The central idea of consilience.

How does Wilson define consilience? The best description I found in the book is here:

The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics. In support of this idea is the conclusion of biologists that humanity is kin to all other life forms by common descent.

(Edward O. Wilson: p. 266)

Now, we should be careful to distinguish this position from a simple-minded mechanicism. Those who oppose science as a limited form of knowledge —yes, it's not only the Americans who oppose it in the name of religion; here in Europe there are plenty of people who oppose the scientific worldview in the name of a badly understood humanism that stresses the arts and considers anything that's related to science and technology as something "too cold and inhuman"— like to criticize this position as "reductionism". However, this is not what Wilson proposes. First of all, we should be careful when equating the laws of physics with good old mechanicism. That might have been true of the classical mechanics, the Newtonian physics of yesteryear, but today's physics are far more complex than that. To think that resorting to the laws of physics to explain the phenomena we observe is reductionist (in the sense of stupidly simplistic) is quite naive or, even worse, ignorant. Today's physics is nothing but overly complex and more than capable of accepting non-deterministic behaviors in its theories. Second, and most importantly, Wilson's objective is to find a field of knowledge that could make it possible to synthesize all human knowledge (i.e., the theory of everything that we have been after lately), and to be fair physics seems to be the discipline that is getting closest to that. The social sciences are, without any doubt, way too far from objective knowledge in any form or shape. There are only two positions that we can take regarding this issue: either we continue their original project, convinced that it is possible to study the human being in an objective manner, or we just give up in despair and choose to stress that human nature is different, which seems to be the Postmodern approach. It's clear to us which is Wilson's preferred option: he chooses to reaffirm the validity of the Enlightenment and its project of universal knowledge.

There is one more criticism of the scientific mindset that Wilson also deals with. Those who oppose the scientific methodology as the best way to achieve knowledge, emphasize the fragmentary nature of our knowledge these days. There is an excess of information everywhere, they remind us. Not only that but, for each possible explanation or theory that we hear about a particular fact, there always are several other alternative approaches. Worse yet, we have no way to figure out which one is correct. Postmodernism loves this position, emphasizing fragmentation and plurality and dismissing science as dogmatic, bent on imposing a single true explanation that, in reality, nobody can prove beyond any doubt. As I said, Wilson also addresses this issue:

Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

(Edward O. Wilson: p. 269)

In other words, he doesn't deny the existence of a plurality of explanations. He doesn't believe in the imposition of the Truth either. I think we all understand that these days. Yes, we have somehow internalized the postmodern criticism —which is at least partially valid— that, even if we accept the existence of an objective reality out there, our own knowledge of it may always be partial, incomplete, imperfect. And yet, we cannot just give up and fall back into an affirmation of subjectivity, like the postmodern thinkers do. Sure, a dogmatic belief in an objective Truth could potentially lead to a totalitarian ideology, but a simple look back at our own History will also teach us that nihilism has the very same effect: the lack of an objective way to measure things agreed upon by all social agents leads to the world of the jungle, where the stronger imposes his will over everybody else. Wilson knows all that. He knows the dangers of both dogmatism and nihilism. What he proposes is a firm belief in the scientific method as the best possible way to achieve knowledge, even if he fully understands this knowledge will always be limited and partial. That is, nevertheless, no reason to give up, especially when science has already proven to be the only methodology that got us closer to real knowledge of how things work. I have to agree with him.

Bridging the gap between science and humanities.

It has become a commonplace to mention C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures seminal work when discussing the often difficult relations between the sciences and the humanities. Wilson offers a possible solution that may help us bridge the gap:

There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry form both sides. (...) The two cultures share the following challenge. We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature.

