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The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long
career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary
biology, entomology, and ethology, he has 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 rigor and vigor 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.
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