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Summary: EXCELLENT READ WITH RICH VOCABULARY
Review: Edward Wilson argues for the possibility of a consilience among domains of knowledge such as art, psychology, biology and so forth--a difficult synthesis. His book is well-written and lucid for such a complex subject. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. I caution readers who do not have an educated vocabulary without which Wilson's precise wording becomes a nuisance...a provocative and enjoyable read.
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Summary: This book was somewhat boring
Review: I was a little disappointed. I found the prose dry and the pace slow.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Rather than write a general review of this book, which I may do with another time, I just had one comment to make for now. Wilson is also known for his biological determinism (he is, after all, a biologist). He soft pedals these ideas, probably in order not to offend liberal-minded scientists. However, Wilson is quite moderate on these issues, compared, for example, to the neuroscientists. I was trained in both psychology and neurophysiology, and the neurophysiologist types are much more hard-core on the determinism issue, making Wilson look like a moderate. For example, when I was in school, and you learn in your Functional Neurology class of a guy who had a small stroke in the cerebral cortex, who then seemed perfectly fine except for his losing his ability to use articles and conjunctions in his speaking vocabulary, you very quickly get the idea that if it's not in the brain, it's not anywhere. Of course, people who have more extensive brain damage may have more general impairments, but this is only one example of how specific they can get. Probably the strangest example of this sort of specificity I encountered during my education is with respect to the orgasm center in the human brain, which if I recall at this point, is in the ventral posterolateral nucleus in the thalamus. But anyway, it's in the thalamus somewhere, which is a structure located just below the cerebral cortex, and functions as a way station or relay station, sending signals further up to the cortex. However, some touch sensations do get processed in the thalamus. For example, there are these people who have developed epileptic seizure foci in this area. Well, you could say this is not exactly an unpleasant type of epilepsy to have, considering the "seizures" go on for several minutes and produce orgasm-type feelings the whole time that are probably an order of magnitude more intense than the normal ones. (No convulsions are associated with this type of epilepsy). Anyway, when you continually encounter these sorts of brain phenomena, so-called hard-core "determinists" like Wilson start to look very wishy-washy on the determinism issue.
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Summary: Good but not good enough !
Review: Wilson is one of those rare men who has both technological /scientific and scholarly humanistic talents with tangible achievements in both spheres. He actually makes a point of stressing the downright stupidity and ignorance of scientists who know nothing about the arts and humanities (who I term "technological morons" ) and artists / humanities scholars who boorishly ignore science and mathematical thinking (who I term "ostriches"): neither can explain or represent reality in any way that even begins to scratch the surface! As someone who whole-heartedly believes that science and humanities desperately need to coexist in the same brains, this book is a marvelous justification. The problem is that it doesn't do enough to demonstrate actual consilience. For several hundred pages, Wilson tries to convince us that consilience in various fields of knowledge is necessary and realizable...but for those of us who were convinced of this beforehand? The author should have done more to show consilience beyond the constant repetition of terms such as "epigenetic rules" which is the idea that there are genes that predispose us to act in certain ways thereby linking behavior and culture to biology. On the other hand, this book is a must read for the sad and unwieldy masses who still hold childishly to creationist and primitive religion.
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Summary: Tick-Toc, Tick-Toc, E. O. Wilson's a Crock
Review: Dr. Wilson admires the organization and efficiency of ant colonies. He admires them so much, he seems to think that humans will eventually come to their senses and live like them. This book was tedious reading, and I was bothered by the author's stylistic habit of straddling both sides of arguments without making a convincing case for one or the other. He parrots the popular, gloomy environmental cliches of rain forest destruction, global warming, and tragic extinctions, and to me, loses all credibility as an independent thinker. Perhaps Wilson has already made the transition to ant-logic and ant-thinking <g>.
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Summary: Incredible book
Review: I was steered to this volume by two online friends who are also avid bibliophiles with very ecclectic interests, Roger McEvilly and Stephen Smith. Both were impressed with what Wilson had to say, and I have to agree with them. Consilience is a very densely packed work. The author covers at least in brief topics as diverse as French philosophers to recent advances in brain/mind science. He has included something of almost every conceivable interest which will leave nearly every reader feeling a degree of connectedness with the material. There are also topics in abundance for the curious to research and also the sources to further that personal investigation. I found myself as happily buried in the information in the author's end-volume footnotes as in the text itself! Here I found several sources, both in journals as well as books, in which to do future study--not that with friends like Roger and Stephen I will ever lack for titles to read! While I can believe that the social sciences and the physical sciences might acheive what Wilson calls consilience, I'm not certain that I agree with him that the arts will do so. Certainly the various branches of the physical sciences are already beginning to do so with very fruitful results. An interesting read, but plan on spending a fair amount of time in reflection!