(Edward O. Wilson: p. 126)

Removing the "territorial lines" between the two is, obviously, not so easy, especially taking into account that plenty of people's livelihoods depend precisely on these boundaries. Yet, Wilson is absolutely right. The divide cannot be bridged by having one side or the other claim final victory. The debate has already lasted long enough for us to realize that they both have a point. We cannot understand the human being and our surroundings without resorting to both types of knowledge. The task now ought to be finding out how they interact with each other which will inevitably require the work of "synthesizers", people with the ability to speak both languages. That is the challenge we have in front of us, and we'd better make sure we start introducing that idea into our schools.

The undelivered promises of chaos theory.

Wilson's defense of the idea of consilience inevitably brings up to mind the highly complex world of chaos theory:

The most interesting feature of chaos in populations is that it can be produced by exactly defined properties of real organisms. Contrary to previous belief, chaotic patterns are not necessarily the product of randomly acting forces of the environment that rock the population up and down. In this case and in many other complex physical phenomena, chaos theory provides an authentically deep principle of nature. It says that extremely complicated, outwardly indecipherable patterns can be determined by small, measurable changes within the system.

But, again, which systems, which changes? That is the nub of the problem. None of the elements of complexity theory has anything like the generality and the fidelity to factual detail we wish from theory. None has triggered an equivalent cascade of theoretical innovations and practical applications. What does complexity theory need to be successful in biology?

(Edward O. Wilson: p. 90)

In other words, the idea that complicated patterns of behavior may be explained by small, measurable changes (which is at the very core of chaos theory) is perfectly compatible with the idea of consilience. As a matter of fact, Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science can be seen precisely as one attempt to combine them both. However, as Wilson points out, chaos theory has failed to deliver on its promises so far. Sure, there is still plenty of work to do in the field and we cannot completely rule out a sudden discovery that will revolutionize scientific knowledge, but the reality is that as of today it doesn't offer the answers that we are after.

The risks of multiculturalism: the Chinese example.

We often hear about the need to respect other cultures and promote multiculturalism these days. The need to promote respect for other cultures is one of those things that sounds quite obvious. But, as it tends to happen with these issues, the devil is in the details. What do we mean by respecting other cultures? Leaving them alone? Does that mean forgetting about them even when we can help (for instance, to help them fight against a large epidemic)? And what about intervening in order to stop genocide or major crimes against humanity? Should we just watch from the outside then so we cannot be accused of cultural imperialism? Also, does respecting other cultures mean to consider them as equals (not in the sense of their individual rights, of course, but in the sense that we have to assume that their accomplishments are equal to ours)? All these are complex questions without a very easy answer but they certainly illustrate the paradoxes that a simplistic multiculturalist approach entails.

Science has often been at the center of the criticism against Western cultural imperialism leveled by those who defend a multicultural approach, and Wilson is clearly aware of it:

Between the first and thirteenth centuries they led Europe by a wide margin. But according to Joseph Needham, the principal Western chronicler of Chinese scientific endeavors, their focus stayed on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationships of entities, from stars down to mountains and flowers and sand. In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers. As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytic research attained by European science in the seventeenth century.

(Edward O. Wilson: pp. 30-31)

You see, multiculturalists take the typically postmodern approach that everything is relative. Therefore, there is no way to judge anything. Actually, there may not even be any anything to judge, since there is no evidence whatsoever that there is a world outside our own minds in the first place. It's relativism taken to its highest form. Yet, what Wilson is telling us here is that there is indeed a way to judge. There is a yardstick that we can use to measure things against. In the case of knowledge, it consists of the extent to which a particular theory manages to explain events in the past and, more importantly, the ones that will happen in the future. In other words, we can study a particular hypothesis and see, first, if it can explain past and present events in a manner that makes sense and sounds logical and, second, whether it helps us predict future behaviors too. In this sense, it is quite clear that while the Western approach to science can show some evident successes, the same cannot be said of the traditional Chinese approach, for instance. This is not cultural bias, the same way that observing that Michael Phelps is a better swimmer than me doesn't show cultural bias either but it's rather a pretty objective statement. It may be something that those who are in favor of an absolute egalitarian approach to social issues may dislike, but that still doesn't change its factuality.

