Consilience

November 15, 1997
The man who brought us sociobiology and biodiversity argues that the world is organized according to a few natural laws. We just have to find them.

Starred review from February 1, 1998
Thanks to the rampant success of Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" (1988), a great many are familiar with the project to formulate a grand unified theory linking together all the basic physical forces. In a book that is truly a magnum opus, Wilson is concerned with an even bigger project, the unification of all knowledge by the means of science, so that the explanations of differing kinds of phenomena are seen to be connected and consistent with one another--that is, to be "consilient." Consilience is the summum bonum of science as a way of knowledge, a philosophy; discovering it across all fields of knowledge--the arts and humanities, not excluding religion, as well as the physical and social sciences--would complete the work of the Enlightenment to demonstrate that creation is intrinsically orderly and even predictable. Wilson sympathetically reinterprets the Enlightenment, especially the work and attitude of Condorcet, sadly allowing that its termination in the French revolutionary reign of terror justifiably accounts for some of its subsequent bad press, then proceeds to show that the consilience of the natural sciences has been conclusively established and to argue that discoveries in brain science and genetics, in particular, should be applied to the problems of social science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion in order to bring them into the single web of cause and effect that encompasses everything. Wilson is confident that such applications will eventually be made, but he also feels it is urgent that they be made. As human population burgeons and its environment deteriorates, continued human success depends on making the wise choices that sound knowledge makes possible. Wilson dazzlingly reaffirms the cogency and the power of scientific materialism. ((Reviewed February 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)