effect)? What in the world is he talking about here?
Rating: 
Summary: The unity of knowledge
Review: Many of his colleagues in the sciences and humanities consider E.O. Wilson to be the most important biologist since Charles Darwin, and one of the most important scientists of any kind in the 20th century. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, is further justification for this praise. Wilson begins Consilience with a look at how the Enlightenment thinkers, with their emphasis on "a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress," got it right. From there he goes on to explore many varied issues: genetics, the very way the brain works, the Left-wing infection of the social sciences, the great unifying revelations of evolutionary biology, the intuitive assumptions of the arts and religions. Not surprisingly, he speculates on where human culture and evolution may be heading. Wilson makes no bones about the goals and side effects of his Enlightenment-style transcendent thinking. He speculates that science is in a sense "religion liberated and writ large," and insists that "preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger." It is safe to assume that Edward O. Wilson is familiar with the words of the medieval sage Paracelsus, who lived half a millennium ago: "Although there are many names, the arts are not separated, and one kind of knowledge is not severed from another; for one is in all." Whilst far from perfect (Wilson does unfortunatley pander to the Left towards the end) Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge is both entertaining and accessible.
Rating: 
Summary: Bull's Eye
Review: Wilson really delivers on what the title of this book promises. The 1st 25 to 30% of the book was boring and I thought, "oh no, typical touchy feely old man Wilson moaning about global warming etc," but then things really began to get interesting. Like the title suggests, a synthesis of human epistemology is possible, and Wilson actually pulls it off. Want to see what some of the scientific underpinnings of art and religion are? Wilson gives it the old college try. Personally, I'm tired of hearing how science and religion are seperated by a 40 foot lead and concrete wall. Lets hear some cause and effect relations of how the two give rise to each other. Wilson approaches this synthesis by adducing the fairly modern disciplines of cognitive neuroscience and psychology, and of course, behavioral genetics. His insistence on epigenetic rules, which is his term for the marraige of nature and nurture, is thematic to this work and each concept he introduces compliments the ones that follow it under the aegis of biology, its epigenetic rules, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. It is by sticking with these theses in discussing his various subjects in a context that is material, dynamic and relevant to all aspects of biological life that make this book significant: in short, conscilience. It's nice to hear a scientist actually acknowledge the existence of human psychology in biological terms and not as if it were some seperate event. Wislon staunchly refuses to engage in the sophomoric fallacy of dualism. In the same vein, to hear someone come right out and suggest that the social sciences should try and be a bit more empirical and scientific in how they conduct their affairs is refreshing to. Wilson is the sociobiologist down to the bitter end. You'd think more intellects would pursue these kinds of constructive arguments, but I suppose the apron strings of grant money sort of quells the possibility of people actually thinking in print. Wilson must have already received his grant money. That he discusses the stark axiom that politicians and economists are not the most practical creatures for making ecological decisions is edifying to see in print too. In general, Wilson's framing of ethics in scientific terms comes off fairly well; not an easy task to accomplish. On the other side of the coin, Wilson does close the book with typical PC maoning about evil corporate robber barons. He also forgets he's a scientist for a moment by urging us to regulate future biotech activities to insure the human genome doesn't get yanked around too much. Ahem! is any genome or ecology static? Not that I've heard of. To try and accomplish that would be an abomination of nature, if ever such a thing existed. This suggestion smacked of anthropocentric divinity to me. Overall however, its a good pop-sci book presented in the context of the modern scientific disciplines. The book is a sensible, well thought out analysis of a complex subject matter well excecuted by a sensible, well read scientist.
Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive unification of knowledge
Review: If I had to recommend a book for someone wanting to be enlightened, I would definitely start with Edward O. Wilson's Consilience. It is a comprehensive collection of knowledge from different disciplines and sources of knowledge. Every adult should read this book every once in a while as a reminder of useful information that we have heard, read and even learned, but that we might have forgotten... I also would use this book as a source for references... It is easy to read, harmonically written to join all its chapters... I think that this book is a must in everyone's library.
Rating:
Summary: A million years ahead of his time or impossible?
