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Summary: Hard to believe
Review: For a man with his obvious knowledge it is hard to believe what you see is what you get with the universe. It is quite obvious there is a Designer, yet wilson believes the designer was blind chance. It is also hard to believe most scientists share his belief and dismiss the notion of Creator. Are we to believe the eagle, Mozart and oak tree all came from the same source? By accident?
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Summary: Some natural laws from one of the greatest living scientists
Review: One of the world's greatest living scientists, the author sets forth the premise that a few natural laws form the principles of creation and we need to isolate them. Professor Wilson, pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, has authored two Pulitzer prize-winning books and lectures throughout the world. He is currently Research Professor and Honorary Curator of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.Some of his observations confirm truisms, to wit: "the mind...sees the world only in pieces. "It throws a spotlight on those portions... it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness." Some sobering one-liners: There is almost no probability any two human beings shared identical genes. Life evolved over billions of years. We are a product of our genes and our culture, not of one or the other. Alcoholism is infrequently inherited in males, and almost never in females. Over 1200 physical and psychological disorders have now been tied to single genes from color blindness to single-cell anemia and eventually all will be curable through biochemicals. On who survives. Those who possess brainpower with the ability to make wise choices, survive longer and leave more offspring than those with brainpower that chooses poorly. We are drowning in information and starving for wisdom, so the world will shortly be run by people able to put together the right information at the right time, think about it critically, and make the right choices. The big story in contemporary evolution is that the only thing about human evolution that is changing is homogenization through immigration and interbreeding. The average differences among people in different parts of the world was not very great to begin with and is narrowing. Defining the arts. The arts express the human condition through mood and feeling. They call into play all the senses using the elements of order and disorder. It is partly through the arts we learn that 'high cultures commonly possess a combination of exceptional knowledge, technical skill, originality, sensitivity to detail, ambition, boldness, and drive. Artistic creations are meant to appeal to the beholder without analysis. Educated predictions about the dire future of the human race. By the year 2025, 40% of the world will live with chronic water scarcity. Sometime, in the near future our oceans are going to be fished out. Atmospheric scientists say that because of carbon dioxide air pollution we are increasing global warming and this is reducing our ability to grow food. It is also the cause of clouds and storms. Wilson says flat out that we shall see an environmental bottleneck in the 21st century which will result in a collapse of civilization. This has happened to smaller cultures over the centuries, but the human population is now so great, the effects will be worldwide. He calls population growth: "The monster of the land." The answer: Shrink population to a level that can be sustained by the Earth's fragile environment. He suggests the time has come for economists and business leaders to accept real-world cost accounting which includes the loss of natural resources. One is awed by what Professor Wilson tells us about ourselves and all the living things around us. This is a scientific book and a hard read, but the conclusions are earth-shaking and we should pay attention to what he is saying about our survival. The signs are abundant he has it right and the human race will dip out of sight sometime in the 21st century and are evidently powerless to stop our own extinction.
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Summary: Threatening to the Old Entrenched Order
Review: This brilliant treatise on the unity of knowledge sounds the death bell for the entrenched order of specialists. The social sciences in particular are threatened with accountability. Time will tell if that set of pseudosciences can be made suitable for the next millenium or must needs be discarded with the growing trash heap of unjustifiable delusions.
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Summary: A great book by an important thinker
Review: As an undergraduate in the early 1980s I was profoundly influenced by the paradigm-shifting academic movement begun by Professor Wilson in his work, Sociobiology. The idea that human social behavior was the product of thousands of years of ancestral genetic competition was a refreshing rejoinder to the dogma espoused at that time in conventional Sociology and Anthropology courses. In the years after university I have watched as Wilson's thesis has gradually achieved greater acceptance. Even many feminists and psychologists who once viewed Wilson's work as an anathema have come to realize that the ideas he popularized have changed forever their fields of study. It was with this background that I jumped into Consilience, hoping for new insight. What I discovered was a cogent argument for the need to break down the very same academic barriers that I recognized years ago as an undergraduate. In another book I read recently, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that the fallout from Darwin's work on evolutionary natural selection has completely disrupted and changed forever the intellectual landscape in which we live. Wilson makes essentially the same argument, but his book is more often prescriptive than diagnostic. He argues that the same synthesis which has been tenuously achieved in "hard" sciences such as physics, chemistry and molecular biology can be achieved in all branches of learning. He suggests roadmaps for achieving this integration in the social sciences as well as the arts and religion. Most interesting of all is Wilson's discussion of the need for greater understanding of the biological underpinnings of morality and ethics. Wilson correctly recognizes that for all of humanity's scientific and technological achievement, if our species is to thrive well into the future we must come to terms with ourselves and recognize certain truths that our biological history has imposed on us. That recognition will necessarily entail major changes in the way we live, both at the individual and the societal level. Ultimately, however, Wilson is a conservative - not in the ideological sense, but in recognizing the need to preserve many traditions that anchor us to our cultural heritage. This is a wonderful, well-researched, engagingly-written book by one of the most important scientists of the 20th Century. Readers looking for a peek into the future of intellectual discourse need look no further than Consilience.
