Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Wilson, Edward O.

ISBN 10: 0679450777 / ISBN 13: 9780679450771

Published by Alfred A. Knoff, 1998

About this Item

Dark boards are bound with light teal paper with straight edges and pointed corners. Spine is uncreased with silver titling. Text block is square with deckled pages. Binding is tight. 332p. You can find Wilsons' personalized inscription near the top edge of front fly leaf. Interior is otherwise unmarked with crisp white pages through out. Black and white Dust Jacket is unclipped with bold titling. Edges are creased with lightly peeling corners. Lightly surface scratches present. Overall remains a lovely collectible copy. Seller Inventory # 106449

Bibliographic Details

Title: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Publisher: Alfred A. Knoff

Publication Date: 1998

Binding: Hardcover. 8vo

Condition: Very Good.

Dust Jacket Condition: Good.

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 3rd printing.

About this title

Synopsis:

An expert on sociobiology and biodiversity argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge in the face of the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge over the past two centuries

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.