"Consilience"

“Consilience”



When writing “Consilience” Wilson has set out to try to remedy this ignorance that he feels is among us. He defines “consilience” as a linking of facts and fact based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. Wilson believes that today we do not have the ability to create the linkage. His point is that we must find the connection to avoid an environmental disaster. He looks at the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and believes that they were on the right track. They were enormously optimistic, they were on a path that would lead to endless progress and improvement in the quality of life. Somehow along the way this vision was lost.
Most of the issues that vex humanity daily—ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation,
abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several persistently before us—cannot be solved
without integrating knowledge from natural scienc...