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Summary: ambitious but disingenuous project
Review: Wilson's book is an ambitious project of the Enlightenment ilk, and one whose broad thesis I admire but do not agree with. Personal differences aside, I found Wilson's ability to survey human knowledge in a clear and accurate way to be reason enough to read _Consilience_. There are a lot of arguments and data in here, all of which are well laid-out and deserve a lengthy response. On the other hand, I really do find it disingenous of Wilson to say that he want a ``unity of knowledge'' when he's really hoping for the non-scientists to just surrender outright. The unity he seeks amount to an admission on humanists' part that their disciplines are weak and explain less than the neuroscientists and sociobiologists. This may be the case, but if it is, then it sounds more like a mass defection than a peaceful and interdependent coexistence.
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Summary: Concilience is not holism, but authoritarianism
Review: "Consilience" is a book that is written with a confidence speaking of a mind at the height of its powers, yet it is a confidence that is misplaced and echoes the spirit of the 19th century fin de siecle when it was thought that science was more or less complete, but for a couple of niggling problems to do with black body radiation and the implications of the Michelson-Morley experiment! Incompleteness is an intrinsic quality that has been the strength of science, yet success has the power to seduce and create the belief that some kind of concilatory breakthrough is very near. Epigenetic rules are waved as a metaphorical banner calling all forms of thought to its flag, and spurning all that does not show allegiance. Everything from religion to art to the humanities is chided for not looking for them,and everything that is clearly not science is dismissed out of hand. Moreover, this dismissal takes the form of badly thought-out sound-bites, which reflects poorly on the scientific mind. This is the sadness of it, for science has a great deal to offer and many challenges to meet; these will not be approached by imagining enemies in the camp. This has given rise to three major weaknesses in the book. In spite of the tirade against post-modernism and deconstructivism, one cannot help feeling his beliefs in the all-powerful methodology of science springs from his resentment of a backwoods Baptist upbringing. A minor point maybe, but it is not possible to dismiss it out of hand as this book attempts to do; rather it becomes buried between the lines of this book unconsciously and becomes its formative motive. One can never feel that it is truly objective. This attempted excision reflects itself at least twice. Notions of the Oedipus complex as expounded by Freud are quickly dismissed as unscientific (and admittedly for some good reasons) but the fact that it is targeted in the first place is both interesting and ironic. The origin of the Oedipus story is actually a warning that is relevant to the practice of science as outlined here. Sophocles unpacks the implications of attempting to predict the future by showing how such knowledge affects the present with disastrous consequences. Prediction is the left hand of science while the right is manipulation. All concepts as they are used in science are bent to this double-edged purpose. In the process, the position of inertia as an idea becomes paramount for only with the context it creates is it possible to create the possibility of prediction. However, to reduce reality to this concept universally which is what science must do to achieve consilience (and it is bound to be successful), it is necessary to assume the validity of the assumption to be actually true. In effect, there is no place in such a scheme for personal sentiment or dialectic, both elements being absent from the structure of science. That is why it could never be a complete system and why concilience becomes wishful thinking. However, to make it look as if it works, it becomes an arrogance indeed to assume the possibility of overlaying traditional holism with consilience (which is scientific holism) and expect to "explain" anything at all. Consilience is ultimately concerned with a magic-bullet production line, intellectually acceptable snake-oil cure-alls, while traditional holism emphasises the fundamental link between reality and humanity's participation in it. Yet while attempting to overlay it, this deviant morphism called consilience cannot rid itself so easily of the trappings of traditional holism, for they become unconsciously folded into the structure of this idea of interconnectedness. Consider this image: "Think of two intersecting lines forming a cross and picture the four quadrants thus created...Next draw a series of concentric rings around the intersection..." This web-like metaphor is not new nor original, but is familiar in religion, and the Muslim faith in particular. In fact, the meaning of the word "religion" is taken from just such intersecting lines which means to link back. These are taken to be the human elements regarded as the personal journeys of all people, complete with all their particular sentiments and intents and weaknesses, in contrast to the more law-like structure of the concentric rings. This difference is the dialectic structure that makes it workable, even though these two elements are apparently in opposition. This absence of accomodation in Consilience is reflected in the presence in its web metaphor of types only, or bodies and schools of thought, no matter how disparate. In effect, such imagery belies the dogmatic form that a consiliatory scientific perspective has engendered, making of science a religion of the old school. Modern day science is thus shaped into a form reflecting the same level of autocracy enjoyed by medieval religion. For all his achievements as a scientist, Edward Wilson manages to discredit the two most influential forms of thought in history. It reminds one of Descartes, who in trying to prove the existence of God, did more to promote atheism than any other thinker in history. Humanity is not the sum of its categorial parts, nor is it a colony of ants scaled up. There is always something left out in any thought structure for the sake of the thought structure. Incompleteness leaves room for the human spirit. Conciliation would attempt to do away with it. Of course, this is a post-modernist, deconstructive criticism, a form dismissed out of hand by this book. On the other hand, things do not go away because they are unliked. Fear becomes hidden, not eradicated, and works unconsciously to reflect itself in the subsequent structures made public. Digging them out makes this book an interesting read, but it has little else to offer in terms of understanding or holism.
