So do we wait until the genes solve our problems? And how could a gene- determined culture know which path to favour? Especially since "no bias-free mental development has yet been discovered" p , which however describes only the past.
But with a prospect of gene control we would have nothing except the past in us This is like resurrecting old ghosts again. Chapter 9 "The Social Sciences" discusses anthropology, sociology, economics and political science. Wilson charges that "problems became intractably complex, partly because the root causes are poorly understood" p Fair enough. But is Wilson's basis any better? To him, advanced social theorists seem "happy with folk psychology" p , and he argues that only the molecular paradigm can be of any help.
To Wilson, sociology is even worse; as disciplines for bridging the 'incomplete' views he proposes as a replacement of the 'weak' approaches just mentioned: cognitive neuroscience brain science , human behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, and environmental sciences p However, Wilson cautions that "the similarity to 'real' science is often superficial and has been purchased at a steep intellectual price" p The reasons for this "can be summarized in two labels: Newtonian and hermetic" p Economic theory "lacks a solid foundation in units and processes" p Wilson would like us to accept the mere idea that we make choices not depending on "childhood, social interaction and cultural influence", but on his idea of "hereditary epigenetic rules" p Brave New World?
In chapter 10 "The Arts and Their Interpretation", and chapter 11 "Ethics and Religion", Wilson attempts to extend his basic assumptions also into these realms. What he grasps and discusses are aspects of myth, believing this to cover all of Art. Similarly, the dimension he can reach of religion is merely naive forms of worship, believing this to be all. This does not look like we are nearing the end of the 20th century, and he does not discuss worshipping science scientism.
Chapter 12 "To What End? So again his answer is to pull the humanities into natural science— a view which can quite generally only be partially valid. Wilson does not discuss the fact that all measurement as the basis of natural science is ultimately necessarily determined in a qualitative way unit or act of reference , not quantitatively, and can thus never be self- constitutive.
The image of Man he draws is just as valid for highly intelligent animals; he offers no clear criterion for distinguishing.
Freedom appears as the ability to follow one's whims, encouraged by technology—forgetting that this is not freedom, but compulsion; yet this freedom is the only one Wilson proposes p f. He discusses at length the need to care for the environment, since we depend on it.
Even though ultimately his topic is thus Life and his claim consilience and thus completeness, he does not discuss the necessary condition for Life not getting stuck: the principle of death, which no being fears—as opposed to the process of dying, which is painful precisely to the degree of being inflicted from outside.
This concerns us at the latest insofar as we cling to ideas about life and survival as a function of our understanding or not understanding death, creating or solving problems correspondingly—e. But [social] life can, by its intrinsic principles involving degrees of autonomy, not be predictive in exactly the same way as processes in inert matter. Wilson forgets that "Ariadne's thread of causal explanation", which he holds for universal in the way natural science understands it, is twisted in another way in live structures than physics and chemistry can know.
The consilience that Wilson can offer is a selective and partial vision. It is always possible to take the world and intuitively shape stories about it so they fit to a high degree. Wilson, a cofounder of sociobiology to be re- membered when reading his book because of the implied political agenda , even declares his motive: "Find a paradigm for which you can raise money and attack with every method of analysis at your disposal" p The intuition of unifying all of science is a very valuable one, and highly necessary in our times.
It is to Wilson's great merit to dare approach this topic. Yet it poses a question in systematic methodology: On what path can this objective be fulfilled? The genetically inherited traits are not memes, not units of culture, but rather the propensity to invent and transmit certain kinds of these elements of memory in preference to others.
It does, however, sound appealing if you fashion yourself an intellectual, but have a bad memory and even poorer critical thinking skills. His effort to show linkages between the natural sciences and the humanities in particular falls completely flat. Inspired by Your Browsing History. And now, several books, two Pulitzer Prizes and one National Medal of Science later, Consiliencehis most ambitious work yet. But I think that it can and does explain a lot of things, and that is quite a task for a single book.
He fulfills and elucidates the materialist stance that the universe is a physical one, devoid of the supe Wilson shoots for the moon and scores.
Which are best subdued and to what degree, which validated by law and symbol? And if you are in favour of total abstinence or vegetarianism, then you get mad at the miracle at Cana and at the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
Chapter 7 conxilience the genetic roots of art and culture. Biologists should know more about ethics. A century later, DNA splicing is mainstream technology. But they generally do so in their proprietary dialects, not in the language of basic physics.
The great intellectual challenge facing us is therefore clear: Having been raised Baptist, he gives a very balanced consideration of religion and ethics, as he has elsewhere, but fails to do so in other departments, especially modern art, philosophy, and sociology, most likely due to his own lack of a firm grasp of them.
Rather he divides up the intellectual turf in such a way that no one gets left holding the problem. The hard problem of consciousness, to belabor the obvious, is also a perfectly legitimate scientific question.
Feb 10, Matthew rated it it was amazing Shelves: Of course that was a long time ago. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. Consilience is the "belief in the unity of the sciences — conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, Therefore, while this study is expounding a theory of consilience , unity of knowledge at work in a theory of meta-science of inter-causality between multivariates for establishing a wellbeing criterion amongst all, this is also the Frenk, Globalization and Health.
There is a real need for consilience for unity of knowledge and AJSTID is truly an original journal for research production that can help to realise and build knowledge while also linking STEM with the social and human sciences.
Knopf, Inc. Also see E. Galison, S.
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