I first read this book in 1999, shortly after it came out. I just reread it in mid-2002, so this review arises from a double exposure.
"Consilience" is a sweeping book. EO Wilson unabashedly links science, sociology, art, and religion to each other in a grand unification theory that is far more comprehensive than that imagined by physicists.
The subtitle, "the unity of knowledge," refers to Wilson's conviction that the great branches of human learning and culture arise from a common source within our species: everything from particle physics to politics has been conceived in our brains and made manifest through our human interactions. Instead of separating the subjects that we study and the actions that we pursue, why not think of them as merely different facets of the totality called "human"?
It's a heady concept, and one that I find very intuitively appealing. Surely the desire for knowledge that drives a chemist can be linked to the desire to express truth that inspires an artist. Could the appeal of the orderly universe expressed in religion actually be related to the assumption of orderly physical laws underlying science? Perhaps they are both related to our brains' ability to detect patterns.
These ideas are not especially new-- there have always been synthesists finding links between seemingly disparate topics, and the topics of science and art are common ones for this sort of discourse. What is new is the depth of Wilson's arguments, and the breadth of his considerations. As noted above, "Consilience" is a sweeping book, and Wilson is unabashed in his scope. I'll give the book a "strong +" for its powerful elegance and clarity, even amid some misgivings that I note below.
Wilson is a sociobiologist. When he speaks of uniting all human endeavors, he has a clear idea in mind: these things can be related, ultimately, to the human genome. It is unfortunate that sociobiology has been tainted by its association with eugenics and other unpalatable political movements, because these arise from a poor understanding of genetics. Wilson is far more sophisticated, and easily defeats those with an expressly political bent. "Consilience" goes far deeper.
The fresh idea that Wilson develops is that of "epigenetic rules," which perch between the pure genes on our chromosomes and the ultimate expression of these genes in our culture and conscious life. Epigenetic rules act as rules-of-thumb or handy prescriptions for survival as a human; they are neither the base code for proteins of a given individual nor the elaborate social codes that are particular to a given society. Common to all humans, these rules relate to things like incest avoidance, parental investment, and status seeking. They are, fundamentally, what is meant by human nature.
Epigenetic rules are of course created by the genes underlying them, but they are acted out and enforced by the culture overlaying them. They can be influenced from above or below, and surely they have shifted a bit over evolutionary time scales. In fact, they are under pressure and in flux right now as we rush forward, changing society faster than our genes can keep up.
These ideas of Wilson's are one of the first attempts to codify social behavior in a similar manner to how we already codify the physical behavior of inanimate objects. Before you object to the dehumanization implicit in "writing formulas" for humans, consider the complexity of the issue. We can barely write the equations that describe a complex physical system (we can't even explicitly solve for the motion of a system with just three bodies interacting under gravity!). Since a human is almost infinitely more complicated, Wilson's effort is not about mathematicizing psychology or sociology. It is about realizing that these fields can be approached with the same rigor as the natural sciences, even if the results will be completely different due to the staggering complexity of the objects of study.
It's a notion that makes enormous sense. Just as physics has shown us that the natural world is not random or under the control of some powerful, conscious being (as was believed before the Enlightenment), we can imagine that such ideas might also apply as we ascend the scale of complexity through psychology, sociology, and finally to art, religion, and morality. This is the concept of "consilience" (literally, "jumping together")-- the unity of knowledge.
The epigenetic rules are not mathematical formulas, nor would that make any sense. The power lies in the idea that there is some logical basis for human behavior, encoded in the delicate balance between genotype and phenotype. We have barely scratched the surface of understanding our humanity-- all we've done so far is start to understand our inanimate environment, and made a small dent in understanding our biology and genome. The next steps will involve uniting these "hard science" disciplines with the humanities.
Is there a reason why I can appreciate art made by a cave dweller tens of thousands of years ago? Probably. Those buffalo look "pretty" to me because we were both human, and at some level, we share a sense of aesthetics. That sense, then, must be embedded in our genes and the epigenetic rules that they support. Our societies were worlds apart, but I bet we would share some of the same ideas about right and wrong, also. Wilson asks us to open our minds to the possibility that, with careful study, we might come to understand these deep links just as clearly as we now understand the principles of electromagnetism. Lodestones are no longer magic. Why should aesthetics remain so?
(And don't fall into the trap of believing that if you know too much about something, it is diminished. As if art will mean less when we understand the biological principles underlying it. Knowing more enhances beauty.)
It's a glorious concept, and one that I think many scientists feel in their souls-- Wilson just expresses it better than most. But I would be remiss not to mention a few things about this book that irked me, both times I read it.
The book gets off to a poor start, in my opinion. The first few chapters are supposed to set the stage-- warming the reader up by going over the familiar territory of the natural sciences. Wilson explains how our understanding of nature has been greatly improved with the advent of science, and through that discipline, we have begun to get a handle on the simplest systems-- those of physics and chemistry, and a bit of biology. Then he explains his hope that we can expand into the more difficult, social realms.
I found myself uncomfortable with Wilson's idealization of the Enlightenment. In retrospect, we can agree that the principles that arose from that time have had a profound effect on human knowledge and learning (sure, some is positive, some negative, but you can hardly argue that it wasn't significant). But Wilson goes too far, turning the names of the time-- Bacon, Descartes, etc-- into heroes, and indeed almost gods. This is unnecessary as well as unpalatable. Wilson's point would not be diminished by a more truthful account of history.
The other exaggeration that Wilson makes is that we have somehow reached a pinnacle in our approach to learning. He seems to assert that the scientific method is the be-all and end-all of what we need to begin our quest for consilience. Thank goodness we have finally arrived.
But the rest of book contains many admissions that we have barely started down the road toward grand unification, and that much more work needs to be done before we can even formulate well-posed questions about art and religion, for example. So I would assert that only a little leap is required to believe that we might someday find an even better approach to learning than what we have now. It is of course inconceivable at this time, so I can't write about it any more than a 12-century monk could have explained modern science. But I think Wilson should have been more open to the possibility that we could have another Enlightenment, bringing even greater depth and sophistication to our understanding of the world.
I suppose that is of no matter. Simply going forward with the goal of seeking consilience would help bring about such an Enlightenment, if it is indeed in our future. (Perhaps it is not).
The book improves rapidly once Wilson finishes worshipping the past and turns his eyes toward the future. If you persist past the first few chapters, you will be richly rewarded with Wilson's insights into other branches of learning beyond his native biology. Have no illusions-- Wilson has not written ideas that will be in the textbooks a century from now. He has written the gameplan and the first few areas that we might consider in our search for consilience. It is a taste of how the world feels when you view it through the lens of grand unification.
The next steps must come from researchers across many disciplines. It is already occurring, in fact, with the rising incidence of cross-disciplinary research, and the ever-expanding realm that we can describe with basic principles rather than hand-waving. I think Wilson is onto something.
A final issue I can imagine with "Consilience" is its science-centric viewpoint. Wilson asserts that the social sciences and humanities ought to evolve to be more like the natural sciences-- which seems to imply that science will subsume them. Obviously, the artists aren't going to swallow that cheerfully. But I don't think it will actually go like that. I'm not sure Wilson realizes it, but just as genes and culture influence each other in a complicated two-way dance, so do art and science. Attempting to enfold the humanities into the natural sciences will not simply transform the former. It will transform them both into new entities.
It's a two-way street. Let's start exploring it.
Copyright © Kim Allen 2002
