10.31.06
Consilience sans Darwin?
In 1998, Wilson came out with Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, an attempt to demonstrate that all knowledge is intrinsically linked, both within the sciences and between science and the humanities. Reduced to such a summary it can seem obvious, but the idea of consilience is radical. Wilson’s vision imagines absolute unity through a glorious and harmonious logic between fields as seemingly dissociated as musicology and neuroscience, physics and consciousness, genetics and culture.
The notion of consilience seems great on paper, but of all the unifying perspectives that of Darwinism is the worst, because it takes a universal generalization of dubious empirical foundations and tries to rewrite everything in terms of that. It flunks the test almost at the first step.
This article is a considerable eulogy, has everyone forgotten the sociobiology wars?