Rating: 
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 "siow@chass.utoronto.ca". 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.
Rating:
Summary: Wilson is right. Where did we lose the vision, the '60's?
Review: Wilson is right. For without some common unifying thesis the pluralistic global village produces a cacophony of stridend, competing philosophical imperatives, each according to the proponent the best (or at least just as good).The result is chaos, making Hiter's genocidal eugenics as philosophically just as the code of Hammurabi and Balkan "ethnic cleansing" equally valid as Christ's Sermon on the Mount or the efforts of Mother Theresa and Ghandi. Think Clearly. Be Clear. Read E.O. Wilson and understand.
Rating: 
Summary: well written but poor science
Review: Wilson is an entertaining writer. He first presents a historical tour and defence for the scientific method. I agree with his defence. However the main message of the book is that the study of biology will lead to a deep understanding of human nature. This understanding will lead to insights into many social institutions (sociobiology). I agree that taking into account biological processes is important for understanding some social institutions such marital behavior, parental investments and other topics under active investigation by anthropologists and psychologists. But knowing more biology is not useful for investigating other kinds of social institutions. For e.g., markets are ubquitious. Economists have investigated the circumstances in which markets will be useful. These circumstances do not depend on further understanding of biological processes. However they do include investigating completely social constructs such as fiat money, market prices and auctions. Studying biological processes is unlikely to enhance our understanding of markets. Wilson rightly points out that many philosophical moral systems (including well known ones such as Rawls) are built on counterfactual assumptions about human nature. But many of the difficult moral and policy questions we face today are difficult not because we do not understand human nature, but because we already anticipate correctly the conflicts inherent in those issues. From reading his book, I suspect that Wilson is not particularly well read in the social science. I conclude that Wilson is carelessly optimistic in his view that sociobiology will eventually lead to a theory of most social institutions.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent choice!
Review: Although I have not read his new book, I have just completed his article in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly. It is a perfect preview into the not only the history of the foundationalists but where current philosophies will take us. Wilson's "promise of consilience" is a perfect thought to take into the next millennium.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: If the very idea that chemical and physical or biological and social phenomena could be causally connected takes you by surprise, then I strongly recommend this book to you. If you are like me, however, spending most of your days doing science and arguing for conceptual compatibility between psychology, biology and economics, you will find very few original ideas in this book, that has very few ideas altogether anyways.
The first part of the book is historical and it is pretty readable, especially if you are anxious to get to the real stuff. But the real stuff is very slow in coming, as the shocking truth that cell biology has something to do with cell chemistry, and that mind has something to do with the brain is very gradually (it takes about 200 pages) revealed to us. Unfortunately, apart from these general truisms you will find little else. I can recall only one example that is sort of worked out down the hierarchy from social to physical - the presence of serpents in rituals of some primitive peoples in distant corners of the world, something, I dare say, of no importance to anyone but a few scientifically minded shamans and a handful of anthropologists. And this is the general nature of the examples that Wilson uses to illustrate his rare points: they are little known, inconsequential or drawn from the least vital of the classical works (e.g. Milton's "Paradise Lost").
Although the book as a whole is relatively well structured, particular chapters are most often just loose patchworks of independent essays that share somewhat similar themes. This makes the book extremely repetitive and hard to follow as, despite most of its assertions ringing true, it is in a great need of a solid argument. One would expect the book that purports to show advantages if not inevitability of consilience to teem with examples, yet there are very few of them, each of them then being grossly overused in turn (e.g. Westermarck effect is referred to dozens of times, almost as if this were a book on sexual development).
All those flaws culminate in the chapter on arts. There is no even mention of the possibility that arts have something to do with status, and there is virtually no mention of music, movies and literature - as far as this book goes, the arts are about cave drawings and Mondrian's personal development. On the top of it, Wilson reinforces already very entrenched and unfortunate habit of hyperhumility towards the arts and artists (which exists precisely because interest in art is associated with status), insisting many times that arts and science are complementary, that what we get from arts we can not get from science etc. This of course, and perhaps sadly, is not true, if only because 1) one of the reasons for arts (especially literature and movies) is their transmission of social knowledge 2) increasingly, there are more reliable (scientific) sources for this knowledge 3) time available to us for learning is limited.