So, when it comes to the best way to obtain knowledge about our surroundings, we ought to ask ourselves which has proven so far to be the best methodology, the one that has shown the best results, the one that has proven to lead to hypothesis or theories that can better explain the events that happened in the past as well as the ones that are still to come with at least a decent level of approximation. And, when it comes to this particular question, it seems evident that the Western approach to science wins hands down. Everything else is either wishful thinking or denying the evidence that's in front of our eyes.

A possible dark side to the Enlightenment and the criticisms from the politically correct pundits.

In spite of Wilson's faith in the Enlightenment and its intellectual project in favor of human progress, he is fully aware of its own problems and limitations. It is, in other words, a critical support that he provides:

The Enlightenment gave rise to the modern intellectual tradition of the West and much of its culture. (...) The causes of the Enlightenment's decline, which persist to the present day, illuminate the labyrinthine wellsprings of human motivation. It is worth asking, particularly in the present winter of our cultural discontent, whether the original spirit of the Enlightenment —confidence, optimism, eyes to the horizon— can be regained. And to ask in honest opposition, should it be regained, or did it possess in its first conception, as some have suggested, a dark-angelic flaw?

(...)

It has become fashionable to speak of the Enlightenment as an idiosyncratic construction by European males in a bygone era, one way of thinking among many different contructions generated across time by a legion of other minds in other cultures, each of which deserves careful and respectful attention. To which the only decent response is yes, of course —to a point. Creative thought is forever precious, and all knowledge has value. But what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment.

(Edward O. Wilson: pp. 21-22)

The second paragraph is directly aimed at those who defend the politically correct. Yes, it has been mainly white men who contributed to Western culture but, then, how could it have been otherwise in a traditional society dominated precisely by... well, white men? And what does that mean, exactly? What does it imply? Does a tree still fall in the forst if we don't hear it? Is a particular scientific theory perhaps not correct simply because it was discovered or laid out by an "old white man"? Are we truly so brain-dead that we have managed to politicize every single field of human activity? We can call what happened in 1492 a "discovery", a "meeting point", an "accident", a "crash of civilizations" or whatever anyone sees fit. We can also stress that the Vikings, the Celts or some advanced extraterrestrial culture settled down in America before Chistopher Columbus and his men arrived that year, but that still doesn't change the fact that it wasn't until 1492 that a permanent and continuous relationship between both sides of the Atlantic started. As Wilson points out, it's seminality that matters, and not our sentiments.

A firm belief in the project of the Enlightenment.

Wilson is obviously a fan of the Englightenment. How else could anyone defend the idea of consilience? From a traditional religious approach, the world is a fundamentally a mystery, something created by a superior Being and beyond our comprehension. From a more contemporary postmodern approach, God may be out of the picture but the end result is still the same: reality is either impossible to comprehend or, on the contrary, a mosaic put together from thousands, millions of different viewpoints, which once again renders the task impossible. Against that vital pessimism, Wilson prefers to affirm the foundations of the project of the Enlightenment:

I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right the first time. The assumption 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, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. (...) Consilience is the key to unification. (...) The only way either to establish or to refute consilience is by methods developed in the natural science —not, I hasten to add, an effort led by scientists, or frozen in mathematical abstraction, but rather one allegiant to the habits of thought that have worked so well in exploring the material universe.

(Edward O. Wilson: pp. 8-9)

In a world taken over by the New Age craze, creationism, cultural relativism and superstitions of all types, it's certainly nice to read such a firm statement in favor of the intellectual project that brought about democracy, tolerance and social progress, among many other things. It's not a very trendy position to take, but it's now more necessary than ever.

The Ionian Enchantment

Edward O. Wilson tells us pretty quick what the book's main thesis is:

I had experienced the Ionian Enchantment. That recently coined expression I borrow from the physicist and historian Gerald Holton. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences —a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws. Its roots go back to Thales of Miletus, in Ionia, in the sixth century B.C.

