Second argument: well, evolution happened more or less as biology says, but doesn't work the way biology thinks it does, through a materialist blind algorithmic process of natural selection. It works because the whole sha-bang was designed. Maybe also because the designer cares and intervenes regularly, now as in the past shaping the outcomes. Since there is intelligent design, human cognitive performances depend upon intelligence, something outside of the brute interaction over time of genes and environments. It may be that serious philosophers haven't thought this way for a long time. But lots of other people do. Lots of other people do think that mind is separate from body. I don't propose to use my few minutes to give a history of this ancient class of arguments. Suffice it to say that they go back before William Paley, before Descartes, before Thomas Aquinas, but as well straightforward to today in applauded promotions by, say, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and others among the neo-creationists. But their arguments, like all preceding versions of the argument from design, are false. Please don't take my word for it, or even that of a normally careful scholar like Robert Bork, who believes the argument from design. Just point your web browser to "Beahy's empty box" for full text literature that dissects the swindles of experiment of intelligent design theory. So that one is dismissable too. I am sorry, it would have been nice to get everybody into the tent--religion and science, God, Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Ecstasy, and Darwin--poor old Darwin--but it doesn't work. There is nothing about the design of living things that isn't explained under any reasonable epistemology better by modern evolutionary biology, which Darwin would not recognize anyway, than by intelligent design. (Wait a bit for the end of these remarks. I am going to suggest that only Wilson's kind of proposal, rather than those of the creationist, rather than quantum mysticism, rather than therapeutic touch and angels, rather than social utopianism, has a real chance of realizing the noble desideratum, which is to get the best of religion and of science back together in the same thing.)

Third argument, but wait, maybe it isn't a noble desiderata maybe it's either a rotten idea, or impossible in principle what Wilson is proposing, or both. Maybe the unvarnished materialism of evolutionary psychology is just that science or advocacy of infanticide, as a normally circumspect Andrew Ferguson contends in his astonishingly snide account in the Weekly Standard of Stephen Pinkers' recent book, How the Mind Works. But let's stick with the claim that as a goal or a hope, unifying religious, aesthetic, or humanistic cognitive performances with scientific knowledge is vain; that to accomplish this, if it were possible, would be not an achievement but a loss. And among those who have argued this is my distinguished colleague Richard Rorty, who has stated his position very clearly that "although advances in biology may someday have greater relevance to the behavioral sciences, conceivably even to the policy sciences in the humanities than they do now. We should nevertheless not get on the bandwagon Wilson is trying to set in motion." Why not? Well, because for one thing, the disciplines are not fragmented, Rorty says. Their separateness is a good thing, not a bad thing. There are just different ways of doing things. The diversity is the great plus. To make the method and the language of science the core or the determining language of all knowledge would be a great loss, an impoverishment, because there are not barriers between the disciplines, only different folks doing different strokes. People like Wilson have shown neither that their hopes of unification are feasible, nor what sort of world would result from unification just in case it were feasible. And from the point of view of variety, or perhaps freedom too, there would be less of a world under Wilson's theme than the one we have. And so Rorty says in short: "I have no doubt that this hypotheses is true." (And he is referring to Wilson's hypothesis that every mental process has a physical basis and is consistent with biology.) "I have no doubt that this hypothesis is true, but it simply does not follow that knowledge or culture should become more unified than it is. That is like inferring from the fact that every workable piece of software has a hardware realization to the conclusion that we should aim for one big unified program." Well I hope we are going to talk about one big unified program in the discussion, but I must confess that this is a strong argument, as Rorty's arguments usually are. Passing for a moment on the computer analogy, he is asking for resistance to imperialism. Who could argue with that--to resist the imposition of scientific method on quite different forms of life and ways of knowing. They are concerned with other matters than just representing physical reality, if there is such a thing. But Rorty among others applauds the discoveries of Thomas Kuhn, that supposedly put an end to logical positivism by showing that there is no such thing as scientific method--no one style and language to be imposed on anybody. (Anyway, Kuhn showed no such thing. He showed that in the few cases he chose, drawn from physics, personal and social factors play a larger part in theory choice than had been assumed in mainline philosophy of science. And the rules Kuhn proposed for theory choice don't apply to most science as has been amply demonstrated since the structure of scientific revolution, least of all to evolutionary biology.) So the attempt to conciliate evolutionary psychology with the humanities would not impose a privileged language on the latter, delegitimating the native tongue. Nor would the latter give way to the former, anymore than embryology, my own field of research, gave way to molecular genetics, with which it had had nothing to do until the 1960s, when people in both disciplines began to work toward consilience. Both fields in fact were quickly and splendidly enriched, and the riches then spread upward to the budding discipline of neurobiology and downward to hard-nosed biochemistry. So in short, enrichment of formerly separate disciplines via conscious work toward consilience has caused no visible loss of diversity or substance or style, has done no colonizing in the cases that at least I know about. Maybe it wouldn't be so between biological cognitive science and aesthetics or ethics, but we don't know that.