Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge - Softcover

Wilson, Professor Edward O.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034911112X ISBN 13: 9780349111124

Publisher: Abacus, 1999

Synopsis

In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning. Edward O Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos. It is a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialisation of knowledge in the last two centuries. Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and human scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world.

About this title

Review

The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: over a long career he has not only made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology and ethology, but also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means "a jumping together", in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." In making his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia, and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigour and vigour to be brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for "Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us .... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." Wilson's wisdom, eloquently expressed in the pages of this grand and lively summing-up, will be of much help in that search.

Review

The first great ecologist, a pioneer in sociobiology and biodiversity...a giant among popularisers of science (Bryan Appleyard, INDEPENDENT)

There's a new Darwin. His name is Edward O. Wilson. (Tom Wolfe)

Edward O. Wilson seems to me the most important active naturalist we still have with us. It's not for nothing that he is a world expert on both ants and evolution. We really cannot do withou such intelligences as his. He makes one proud to be the same species. (John Fowles)

You can't fault his prose... This is science written with the passion of a zealot. (THE TIMES)

Edition details

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 034911112X
• ISBN 13: 9780349111124
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384