Consilience
by E. O. Wilson
Buy on Amazon"In this new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience - 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." "Professor Wilson shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species - a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries.…
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"Wilson makes the argument – or rather the prediction – that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an interdisciplinary way. And that’s important because if you look around at various fields, what Wilson predicted a decade ago is actually happening with neuroscience. There’s a field of neural economics, which is a combination of economics and neuroscience, there’s neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. And in this way, I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields. Well, except that in the Renaissance we thought we were masters of our destiny, and the whole idea was ‘what a glorious thing man is, with limitless capacities’. But here, each individual is not so special, we are shaped by genes, by social trends; individual decision-making is bounded. There are severe limits on free will."
Neuroscience · fivebooks.com
"E. O. Wilson had a similar effect on me with the argument in "Consilience.""
By the Book: Steven Johnson · nytimes.com