You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Reading and thinking about E. O. Wilson latest book is worthy of many, many CME credits. This is a volume so rich in ideas, in wisdom, in history, in philosophy that it should and will be read by serious scientists—biological and social—and by scholars, students, and researchers who constantly grapple with issues of synthesis and the fundamental unity of all knowledge. Wilson's consilience, simply stated, is “the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning.” This is a formidable undertaking—groundbreaking in scope, an enormous intellectual and enjoyable adventure, especially since the author writes so engagingly and is so well versed in so many areas of knowledge and experience. Wilson, who has come up with many new, original, and creative ideas and studies, is obviously a genius of the first order and at age 70 still challenges, explores, and makes order of many disparate areas of knowledge. He is at present the Pellegrino University Research Professor and Honorary Curator of Entomology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He has written or cowritten 16 earlier books, some on The Diversity of Life, Biophilia, On Human Nature, Sociology, Insect Societies, and over 400 original papers. He has won two Pulitzers. He is an acknowledged world expert on ants. In this most recent book, he argues very persuasively that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws. In Consilience, Wilson especially argues for the unity of the sciences and the humanities. Drawing on the ideas of the Enlightenment, Wilson believes that bringing together these two spheres of knowledge, thought and scholarship, is crucial at this time in world history.
Consilience, rather than coherence, is Wilson's identificatory