Review: In this ambitious work, Edward O. Wilson, one of the most distinguished scientists of our times, and a man I greatly admire, goes perhaps a bit beyond his area of expertise as he envisions a project that is perhaps beyond even the dreams of science fiction. "...[A]ll tangible phenomena," he writes on page 266, "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 in a nutshell is his dream of "consilience." It is also the statement of a determinist. My problem with such a laudable endeavor (and with determinism in general) is this: even if he is right, that the arts and the humanities will ultimately yield to reduction, how do we, limited creatures that we are, do it? It seems to me that in the so-called soft sciences like sociology, economics, and psychology, for example, and even more so in the world of the humanities and the arts, reduction is so incredibly complex that such an attempt is comparable (in reverse order) of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. It's ironic that Wilson uses almost exactly this metaphor on page 296 to explain why once the rain forests are chopped down, they're gone forever. He notes, "Collect all the species...Maintain them in zoos, gardens, and laboratory cultures...Then bring the species back together and resynthesize the community on new ground." Will this work? Wilson's answer is no. He writes, "...biologists cannot accomplish such a task, not if thousands of them came with a billion-dollar budget. They cannot even imagine how to do it." He adds, still on page 296, that even if biologists could sort and preserve cultures of all the species, "they could not then put the community back together again. Such a task...is like unscrambling an egg with a pair of spoons." This is exactly how I feel about the consilience of human knowledge. I cannot even imagine how reductionism could help us to understand a poem. There is a dictum among poets that "nothing defines the poem but the poem itself." No amount of reduction will allow us to understand what makes the poem tick. This is because the poem is an experience, a human emotional, intellectual, sensual experience dependent upon not only the literal meaning of the words, but on their connotations, their sounds, their rhythm, their relationships to one another, their syntax, their allusions, their history, their use by other poets, etc., and also what the individual reader of the poem brings to the experience. Reduce the poem and you do not have an understanding of the poem. At best you have an essay on the poem, at worst something alien to the esthetic experience. In essence, I should say that the problem with consilience is that our experience is not reducible. I have read a lot of what Professor Wilson has written, including On Human Nature (1978), the charming memoir, Naturalist (1994), parts of The Ants (1990) and his controversial, but ground-breaking and highly influential, Sociobiology (1975). And I have read some of his critics, most recently essayist Wendell Berry's Life Is a Miracle (2000) and Charles Jenck's piece in Alas, Poor Darwin (2000). What has struck me in these readings is the disconnection between what Wilson has written and what some critics have criticized him for writing! For example it is thought that Wilson is a strict biological determinist when it comes to human behavior. But here he writes, very clearly on page 126, "We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture." Wilson has had to weather more than his share of unfair criticism because, as the father of sociobiology, which some mistakenly see as a furtherance of a rationale for eugenics, he has been made the target of the misinformed. Additionally, Wilson is not the lovable sort of genius we adored in Einstein, nor the heroic scientist overcoming a terrible handicap as in the case of Stephen Hawking, but a slightly nerdish genius from Alabama who spent much of his life crawling around on the ground and in trees looking at ants. Some people make it clear that such a man should not presume to tell them anything about human beings and how we should conduct our lives or how we should view ourselves. But I think they are wrong. Wilson brings unique insights into the human condition, and he has the courage of his convictions. I think he is a man we should listen to regardless of whether we agree with him or not. Even if its central thesis is wrong, Consilience is nonetheless an exciting book, full of information and ideas, elegantly written, dense, at times brilliant, a book that cannot be ignored and should be read by anyone interested in the human condition regardless of their field of expertise.
Rating:
Summary: Some thoughts on Consilience
Review: Edward O Wilson has certainly made his case for consilience well. However, not all phenomenon are subject to consilient explanations. Ethics, for example, in the Indian tradition, is explained rather simply by the ancient Indian gurus as a way to stay within the charmed circle of Brahman, or oneness with God, and not venture out and entangle onself too much with the external world. However, the reason for the desire for this mystic union, as Edward O. Wilson so eloquently put it, may lie in our genes.