(Edward O. Wilson: p. 4)

It is, after all, the same idea behind the project of the Enlightenment, the assumption that behind all the chaos of nature lies a basic order that can be discovered by the human mind. Today's theory of everything takes inspiration in the very same approach too. It states the belief in a concept, a unifying story that ultimately makes sense of it all. It's a position obviously set against the more pessimistic postmodern philosophy that became popular in the 1980s. Yet, the most intriguing aspect of all this, I think, is that Wilson's "belief in the unity of the sciences" is no different than a faith, really. There is little difference between this and religious faith, on the other hand. He remains convinced that "the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws", but there is nothing like a proof beyond any doubt that this view is indeed correct. One could certainly argue that there are reasonable arguments that would seem to agree with Wilson's approach —as a matter of fact, that's what he spends most of the book doing, offering those very arguments—, but they are short of definite and beyond any doubt. Ironically enough, then, those who fall for the Ionian Enchantment cannot explain reasonably well why they believe in this underlying unity of reality.

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

The idea of consilience itself is a concept of Greek origin that assumes an intrinsic orderliness in our cosmos, which makes it understandable by human reason. As such it is the prerequisite of any scientific knowledge of our surroundings, since there cannot be knowledge —at least in a form that we can communicate and share with others— without the use of reason. In this book E. O. Wilson calls for a return to this old project that attempted to unite all of human knowledge into a single corpus —not so different from the efforts to find a theory of everything that we have heard of so much lately, although extending far beyond the realm of physics and reaching towards many other disciplines, including the social sciences. Along the way, Wilson takes us on a fascinating journey through the different attempts to build this synthesis in human history and reflects over our contemporary state.

Technical description:
Title: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
Author: Edrwad O. Wilson.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Edition: First Edition, New York (USA), 1998.
Pages: 332 pages, including index.
ISBN: 0-679-45077-7

Entry from Wikipedia.
Find it on Amazon (US, UK).

Can science be creative?

For whatever reason, we usually don't think of science as a creative endeavor. It's supposed to be too cold, analytical, methodical and objective to be creative. Even parents tend to talk about their kids as having "artistic" or "scientific" aptitudes, meaning that they are creative or analytical, respectively. Things are just like that: black or white, creative or analytical. It doesn't occur to us that perhaps there is far more to science than what meets the eye at first sight. Sure, Kuhn already demonstrated several decades ago that things are not nearly as clear-cut as we'd like them to be. In his landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) he explained how what we tend to view as "science" is actually normal science or "routine science", a set of practices, assumptions and, above all, an overall theoretical framework that underpins all research for a period of time. This normal or routine science is necessary both for the advance of the scientific discipline itself and the application of its discoveries to our daily lives. As it also happens in societies, a constant change of references and frameworks (a permanent revolution in the old Trostkyite fashion) can only lead to Sisyphus' fate, the constante reinvention of the wheel. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't certain moments when we need to break away from the past, destroy the old mold and view things from a completely different perspective. This is what Kuhn called a paradigm shift. Well, chaos theory definitely poses one of these challenges to the status quo.

Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things.

(Gleick: p. 43)

Needless to say, paradigm shifts have been happening far more often since the Enlightenment and Modernity —as a matter of fact, it could be argued that change and paradigm shifts are the very foundation of the modern era. We'll leave it for another time to discuss whether this is a consequence of the philosophical changes brought about by certain thinkers or perhaps something intimately related to the high degree of specialization and the intrinsic complexity of our own societies at this stage of civilization. In any case, it should be patently obvious by now that science can be every bit as creative as anything else, both in its practice and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from what it teaches us about the world that surrounds us. Everything is in place for a new era where perhaps science, technology and other disciplines usually interpreted as artistic or creative —including the so called soft sciences— could converge into a more unified type of knowledge —what Edward O. Wilson calls consilience.