by Joshua Rolnick ’99.5

The chapter titles in Edward O. Wilson’s newest book read like a list of some of the greatest subjects of human thought: "The Natural Sciences," "The Mind," "The Social Sciences," "Ethics and Religion." And Wilson has something important to say about each of them in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

But, then again, no one who has read the book could claim that Wilson is a man who lacks ambition. In Consilience, the Harvard entomologist puts forward his grand vision of a total academic synthesis: the unification of all fields of knowledge, from political science to literature to religion, under the explanatory umbrella of the sciences.

"Consilience," literally a "jumping together," was first used by the 19th century philosopher William Whewell to mean the merging of theories drawn from separate disciplines. Chemistry and physics, for example, are consilient because the explanations of nature in them fit together to form a larger explanatory whole. Yet consilience does not put all disciplines on an equal footing–some fields are more fundamental than others. At the bottom of the scientific totem pole, in Wilson’s view, is physics; chemistry, which occupies the next slot, only became consilient with physics when phenomena in chemistry became explainable in terms of physics. The whole of chemistry wasn’t mapped onto physics all at once, of course, but bit by bit, molecular bonds, combustion, and other basic phenomena in chemistry were reduced to more fundamental processes in physics. Consilience, then, amounts to a chain of reduction linking all disciplines on the totem pole.

There’s nothing radical about the idea that the sciences should form one coherent whole, but Wilson’s vision goes further. Later in the book, he calls for the eventual inclusion of the social sciences and the humanities within our scientific schema. Simply put, he believes that faith in God, supply and demand curves, and political behavior–among other phenomena in the humanities and social sciences–will one day be reduced to biology (and through biology, to chemistry and physics). The crucial link in that chain of reduction will be evolutionary biology and the science of the brain, which will soon offer their own framework for understanding human behavior.

"The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities," he writes. And that’s where Wilson’s own background comes into play. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he began his career studying and classifying the ants of his home state. But unlike many scientists, who, as Wilson laments in Consilience, never venture out of their research niches, Wilson has made a writing career from looking at the big picture. He was one of the founders of sociobiology–a term he coined–and in his 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Wilson extrapolated from his studies of insect societies to argue that much of human behavior is genetically determined. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, first in 1978 for On Human Nature, and then in 1990 for The Ants.

Evolution, the sociobiologist believes, has built certain behavioral rules in the brain that can provide a framework for understanding human behavior. Through those rules, scientists will one day be able to reduce social science to evolutionary biology. Wilson writes that this reductionist victory for biology may come sooner than we think, now that the new discipline of evolutionary psychology has risen to prominence. He writes that understanding the mind through an evolutionary perspective is allowing sociobiologists to uncover a set of "epigenetic rules"–instinctual algorithms for behavior hardwired into the brain–that interact with environment to produce culture. Snakes, as the familiar example goes, are symbols of evil in so many cultures because millennia of falling victim to poisonous snakes have made human beings fear snakes instinctively.

After developing his sociobiological theories in some detail, Wilson turns to the social sciences. Unlike many biologists, Wilson acknowledges the importance of good social science: "People expect from the social sciences–anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science–the knowledge to understand their lives and control their future." Indeed, he writes, social science has been entrusted with some of the major problems facing society today, such as how to optimize world trade and moderate ethnic conflict. Yet progress in the social sciences has been slow, and Wilson asks why. The answer is consilience, or a lack thereof: "the medical sciences have it and the social sciences don’t." Even economics, the most successful of the social sciences, the entomologist argues, has failed to ground itself properly in psychobiological theories of human decision-making. As a result–and here Wilson doesn’t mince words–much of economics is still "irrelevant" to the practical problems of the world. Social scientists must "cross the boundary between the social and natural sciences," he concludes.

In the final section of the book, Wilson lays out the most daring component of his theory: the unity of arts and religion with the sciences. The social sciences, after all, are scientific endeavors with essentially the same goal as the natural sciences–a fully explanatory and predictive theory of natural phenomena. Religion, ethics and literature, on the other hand, appear to be undertakings of quite a different kind.

Yet, in Wilson’s view, that appearance is illusory: all reality is consilient, and the arts, like the social sciences, should be grounded in biology. "Art is the means by which people of similar cognition reach out to others in order to transmit feeling. But how can we know for sure that art communicates this way with accuracy?" asks Wilson. The answer, not surprisingly, lies in the science of the brain. Here Wilson’s theory becomes vague, but he seems to be arguing that if we understand how the brain processes artistic stimuli, we will know how to optimize the transmission of artistic feeling. And knowledge of epigenetic rules of behavior will help artists choose their symbols, stories, and motifs more effectively.

Ethics and religion, likewise, will benefit from sociobiology. Essentially, Wilson is arguing that we should treat ethics and religion as the products (or byproducts) of evolution, and that once we do, we will have a better understanding of what makes some people have certain ethical beliefs and why societies the world over practice some form of religion. But Wilson declines to tease out his theory, writing instead only that "the brain sciences are making important advances in the analysis of complex operations of the mind. There is no apparent reason why they cannot in time provide a material account of the emotions and ratiocination that compose spiritual thought."

Consilience is hardly a book to dismiss lightly. Wilson’s mellifluous prose and years of research experience make him stand out from a crowd of modern-day science popularizers. Rarely does one come across a distinguished scientist who writes such beautiful prose. Early in the book, for example, he extols the scientist’s quest for objective truth by comparing it to the need for religion: "It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course–a stoic’s creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook to adventure plotted across rough terrain. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind." And Wilson is a man of dazzling intellectual breadth. In the course of laying out his theory, he finds time to discuss consciousness, the historical origins of science, the purpose of art, problems in economic theory, and the perils of overpopulation.

Yet one is unable to avoid the conclusion that Consilience is a case of scientism gone awry. Wilson is aware that he is pushing scientism, but he doesn’t see anything wrong with that. After all, Wilson also considers deism "largely a problem in astrophysics." In Wilson’s view, science is knowledge and knowledge is science.

The power of scientific inquiry notwithstanding, I have to wonder, skeptically, if a scientific theory of art appreciation would really make poets transmit feeling any more effectively. It’s almost comical to imagine the "neuroscientifically inclined" artist, pouring over neuroscience papers to determine what kind of meter will be the most poignant for his poem about the epigenetic rules governing erotic love. No one can deny that a psychobiological theory of the arts would be an admirable scientific achievement, but somehow I doubt it would help people understand Milton.

Wilson is one of the most thoughtful scientists alive, but sadly, he is a far less thoughtful ethicist. Throughout the book, Wilson treats philosophers unfairly, and his discussion of moral philosophy is no exception. He criticizes philosophers who assume that there are transcendent moral principles, dismissing such influential works as John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice because it assumes that certain moral laws hold transcendently. If philosophers knew more about evolutionary psychology, he claims, they would not reason as they do. Whether he is right or wrong to argue that ethics is nothing more than biopsychology, he fails to see the distinction between a science of ethical behavior and a theory of ethics. Evolutionary psychology may uncover the origins of ethical thought, but it will do little to show us how to make ethical decisions. If ethics is biologically determined, should society turn to ethical nihilism? Most people would say "no."

Consilience, in short, is a brave work and anyone would profit from reading it. But like most great attempts at synthesis, it never quite realizes its goal.

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf 1998, $26.00)