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The controversial founder of sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, has written a millennial book for the arts and sciences that has many applications to psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He has assumed the daunting challenge of considering the unification, or compatibility of all our knowledge, a philosophical problem in our everyday functioning that affects patient care.
The term “consilience,” which means the interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines, was first used in 1840 by a William Whewell. It is perhaps ironic that this ambitiously sweeping term was revived by a student of creatures so tiny as ants, but it reminds us of how far reaching, and how annoying to many, Wilson's concept of sociobiology was when it was published in 1975. An issue of Time from August 1, 1977, portrayed a couple on the cover controlled by puppet strings that included a new version of the cartoon from the Charles Atlas bodybuilding ad, in which the bully kicking sand is admired for his genetic fitness by the girlfriend. Take heart 97-lb. weakling! Natalie Angier (1999), in a feminist reply to evolutionary biology, points out that some baboon females prefer the nice little guy. The current sociobiological critical lineup, according to a review by Hull (1999) of a book by Ruse (1999), has Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin on the Marxist side, arguing that Wilson is an apologist for the evils of capitalism, while Wilson is defended by Richard Dawkins and also by John Maynard Smith, an evolutionary biologist as Marxist as Gould and Lewontin.
Wilson contrasts the rival historical lines of what he calls enlightened science, which has doubled in practitioners, discoveries, and journals every 15 years from 1700 to 1970, versus transcendental antiscience, which has culminated in Wilson's bête noir, postmodernism. He calls postmodernism a posture of subversion, whose “ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink