CONSILIENCE: The Unity of Knowledge
By Edward O. Wilson
Knopf, 332 pages, $26
Biologist Edward O. Wilson has never been afraid of the big questions, to his credit and to our gain. In a career spanning five decades he has moved from a specialization in ant behavior to controversial arguments about evolutionary biology and biodiversity. Unlike many of his science peers, Wilson thrives on seeking the deepest possible explanations. His eloquent books are widely admired by researchers and laymen alike, and his science theories still withstand the tests of experiment. This dual punch is an unusual accomplishment in a fragmented age when many researchers have great difficulty reaching a wide audience.
Wilson has written numerous books combining an artist’s insight and an experimenter’s obsession, two of which, “On Human Nature” (1978) and “The Ants” (1990), won Pulitzer Prizes in general nonfiction. No less a nonfictionist than Tom Wolfe dubbed him “the Darwin of our time.” Like Darwin, Wilson sometimes has landed in trouble. He managed to enrage Marxists, liberals and Stephen Jay Gould in the 1970s with a pioneering theory called sociobiology, describing the institutions of human culture as dictated ultimately by biology. The benefactors of high society charities, according to sociobiology, are fulfilling a species-supportive impulse to act ethically. In the Harvard campus fights that followed, Wilson was unfairly maligned until his detractors retreated.
Wilson’s newest book extends sociobiology by going after the biggest question of all–whether there is an ultimate unity behind the many fields of human thought. The hard sciences–physics, chemistry and biology–as well as theology, poetry, art and the soft sciences–sociology, anthropology, economics and political science–are converging, Wilson argues. They all share the same laws and speak the same language. This is “consilience,” a term Wilson takes from a 19th Century polymath named William Whewell.
If all this sounds familiar, it is. It was the rationalizing dream of the ancient Greeks and the Enlightenment thinkers, and Wilson begins by asserting that they, and not we, knew how things really work. Scientists, of course, love the Enlightenment’s idea of underlying rationality. Today’s new complex systems sciences require interdisciplinary work of Greek complexity, for instance to understand how genes combine with culture to shape our identity. Wilson is out to help by reuniting Apollo with Dionysus, reason with unreason.
To make his theory concrete, Wilson shows how different disciplines might explain something simple, like a dream. The shaman sees a dream as an ecstatic vision; a psychologist sees it as archetypal conflict; and a scientist sees it as nighttime firing of electrical charges from brain stem to cortex, allowing the mind to sort and file information. Science, however, says “nothing about the content of the dreams,” which so concerns the shaman and psychologist. Could our dreams be genetically determined plots generated by these neuronal impulses, useful as training to sharpen our survival abilities? Such a theory, Wilson suggests, is consilient with the shaman’s magic or Freud or Jung’s concepts.
There are many such examples in this book–some convincing and bracing, some not, but all of them witty. Ever wonder why we become near-homicidal maniacs over sports teams with names like Bears or Bulls? We are re-enacting Paleolithic totem rituals. Why do we kiss the hand of a priest? We are behaving like wolves who bow before the alpha male. Why should dissidents die in prisons to bring democracy to terrible regimes? They are agents of a biologically determined ethical imperative.
Your tolerance for this thinking, of course, may be inversely proportional to your religious faith, your expertise in wolf behavior, or the amount of time you’ve spent as a political prisoner. Reading this book, though, it’s not hard to see why sociobiology angered people.
Wilson counters by invoking the Great Books and arguing, convincingly, that it’s time to return to the quest for ultimate explanations, armed with all our hard-won science knowledge of the last three centuries. He cites Milton, for instance, when discussing the different values a humanist and a scientist bring to the question of creation. Wilson is right that humanists have lost too much of that old-time fire for the big questions. But he is a bit simplistic when arguing that thinking about atoms or DNA will rescue them.
Acknowledging his hubris in claiming that all the great questions are ultimately scientific, not spiritual, Wilson allows for the utility of mystery, “myth and passion.” These passages however, sound uncharacteristically shallow. Is poetry’s power mainly in the pleasurable brain chemicals it might produce? Wilson pointedly writes he is not being that reductionist, but his book expends too little effort exploring what, exactly, the passion of art, poetry or myth is. As with the example of the dream, science might tell us the neurochemical processes of storytelling, but it says nothing about a poem or story’s content, which to the humanist is really the whole shebang.
This book aspires to lofty heights, to be a great book itself. Unlike Wilson’s other books, however, in the end this one falters. In the final chapter, “To What End?” (by now the reader should know to what end), the arguments do not gather into a deeper river. Instead, the book offers a few diffuse complaints about the threats posed by our degradation of the planet, recent genocides and gene manipulation. “Consilience” posed such a large goal for itself that one wishes the book itself were more consilient.
