Ebook: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

E.O. Wilson's Consilience was certainly a massive undertaking, as this brilliant scholar (read Biophilia!) pulls together research and personal worldviews in order to bolster his claim that all knowledge can be ultimately reduced down to physics. However, many of Wilson's examples leave a bad taste in the figurative mouths of those professional philosophers and laypeople alike who believe in the power of human agency. Additionally, Wilson's idea of consilence is really the opposite of the common understanding of the term - which is actually the reverse of reductionism. I applaud his effort to think in a new way about how very different fields might come together in collaboration to benefit the greater good, but these utilitarian ideas are lost in the mire of many bizarre claims (for example, that broad institutions such as culture can be explained and understood purely by genetics and cell activity). There is certainly merit to the thought that uniting disparate fields can produce a positive outcome, but we already have this - it's called interdisciplinarity. If the reader is careful, he can find some truly innovative nuggets interspersed throughout the book. However, these do not save Consilience entirely, and one is left disenchanted with Wilson, who for many other reasons (his work on ants, conservation efforts, etc) should be considered a visionary of our time.