Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Christian Century, Nov 4, 1998 by Steve Pope

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. By Edward O. Wilson. Knopf 352 pp., $26.00

The subtitle of this book, "the unity of knowledge," will strike some readers as abstruse, yet it directs us to important questions: Can we think about the world and ourselves in anything resembling an integrated manner? Do our moral convictions connect in a reasonable way with what we think about human origins? Is the way we think about the physical world consonant with the way we think about human conduct? Is our view of human nature compatible with our religious convictions? Wilson thinks that the answer to these and similar questions is no, primarily because of scientific illiteracy, but also because of a widespread failure to live up to the intellectual, religious and moral implications of science.

"Consilience" is a 19th-century term connoting a "jumping together" of knowledge "by the linking of Fact and fact-based theory across the disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation." Wilson's "consilience" aims to provide a comprehensive framework for relating all the various disciplines of knowledge under the banner of natural science. Wilson is well qualified to take on tiffs task. He is a distinguished Harvard biologist and popular teacher, Pulitzer Prize--winning writer, sociobiologist, naturalist, authority on entomology and outspoken advocate for environmental responsibility and species diversity.

For our survival and well-being, Wilson says, we need a consensus about our origins, our nature as human beings, our place in the natural world and our purpose, or what it is that makes life worth living. The most credible foundation for this consensus, he insists, is natural science. And the biggest threats to this enterprise come from completely opposite directions--postmodernist denial of scientific objectivity and religious obscurantism and dogmatism.

Wilson believes that evolutionary, biology, strategically situated as the bridge between the natural and the human sciences, should replace theology as the "queen of the sciences." "The legacy of the Enlightenment is the belief that entirely on our own we can know, and in knowing, and in understanding, choose wisely."

To a great extent, Enlightenment hope has been realized by 20th-century "hard science." The challenge remaining is to extend well-tested scientific principles into the domain of the social sciences and the humanities. Eventually, Wilson predicts, science will provide a synthesis of all knowledge from all fields of inquiry, from philosophy and literature to art and architecture.

We humans have a tendency to think of ourselves as different from all other animals, as special, noble and created in the "image of God." But like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, Wilson rejects anthropocentrism. Since human nature has evolved throughout millions of years of natural selection, he says, the most appropriate science for examining the meaning of human behavior is evolutionary biology and its allied disciplines. Wilson has dedicated his life to persuading us to think of ourselves as animals who, by dint of luck and natural selection, have evolved to possess highly complex brains. For all our intelligence when compared with gorillas and chimpanzees, we are still primates. We should, therefore, not be under the illusion that when anatomically modern human beings emerged 100,000 or so years ago, after millions of years of evolutionary change, they ceased to be influenced significantly by their evolutionary past. We cannot climb up a ladder and kick it away while standing on the top rung.

Wilson takes a "no holds barred" evolutionary view of religion. Religion is the bastion of superstition, dogmatism, fanaticism, tribalism and other atavistic impulses. Whereas Hegel viewed religion as the poor man's philosophy, Wilson regards religion as the poor man's science. Religion was once the only way pre-literate people could comprehend the natural world and deal with human suffering. But now we have science, so religion is no longer needed by those who want to know the truth about human life--indeed, it frustrates such a quest. Yet Wilson does not want to extinguish all religion. For the time being, at least, we must keep it in place as an emotional crutch for the weak and as a civic religion that can bind us together in political community. Some day, Wilson hopes, the "evolutionary epic" will replace the biblical mythology as our core religious narrative.

Wilson also believes that religion and ethics can be "explained" in terms of evolved "epigenetic rules" that serve to promote human survival and reproduction. Epigenetic rules are "hereditary regularities of mental development" that "animate and channel the acquisition of culture." A smile, for example, signifies happiness across all cultures because smiles are genetically encoded responses common to all human beings. Fear of snakes is also universal: Native Americans may fear rattlesnakes and Indians fear cobras, but both fears express the evolved epigenetic rule that instinctively recognizes the potential lethality of snakes. Controversially, Wilson stretches this notion to embrace other behavioral phenomena--many quite broad and all substantially influenced by culture, including incest taboos, status seeking, care for children, sexual behavior, the morality of cooperation and cheating, and altruism. In Wilson's view the Christian ethic of self-sacrifice has functioned to encourage loyalty to the group, thereby tacitly promoting the selfish interests of the individuals who belong to these groups and promoting human survival.