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Summary: You cannot ignore the importance of this book
Review: If you don't ready any other chapter in this book, read the last chapter, E.O. Wilson's case for saving our environment. And, an incredible argument is it. Our oceans are dying, humans are over-running the planet, we are killing off plants and animals equal to the catastrophe that ended the dinosaurs--and despite it all scientists carry on as if the many disciplines of science are not connected by the common ground of physics. His plea is that in order to avoid what he believes (and I agree with him whole-heartedly) are truly the inevitable consequences of our species' footprints on this planet He argues forcefully that expansionism and exceptionalism-the idea that humans are an exception to the laws of physics and evolution-are clearly wrong in their assumption that we can continue to grow as we have and that technology can somehow save us from the environmental disasters we are facing.
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Summary: If you can't be a full-time reader, read this.
Review: General readers should disredard the comments of various academics fired up by territorial instinct. Those of us spending precious non-breadwinning hours gathering wisdom are happy to find a brilliant synthesis like Consilience. It doesn't matter to us who is "right".
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Summary: Peculiar and somewhat Insulting
Review: Wilson forecasts a direction in intellectual trends towards the reunification of all disciplines in a monolithic body of knowledge. His prior renown as a naturalist places him on the periphery of the humanities and social sciences--potentially an ideal position for critical and discerning analysis by someone with Wilson's lucid writing. Unfortunately, the product of his reflections demonstrates the unlikelihood of their undergirding thesis. He seems to miss the Platonic, slightly mystical bent of the unity of knowledge. Beginning with his ludicrous Ariadne's Thread metaphor, moving through his outdated analysis of the state of the humanities, and ending with his rather utopian and simple-minded enthusiasm of a bizarre physio-neuro picto-alphabet, he displays little understanding of the humanities and a happy inability to evaluate his own work. Failing to recognize the long history of a scientific/literary separation and the current antipathy between the two, he cheerfully and mindlessly advocates a sloppy and improbable reunion of the two. He performs a true disservice to cooperation between scientific and literary scholars by failing to recognize that scholars of the humanities might maintain the efficacy or accuracy of their studies. His final product seems a farfetched, if not asinine, puff of smoke, utopian at very, very best. All this book does is cheerfully demonstrate that if any truly productive scientific and literary syntheses will be performed, they will have to take place by a team, rather than someone who seems completely unaware of the stake people set in their beliefs, and think that scholars will cheerfully genuflect at the all-Holy altar of...neurobiology.
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Summary: A fiercely provocative book!
Review: This is a book to read twice (or perhaps even more than that!) Wilson's argument for consilience withink the natural sciences, and even among the natural and social sciences is supported by very strong evidence and is not to be taken lightly. The connections to the humanities and religion are logical but less well supported. Where I may not agree with Wilson is in the imminence of Consilience...while we are on the right track in the natural and social sciences, the vast majority of artists, writers, politicians, journalists, etc., have an extremely poor knowledge of the natural sciences, and the vast majority of scientists have a poor knowledge of the humanities. Just ask your English professor about string theory! To give my personal answer to what someone below me asked about free will: (he asked that if a computer could calculate what he would do next, wouldn't he just do the opposite to prove his free will?) The reason, according to Wilson as I interpret him, that even if you did so that doesn't mean you have free will is the following: if you do the opposite, you didn't do so of your free will! You are not programmed WITHIN your genes to act a certain way; its the way genes and environment interact. But BOTH are already determined. So by determining what you were going to do next, and letting you know that they determined it, they were actually changing what you were going to do next. And if you didn't chose to do the opposite, that was also already determined.
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