Off the Bookshelf : Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Edward O Wilson has received much criticism for his views on sociobiology, but his book Consilience is eminently readable and essential reading for anyone who is interested in the larger picture of human knowledge. Edward O Wilson is a professor of biology at Harvard University and renowned for his work on Ants. His book ‘The Ants’ written with Bert Holldobler in 1990 fetched him a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Consilience – literally meaning ‘jumping together’- attempts to show how all the different seemingly disparate branches of human knowledge are interconnected, or could possibly become interconnected in the future to present one unified body of wisdom. The Author starts by describing the ‘Ionian Enchantment’ – a deep seated conviction that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of laws. In his opinion this enchantment has grown steadily more sophisticated since the times of the Greeks and has dominated scientific thought ever since.

From here Edward O Wilson takes us on a brief tour of the different branches of learning, and then explains how there is an implicit hierarchy of the sciences from subatomic physics to chemistry to biology to human nature to culture and then on to the diverse fields like social sciences, the arts and even ethics and religion. Although at times the connections between the fields are quite tenuous, its nevertheless exciting to read as the author takes up the onerous task of incorporating religion and cultural values into all encompassing spectrum of knowledge that he conjures up.

The part where he tackles head on the nature vs. nurture debate regarding human culture is especially worth reading. The author argues for a more complex understanding of the phenomenon of human culture rather than cleaving everything into simplistic dichotomies. To illustrate his point he uses the example of the arrow leaf – an amphibious plant. When an individual of the species grows on the land, it resembles arrowheads, when in shallow water, the leaves at the surface are shaped like lily pads, when submerged deep in water the leaves develop like ribbons that sway back and forth with the currents! Edward O Wilson explains that these variations are different expressions of the same set of genes based on the differences in environment.

Through this and numerous other examples and explanations, the author weaves a compelling narrative about the interconnectedness of the entire breadth of human knowledge.