A Great Leap Together

By R.Z. Sheppard

If you are still in the dark about Edward O. Wilson and what he does for a living, you have already proved the point of his latest book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Knopf; 332 pages; $26). The modern mind, Wilson argues, is so compartmentalized by specialization and insular beliefs that we have lost faith in seeing the natural world as an integrated whole.

Wilson is in a good position to know. He has distinguished himself in too many specialties to be called a specialist. He is a research professor at Harvard, a renowned entomologist, a leading environmentalist and a founder of sociobiology, the study of genetically determined behavior. He is also one of the clearest and most dedicated popularizers of science since T.H. Huxley, the 19th century British biologist whose books and lectures brought the new heresies of geology and evolution to Prime Ministers and coal miners alike.

Consilience, whose title comes from two Latin words meaning "leaping together," continues the tradition of the scientist as crusader of enlightenment. Wilson's prime targets for conversion are liberal-arts academics and social philosophers who have built careers on internal intellectual constructs rather than objective evidence. His cutting-edge appraisals are particularly bad news for psychoanalysts and New Agers. "The brain," he proclaims, "is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive."

Critics have called Wilson a reductionist, a determinist and worse. He answers his detractors as if they were tenured Neanderthals, stunted by ideology and ignorant of the molecular and cellular events responsible for the genetic evolution of human nature. Freudians, Marxists and literary deconstructionists all fail to meet Wilson's rigorous standards of proof. His advice to the politicians of diversity: "For best results, cultivate individuals, not groups."

Wilson is confident that microbiology and neuroscience will eventually explain everything about the nature of Homo sapiens. "The general structure of the human nerve cell has now been charted in considerable detail," he says. "The stage has been set to attack the master unsolved problem of biology: how the hundred billion nerve cells of the brain work together to create consciousness."

Nearly 40 years ago, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow also lamented the polarization of science and the humanities. His essay, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, sparked one of the liveliest debates of the postwar era. Today, of course, there are at least 22 cultures, each celebrating its difference, none much interested in looking for common ground.

Consilience is a passionate sermon on what might be called holistic biology. It is a strong antidote to the hard-core diverseniks and the trendy campus fatalists who hold truth to be subjective and therefore relative. There is one truth, however, that is indisputable: unlike his critics, Wilson can do the science and the prose.

--By R.Z. Sheppard