Consilience

 In Search of the Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson

I have recently returned to reading the biologist and polymath’s 1998 book in search of some answers to why there is an absence of political leadership capable of addressing our current ecological and environmental crises. I have adapted and summarised some of the early chapters of his book, by way of explanation.

Wilson’s book is an attempt to demonstrate the potential of unified learning via the unifying influence of natural science, particularly of modern biology. He argues that as a general paradigm this applies to all of science, on the grounds that all living activities are governed by information derived from DNA.  When he wrote this book by proposing a unifying conception of science, to counteract the prevailing mainstream fragmentation and specialization of disciplines, he gained widespread appreciation. And, for me even more so now- in a highly complex and dystopian world. Moreover, it is a beautifully written book. Besides offering an overview of the validity of Wilson’s vision for the unification of sciences, emphasizing methodological issues it also offers economists a way of linking this discipline with biology and other sciences.

He argues that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right the first time. The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favoured by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.

Consilience is the key to unification.  Wilson preferred this word over “coherence “because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork for our understanding of knowledge and its application.

In his 1941 classic Man on His Nature, the British neurobiologist Charles Sherrington spoke of the brain as an enchanted loom, perpetually weaving a picture of the external world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe. The communal mind of literate societies—world culture—is an immensely larger loom.

Through science it has gained the power to map external reality far beyond the reach of a single mind, and through the arts the means to construct narratives, images, and rhythms immeasurably more diverse than the products of any solitary genius. The loom( or paradigm?) is the same for both enterprises, for science and for the arts, and there is a general explanation of its origin and nature and thence of the human condition, proceeding from the deep history of genetic evolution to modem culture.

Consilience of causal explanation(or systems thinking and practice?) is how the single mind can travel most swiftly and surely from one part of the communal mind to the other. In education the search for consilience is the way to renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts. During the past thirty years the ideal of the unity of learning, which the Renaissance and Enlightenment bequeathed us, has been largely abandoned. With rare exceptions , particularly American and European universities and colleges have dissolved their curriculum into a slurry of minor disciplines and specialized courses. While the average number of undergraduate courses per institution doubled, the percentage of mandatory courses in general education dropped by more than half. The trend cannot be reversed by force-feeding students with some-of this and some-of-that across the branches of learning. Win or lose, true reform should aim at the consilience of science with the social sciences and humanities in scholarship and teaching. Every university or college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?

Every public intellectual and political leader should be able to answer that question as well. Already half the legislation coming before the United States Congress contains important scientific and technological components. Most of the issues that vex humanity daily—ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most persistently before us—cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need. Yet most of our political leaders are trained exclusively in the social sciences and humanities and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences. The same is true of the public intellectuals, the columnists, the media interrogators, and think-tank gurus. The best of their analyses are careful and responsible, and sometimes correct, but the substantive base of their wisdom is fragmented and lopsided. A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.