As some sort of partial compensation for the reading for the thousandth time that human nature is relevant for social phenomena, comes the penultimate chapter on ethics. It is refreshing to see one of the major figures in sociobiology pointing out the fallacy of the so-called naturalistic "fallacy" that so many evolutionary psychologists enthusiastically embrace. Wilson puts the matter succinctly: there is no other place for ought to come from but is. This does not mean that every particular act is right, but it does mean that it is wrong only if we say so. But even this chapter is too long for this simple, if important point. Almost no ethical implications of what we actually know about human nature are worked out - the chapter proceeds as if we know nothing about gender and race differences, origin of mental illness, cognitive biases and child development again into the wordy and uninformative hodge-podge.
In several places Wilson laments over intellectual specialization that is common among contemporary inteligenzia. It seems to him that we need more synthesizers, but that is hardly as obvious as he appears to think. Distributed systems have had considerable success in many areas and it is quite possible that scientific enterprise is best served by thousands of specialists oblivious to the regularities in the greater project that they are a part of. Besides, even a relatively poorly researched book like this one depends on the work of at least several dozens specialists, and there are probably not much less synthesizers that could have written it. I therefore expect that we will soon be reading a more successful attempt at the same topic.
Rating: 
Summary: Self-Congratulatory and Out-dated Philosophy
Review: The author demonstrates a wonderful understanding of contemporary and popular science, and has a penchant for enthusiastic and exhilarating writing. This isn't surprising considering his credentials. It's obvious he has a passion for science, the work of science, and all of the accomplishments of science; so much so it reaches the point of self-congratulatory and hindsighted, not foresighted.
As an educational crash-course through the natural sciences and humanities, this book is good. But the author claims a lofty goal of "unity of knowledge," which clearly pushes his goal under a philosophical context.
This context, is where he drearily fails. Why? Because he openly REFUSES to recognize the philosophical context. He admittedly (in the chapter 2 I believe) proclaims all can be known by science and its monological studies, and anything that can't be examined in such a manner simply doesn't exist. From such a perspective the author remains crystalized in 1700 spouting cheers for Aristotle and Cartesian ideologies, completely disregarding over 200 years of post-modern and integrative thought. There is even a paragraph where he mentions that contemporary philosophers might accuse him of being a positivist, or a reductionist (popular ideologies for 100 years ago), to which he enthusiastically responds his guilt!
I was sorely disappointed by this book. The writing is good, the objective information is sufficient (although you'd do much better reading a science textbook), but the depth of thought doesn't progress further than incessant self-flattery and constant pats on the backs of his peers.
I bought this book for the sake it pursued a "Unity of Knowledge," and I am deeply interested in integrative thinking and philosophy. I've read many books on the subject, and this one comes so short, and covers such a small territory of the current intellectual trends, that it's almost insulting. This guy should of been born 200 years ago. Drivel like this was acceptable and "cutting edge" back then.
Rating: 
Summary: Will he "See" the rose?
Review: “Consilience” is the culmination of a lifetime of thinking about nature and man’s attempt to understand the world he lives in and his place in it. His book “The Ants” earned he and his coauthor Bert Holder a Pulitzer prize and his theories on socialbiology upset many of the dogmas that were, and still are to some extent, well entrenched in the scientific establishment.Now nearing the end of a long distinguished career, he sees that all knowledge is interconnected and that in order for mankind to have a true understanding of the world he must attempt to understands his place in the context of all the forces at work in the universe. His writing style and his public appearances on PBS show that Mr. Wilson is a gentleman in the true sense of the word. His arguments for his point of view are always well reasoned and supported with real life examples and although he sometimes pokes gentle fun at different points of view, he is always respectful of the opinions of others. He is above all a humanist and what impresses me most, is how he can maintain his optimism about human progress in spite of everything he knows. I really enjoyed the book and admire the man. I wonder though, if when his time to leave this world finally comes, whether or not he will have an epiphany like the author Marino on his deathbed in the story “The Yellow Rose” by Jorges Luis Borges. “Then the revelation occurred, Moreno saw the rose … and he realized it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.”
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