Wilson's argument for the unity of knowledge across disciplines
Wilson, the biologist who founded sociobiology, argues that the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities can and should be unified through causal explanations that connect across levels, from physics through chemistry and biology to mind and culture. He takes the term consilience from William Whewell, meaning a jumping together of knowledge across disciplines.
His argument is that the Enlightenment project of unified knowledge was abandoned prematurely, that the social sciences and humanities have operated without foundations in what is known about human biology, and that the connection can now be made. He works through the biological basis of mind, the gene-culture coevolution model in which cultural transmission and genetic evolution influence each other, the epigenetic rules that bias cultural development in predictable directions, and the application to ethics, religion and aesthetics.
The chapters on ethics and religion argue that moral intuitions are products of evolutionary history rather than of transcendent principle, and that this is an empirical claim that can be investigated rather than a philosophical position.
The book has been criticised heavily. Philosophers argue Wilson conflates explaining the origin of a moral intuition with establishing its validity. Social scientists argue that reduction to biology loses the phenomena they study. Wilson's confidence that unification is achievable is not shared by most working in the fields he proposes to unify, and the intervening decades have not produced the synthesis he anticipated. It remains the most ambitious statement of the position.
Readers interested in the strongest argument for unifying knowledge across the sciences and humanities, with the substantial objections noted.
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