The Wilson Quarterly

Is Everything Relative?

A Debate on theUnity of Knowledge

E. O. Wilson's Remarks on Consilience

he word consilience is not new. It was first introduced 160 years ago by William Whewell, the father of the philosophy of science as he is called, and it means literally the jumping together of the concepts of the sciences across different levels of organization. The word is used sparingly, or has been up to this point, and I have suggested bringing it more into the mainstream while it still retains its purity of meaning, unlike coherence, interconnectedness, and the convergence theory of proof.
Consilience is also a very old idea. It goes back to the original Enlightenment. The scientific revolution, begun in the 17th century, gave hope to the idea that there was an underlying unity of knowledge to be discovered, and that as we uncovered it on into the study of the human condition and even ethics, humanity would enter an unparalleled new period of progress. The dream died throughout most of the scholarly community that had embraced it, though it stayed alive in the sciences. We are now in a position to reexamine this main premise of the original Enlightenment and to consider bringing back a program, a proposition, a framing of discourse that would reflect the state of human knowledge in a more modern, persuasive, and effective form then the original Enlightenment.

The need for this examination is more than purely intellectual. There is an urgent need on many fronts to consider this proposition and carry it into open discussion. On the one side we have witnessed the liberal arts slide down into specialization--and therefore increasingly fragmented knowledge. The number of colleges and universities requiring science, for example, has declined substantially in the last 30 years, as has the percentage of liberal arts colleges in the total community of colleges and universities. And then there is the whole pressing conglomerate of problems--ethical, practical, technical, political, psychological--that impinge on a society grown increasingly complex through scientific and technological advancement, including the most recent information explosion that engulfs us with information but not so much in knowledge or in wisdom.

Here is an example to illustrate my point concerning the problems and risks involved in the fragmentation of knowledge: When we discuss something such as the fate of America's forest, we immediately involve forest management, ecology, ethics, and social sciences, which are all still very imperfectly linked. The disciplines often use very different languages and have different concepts. Their specialists see nothing wrong really in having different techniques, glossaries, and modes of analysis. They are fragmented and separated as separate subjects, and yet we often find ourselves spinning around through those sections, popping from one to the other, and fitting these imperfectly together. And so it is here where the consilience program carries with it the promise, even partially successful, of important advances in the practical affairs of the republic.

he important event that has occurred in the last 20 years is the erasure of the famous line between the natural sciences on the one side and the humanities and social sciences on the other, very roughly between the scientific and the literary cultures. This is not an epistemological fault line, I would argue. It is not a barrier erected to keep the reductionist barbarians of science away from high culture. It is, in fact, a merging more closely all the time as a broad domain of mostly unknown or poorly explored phenomena that are being defined and studied with increasing illumination cooperative from both sides of that now increasingly well-recognized domain. Now, the pivot to all of this is the redefinition of human nature, an operational definition of human nature, and I suggest the following: human nature is not the genes which prescribe human nature, human nature is not the cultural universals such as the incest rules and the rites of passage which are the products of human nature. Human nature is the epigenetic rules, those hereditary regularities of mental development.

Rather than try to discuss this abstractly further let me give you a couple of examples of genetic rules to make it clearer. People do not commit incest as a rule because of the Westermarck affect which was discovered around the turn of the century by the Finish anthropologist Edward Westermarck. It has since been found to be an epigenetic biologically based rule throughout all known primates, including human beings, and it is the following: when two people live close together during the first 30 months of life of either one, they are both desensitized to later sexual bonding and full sexual attraction and behavior. There are other ways in which we keep incest to a minimum in the human species just as every animal and plant species uses its own distinctive incest avoidance mechanism that characterizes their species.

n the case of color vision and color vocabulary, we have gone all the way from genes to culture, and thus begun to see how genetic evolution can link with cultural revolution. When you raise or lower the intensity of light, as with a dimmer switch, you see it as a physical continuum. If you increase the wave length of monochromatic light, that we perceive as color pass through four basic colors; they are blue, yellow, green, and red. We know a lot about what is happening in the brain but we also know something else. When societies build a color vocabulary, they take eleven semantically mapable colors, which I would call them general colors or semantically identifiable colors. We can infer from going to societies with only two color terms to societies that have all eleven, that societies use black and white when they invent two color terms; three color terms--black, white, red; four color terms--those and yellow or green; five--all those with yellow and green. Then they add blue, then brown, and so on. There are about 2,026 combinations that are possible if people were doing this at random in the evolution of color vocabulary, but, in fact they follow just 22. This is among the epigenetic rules that have been identified and I suggest that we are just beginning to turn them up.

When we begin by this means and others to define human nature and cross the gap in the borderland areas from brain to mind and mind to culture, when we start moving into this area cooperatively, across the great branches of learning, we cannot help but enter a new era of very important intellectual activity and research. By presenting these subjects in a new frame of discourse we have the prospect of revitalizing the liberal arts. The social sciences, the humanities, the foundational levels of organization, biology, moral reasoning, and the theory of the arts, which are now studied without much consideration of consilience, would all be greatly strengthened by the introduction of consilience.

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