Rating:
Summary: The Evolution of Evolution
Review: Consilience is a great idea, but is it a scientific idea? Wilson's engaging defense conceals a curious serpent in the conceptual eden. One of the ironies of Wilson's invocation of this consilience is the way that this points immediately to the real process of evolution visible in world history, wherein Darwin's theory of natural selection, granting the breakthrough of the idea of evolution, is little more than an ideological breakdown product of the history of philosophy. The book opens with a picture of the Ionian Enchantment, then connects this with the Enlightenment, whose themes are given off to a defense against the onslaughts of postmodernism. This connection of two periods is itself significant and leads us to ask what this intermittent pattern in the evolution of science, of philosophy, indeed of the idea of evolution, tells us about the nature of evolution itself, if such a dynamic series of discontinuities speaks plainly beyond the implicit continuity built into Darwin's version. Why does the Ionian Enchantment occur when and where it does, and what is its relation to the full pattern of so-called 'Axial' emergentist evolutionary products of that era? The answer can only be that we see within history a macroevolutionary parallelism, complemented by a sequential series. In this context, Wilson quite naturally points to the two eras of the Ionian Enchantment and the Enlightenment as steps in a significant overall global evolution, from which, among other things, we dare not omit the Indian, the Judaic, the Chinese parallel phases. The point is that Wilson's thesis must use another unstated pattern of evolution to defend the application of the Darwinian, where it is therefore superflous. The fate of the Enlightentment is a problem only if we select a narrow subset of its own implicit consilience of contradictions, and it is futile to wring one's hands over the appearance of the Romantic poets if the very counter-Enlightenment summoned into existence by a dialectic against reductionism is a result of this gesture. Consilience stands as well for the problem it seeks to solve,that is, for the actual division of knowledge that arose at this time, that Rousseau embodied, Hegel so carefully examined, and which Wilson wishes to heal through, evidently, the disarmament and unilateral surrender of the humanities to scientism. This could be a problem, the dog will bite back. Wilson seems intent to berate Kant for being a transcendentalist, while this philosopher went to some lengths to distinguish the transcendental as related to the conditions of our knowledge, from the transcendent, which is unknowable, and about which the religions produce their metaphysical beliefs, to which science is so allergic. This unfortunate confusion of Kantian terminology makes us fail to realize how close Kant is to the scientific perspective. We would oppose materialism to idealism, but that is beside the point. It was Newton who thought the 'will' might alter the momentum of physical systems and violate the law of conservation, thinking space the sensorium of God, and it was Kant who wished to embrace Newton and at the same time save him from himself, by 'modelling' a system of man that could reconcile the great contradiction, his third Antinomy, that has stopped every effort without exception to produce a science of psychology, a theory of culture, or a mechanization of values in the study of fact. The final nemesis here is a 'science' of art, if just here the search for causality attempts to reduce this factor of the creative to another laboratory specimen. If we look at the period of the Ionian Enchantment we see that periods of great artistic flowering are themselves a function of time, world historical time, and we should wonder why the age of the Ionians also produced the great Greek tragedians. This curious anomaly of timing and periodization should lead us to wonder if our evolution is not at the highest level, as an induction of the evolution of art, a far cry indeed from the realm of survival of the fittest, and natural selection. It seems that real evolution as the descent of man knows its own consilience and this represents a form of the 'evolution of consciousness' beyond the scope of the trials of organismic and genetic evolution. The problem with sociobiological thinking is always, and has remained, the basic tenet of natural selection. Given a new understanding of evolution, such as is latent in Wilson's periodization, the idea of consilience might come into its own in a post-Darwinian version. The reductionist version enshrined here will, one fears, flush Romantic poets from their foxholes. But, Wilson is a tough old buzzard. Tip your goblet for a kamikaze. This book has the virtue of the clarity of its presentation, which does not hide therefore any of its flaws. It is useful to invoke consilience under any terms, and the idea might well prove fatal to sociobiology, whose biophiliac converts, in a canticle of Leibowitz, might revert to the wild for a consilient eden of Rousseauan bliss. For the implication of Darwinism is to deprive theory of any theory of the evolution of civilization, which is all about us, if we do not delete it from theory.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful. Thought Provoking Book
Review: The purpose of this book is to explore the possibilities of synthesis of the various branches of study from the "hard sciences" to the arts. As can be imagined, this is a daunting task, but Wilson makes real progress in this book. We live in a complicated world, but Wilson makes a wonderful case for the ability of the human mind to make sense of it. He is at his best when he discusses the failure of the ideals of the Enlightenment, brain chemistry and the genetic connection to culture. He is less successful in connecting the natural sciences model to artistic expression. This book is a thought-provoking read and is challenging, but these are important ideas and worth devoting time and attention to exploring them. Wilson is a man of both depth and breadth of intellect and is courageous enough to use those talents to attempt to discover the possibilities of connecting our theories of various disciplines. Sure, it's speculative, but it is also amazing the power that he brings to his argument that the various areas of human understanding can be subjected to universal principles of understanding. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: A fatally flawed vision