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Summary: A flawed but exhilarating book
Review: As an Objectivist, I hold that «integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason» (Ayn Rand, *The Romantic Manifesto*), that everything in the universe is interrelated, that every item of knowledge is connected to every other and that, to borrow the only sentence from Hegel with which Leonard Peikoff seems to agree, «the true is the whole». I was therefore really seduced by the promise of the subtitle of this book, «The Unity of Knowledge», and Jared H. Diamond's comment that it «attempts nothing less than a synthesis of all ways of knowing». Moreover, «consilience» is such a beautiful word that I simply could not resist ordering the book. But what does Wilson mean by this unusual term ? Though he tries not to break the news too abruptly, it finally appears that «consilience» means nothing more than old-fashioned «reductionism» (even though Wilson does distinguish «consilience by reduction» from «consilience by synthesis»), and was probably chosen over its infamous synonym so as not to scare the potential buyers of the book. *Consilience* is therefore a treatise on Wilson's dream of a unification of the whole field of knowledge, one that would be effected neither by the adoption of a common method (logic and the scientific method) nor by that of a common language (mathematics), but by the reduction of the higher-order sciences, including the humanities, «all the way down» to biology and physics, the latter being the door out of labyrinth of perplexity, and reduction, Ariadne's thread. The already achieved consilience of biology and physics and the recent attempts at making psychology consilient with biology (via sociobiology and the neurosciences) serve as the basis for Wilson's hope that economics, the social sciences, the interpretation of the arts and even ethics will one day be consilient with the lower-order sciences. Of course, such reductions would imply several modifications in our worldview. Free-will, for instance, would have to go, revealing itself to be a mere «illusion », the self being «the entity that *seems* to make... choices». But do not worry : «because the individual mind cannot be fully known and predicted, the self can go on passionately believing in its free-will» and this, Wilson says, is «fortunate», for confidence in one's free will is «biologically adaptive»... This obstacle to reduction being taken care of, economics can then aspire to become a real science, i.e. a science with real, specific predictive power, freed from the simplistic models of homo economicus after taking as its premises the conclusions of a renovated, biologicized psychology. What about ethics ? As part of his attempt to reduce it to biology, Wilson resurrects the 18th-century theory of moral sentiments, by showing how human beings are shaped by «epigenetic rules», «regularities in development in anatomy, physiology, cognition and behavior » which predispose us to act in ways our morality sanctions. That such predispositions exist seems to be a well-documented fact. That they can justify our ethics, however, as Wilson suggests, is philosophically untenable. But then for Wilson, ethics is just the «codification» of social preferences, the «translation of... the public will». For all my reservations about Wilson's reductionist agenda (which he tries to make palatable by equivocating between «reductionism», a philosophical program, and «reduction», a legitimate scientific practice), I must say I was exhilarated by some of the prospects opened by the book, and felt a deep sympathy for the author himself. An admirer of the great figures of the Enlightenment, he sees himself as a modern heir to their philosophical enterprise, defending «the grail of objective truth» against the irrationalism of the postmoderns (to whom, in my opinion, he is a little too charitable, because he is himself innocent of any intellectual dishonesty). Rejecting religion, he nevertheless recognizes people's need for a «sacred narrative», but suggests that they should seek it in science, for, he says, «the true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined.» Such lines are almost inebriating. But then again, perhaps it is only the philosophical corruption of this century that makes books like «Consilience», for all its flaws and excesses, seem like a breath of fresh air. For a more cogent take on the integration of the higher-order branches of knowledge, I would recommend Leonard Peikoff's lectures on «Unity in Epistemology and Ethics» (available from Second Renaissance), and Objectivist literature generally.
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Summary: Wilson has done it again!
Review: Wilson is truely one of the greatest science thinkers of the 20th century. In this great book, he shows us how everything in life is so delicately interconnected. We'll still be singing his praise at the end of the 21st century, for he is a masterful guide through our future. If he is not awarded his third Pultizer for this book, it's merely because he's light years ahead of the review comittee.
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Summary: An arrogant and dismissive book with a good heart
Review: Dr. Wilson is, I have learned from students and professors in the biological sciences, a wonderful teacher and grandfatherly man. It is a shame, then that he chooses to dismiss ideas coming out of the humanities without any attempt to adequately represent them. He chooses to attack straw men--his tendentious interpretations of thinkers like Foucault and Derrida--rather than engaging with stronger ideas. Worse, his take on the humanities--that as a school it is not capable of "discovering" knowledge, but only "interpreting" what has been said before--is absurd. One wonders what "science" is, in the end, other than whatever Dr. Wilson thinks of as "good." That said, I have to praise his book--it is well written and thoughtful in many places, and raises many interesting questions about the nature of knowledge. One only wishes that he had started with the idea that knowledge might be found outside of the sciences, rather than with the certainty that only science could produce knowledge. Then, perhaps, his book would be a true rallying cry for thinkers of all stripes to seek out common ground rather than a call for scientists to condemn and colonize other departments at universities world wide.
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Summary: Two Problems with a Great Book
Review: Like most other reviewers, I found Consilience to be a very exhilarating book. Wilson is generally conversant in both natural and life sciences, and his assessments are almost always mature, incisive, and on the mark. I would like to point out two problems with the book, though. First, the argument that all human phenomena (including art and morality) can be reduced to natural science is just a piece of metaphysical claptrap. Neither Wilson nor anyone else knows this to be the case. The correct argument is that we will learn a lot about human phenomena, including art and morality, if we subject it to serious scientific, and specifically evolutionary, investigation. Second, I think there is an irreducible gap between the non-life sciences (physics, astronomy, chemistry) and the life sciences (biology, sociology, psychology, animal behavior, economics, etc.). The gap is that the latter depend on strategic interaction and are best understood using game theory, whereas the former have no concept of strategic interaction whatever. Game theory, as I have argued in my book "Game Theory Evolving" provides a lexicon for the unification of the behavioral sciences, both theoretically and empirically. Wilson's argument for the unity of the life sciences is rather philosophical more than scientific, and hence leaves the reader uninformed as the the material basis for this unity.
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