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Title: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson, Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 067976867X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: April, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.94
Rating: 2
Summary: Wilson's brand of positivism as a personal mythology
Comment: This book is one of a genre in which scientists speculate and reminisce to a lay audience.
There are some parts of the book I agree with. Like his observations about the fractured state of knowledge in the academic world. But there's nothing that's new, except for the way he puts it together as his personal mythology.
He dismisses many things he has no experience with, like shamanism, dreams, and psychoanalysis. His best insights are lifted from other, deeper thinkers. I suppose you could read the book as an example of how a practicing scientist picks and chooses from the universe of ideas to put together his own view of the world.
I feel Wilson's thesis suffers from two serious mistakes. These are the same mistakes made by most practitioners of hard sciences.
First, he is a strict positivist who believes that scientific knowledge is Truth. And that this Truth is final, static, and absolute. In addition, he wants to conclude that what is not formally knowable, what does not lend itself to scientific description, is not an equally valid area of knowledge.
Where a good positivist philosopher would say "I will focus on what is scientifically knowable because it is all that I can talk about", Wilson says "I will focus on what is scientifically knowable because it is all that is true."
Rating: 3
Summary: more praise than practice
Comment: I think E.O. Wilson's powers as a populizer are overstated. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Gould, Daniel Dennett, Philip Kitcher and Michael Ruse have written more lucidly on science, especially evolution. Two of my three stars go to this book as a broad intellectual history, where it succeeds. As for the book's main argument, that all the strands of human knowledge can and should fruitfully converge, I am less convinced.
The writing is part of the problem. Even when the individual sentences are well-assembled and the words well-chosen, which is is usually the case, Wilson tends to change topics and allow arguments to dissolve before completion.
The controversial portion of the argument seeks to establish that assorted fields like economics, ethics, and the arts can be somehow improved if they are more firmly grounded in "real" psychology and a "real" apprehension of human nature, conceived as products of humankind's evolutionary history. How would these fields be improved under conditions of consilience, according to Wilson?
Applied to a quoted passage from Milton's Paradise Lost, Wilson points out that Milton's description conforms to evolved, hard-wired conceptions of beauty. Fine. So what? Says Wilson: "Works of enduring value are truest to these [evolved] origins. It follows that even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them." Well, no, it doesn't necessarily follow -- for starters, knowledge of origins doesn't necessarily confer understanding -- this sounds like the beginning of what might be an intriguing inquiry; unfortunately, however, this is presented as a conclusion in this book.
It is entirely possible that others will come along to flesh out one or more of the intriguing inquiries begun in this book. In turn, such treatments may create truly useful linkages that are currently unknown or barely understood. E. O. Wilson will deserve credit for having sketched the frame of such inquiries. But if you are looking for consilience per se, and not just an encomium to the idea of it, keep looking.
Rating: 4
Summary: Procrustean argument or prophetic vision?
Comment: E.O.Wilson has come up with an arcane word for the title of his book, the meaning of which you will not find in your regular OED. I eventually read elsewhere that CONSILIENCE is the convergence, jumping, or bringing together of knowledge. The long time spent in frustrating dictionary searches has caused me to yield to temptation and toss an equally odd word at Wilson's book in this review. Is it indeed Procrustean by being a created and arbitrary standard that he demands intellectual conformity to, or is he simply ahead of his time and has a real vision of a coming "unity of knowledge"?
For persons in the humanities and social sciences this book may sting a little. Wilson is used to criticisms of his own work because of his insistence on using sociobiology as the lens through which he sees all. Long ago after having a jug of water dumped on his head and being told he "was all wet", Wilson seemingly realized that in order to be read he would have to develop a moderate, well reasoned, and mild writing style. You'll never read one of his books and come away thinking "diatribe" or "polemic". He even writes with a recognition and acknowledgement of his own biases. He says here that "ethics is everything" and for Wilson this largely means environmental ethics, and if after reading his book, critics want to say he's a reductionist, Wilson admits he's "guilty, guilty, guilty." Wilson however is quite able to give as good as he gets and the subject of his critical penmanship is the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and their "ideological committments" and lack of a "web of causal explanation." He thus sees them as weak in comparison to the natural sciences and poor templates for explaining all we see around us. Furthermore he looks back on the Enlightenment and says that those thinkers "got it mostly right" and achieved a wholeness in contrast to what we have now where divisions in academia are "artifacts of scholarship."
My background is in economics and geography and I don't have a problem with him saying there should be more rigidity and rules in those fields of study, and I agree that there should be more environmental awareness in economics. Maybe Wilson is onto something and sociobiology as a synthesis science might be a forerunner of the blended knowledge that will finally give us a clear view of the Big Picture. Who knows? His argument does tend to falter a bit though when he grasps for the humanities and discusses the laws that might be applicable in art and philosophy. It's a tenuous grip indeed as he is unconvincing in explaining how you achieve "objective truth" by "contemplation of the unknown" which he admits is was philosophy is. And please tell me what law governs the interpretation of a work of art?
It's a fascinating book and very well written. It's obvious Wilson has done a lot of research on the subject and he's a brilliant thinker and he may be mostly right. But Einstein the great unifier himself, once said that "imagination is more important than knowledge", so i'm inclined to go with that until Wilson or someone else can prove otherwise..
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Title: On Human Nature by Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 067463442X Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1988 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Future of Life by Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 0679450785 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 08 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition by Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 0674002350 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 04 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
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Title: The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson, Edward Osborne Wilson ISBN: 0393319407 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0192860925 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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