Review: Edward Wilson, a Harvard biologist and writer of no little skill, here puts forth his vision for a world in which all knowledge is connected scientifically with everything else; that in essence, the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences are all inherently linked and therefore the most reductionistic of scientific knowledge eventually effects what we know about everything else, all the way up to abstractions such as art, music, and religion. Like the other "popularizers of science," Wilson lulls his audience into a cheerful, blind optimism, borne of his mellifluous purple prose and complete willingness to take many important points for granted. Really, this book is a work of propaganda by a strict reductionist trying to conceal the fact that the logical outcome of his philosophical prejudices leads only to complete inhumanity. The black hole on the cover is eerily appropriate. The good news is that this book, while pompous, hubristic, and ultimately downright silly, is quite harmless; it serves mainly to reassure the ranks of Sagan-disciples and Dawkins-swallowers in their monomanic confidence in metaphysical materialism--and they'd surely find that elsewhere if not here. There are (at least) two huge, fatal flaws in Wilson's reasoning. Wilson envisions a universalism of knowledge in which data and facts are shared across disciplines to the extent that boundaries between disciplines simply melt away. But anyone who's spent any time in grad school knows that this is fundamentally opposed to the way that research is actually done; each person's area of expertise drastically narrows, and it is an infinitesimal sliver of nature that is fleshed out by one's thesis. This almost blinkered narrowness is, in fact, what chased me out of grad school after only a semester in a doctoral organic chemistry program. The professional academic life is somewhat broader, but not by much. It's almost as if Wilson has been spending too much time writing books rather than doing real science, that he has forgotten this obvious fact. The even more fundamental issue which Wilson completely ignores is his assumed, undefended philosophical reductionism. You see, to Wilson and his ilk, the idea that the physical world is all that exists is taken as an axiom. Naturally, if people actually have souls, and God actually exists, his whole house of cards falls down immediately, but Wilson doesn't even bother to consider that. To me, metaphysical materialism breaks down at the very point of ontology and selfhood: put simply, if consciousness is an illusion, who is having the illusion? The ideas of personhood, aesthetics, and ethics do not square with a merely mechanical existence, no matter how much one tries to look the other way. As a scientist, I can certainly understand the 'intellectual lure' of reductionism, but nothing greater than itself can be built on only its basis. Furthermore, Wilson needs to read up on his history a little better. This same sort of 'enlightened' optimism which flourished around the second half of the 19th century ended quite abruptly with bitter cynicism right around WW1. He does take the reader on a little history lesson, but it's awfully one-sided and selective. People should read this so they can see for themselves how scantily Wilson tries to back up his reasoning--it's really quite glaring.
Rating:
Summary: LEASHFUL THINKING!
Review: After reading this book I was left with a quizzical, ambivalent intellectual feeling about its contents, something like any of the well-known ambiguous figures used in Gestaltpsychology perception tests. Either this was one of my most meaningful encounters with the philosophy of science or this was one of the best-contrived visual tricks arranged by a renowned scientist to disguise his extrascientific hopes (geopolitical?) under a seductive scientific packaging. First of all the book stands out for the quality of writing and Wilson is surely another name to add to the already rich list of science's loans to high-quality narrative: I wish many a rive-gauche-style intellectual could only approximate in his/her works Wilson's clarity and overall textual pleasantness. The book is from start to end a passionate but only occasionally convincing effort to promote the goal expressed concisely by its crisp subtitle: the unity of knowledge! An ambitious goal, indeed, and one on which very few could dissent just on the vague ground of good and advisable general principles. But once you think it over the subject matter grows astonishingly complex and a little post-meditation forces a lot of questions and further issues to spring up like spiteful little devils on the way to fulfilling Wilson's respectable desires. One of the most lamented splits in today's culture, Wilson tells us, is the ancient, unsolved problem of science's divorce from the humanities. The author's opinion is that art, literature and the social disciplines are altogether blocked in their progress and capacity for real deeper insight by their distance from a sound acquantaince with the fact-based truths of science. And, since man and his brain are the very tools by which all culture is built, the humanist side should adhere to the uncontroversial tenets of the sciences which have the most to say about human beings and their brains: biology and, especially, neurobiology. It is of course understandable - but not philosophically justifiable - that Wilson, being himself a biologist, inclines to view the world thru the glasses of biology, but the gaps he has to close - jumping from neuron to brain to mind to art and so on - are so wide that the few examples of possible unification he presents leaves me doubtful on the actual feasibility of this grand design by the adoption of too simplistic an approach: that of a collapse of the humanities into a sort of sophisticated appendix of science and, more specifically, of biology. And, in the end, you are forced once more to ask an old, trivial but always apt question: has Wilson really avoided the pitfall of trying to explain cathedrals by the mere composition of the stones they are made of? How can we cope with the complexities of emergent qualities like mind, consciousness and aesthetics by the long leash of biology-based "epigenetic rules" without stretching that leash to a length such as master and dog are no more recognizable as two related creatures?
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