E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: Early humans invented [the arts] in an attempt to express and control through magic the abundance of the environment, the power of solidarity, and other forces in their lives that mattered most to survival and reproduction.  The arts were the means by which these forces could be […]

E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term social contracts.  In combination they gave early Homo sapiens a decisive edge over all competing animal species, but they also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of […]

E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: Where cultural relativism had been initiated to negate belief in hereditary behavioral differences among ethnic groups – undeniably an unproven and ideologically dangerous conception – it was then turned against the idea of a unified human nature grounded in heredity.  A great conundrum of the human condition […]

E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: Everyone knows that the social sciences are hypercomplex.  They are inherently far more difficult than physics and chemistry, and as a result they, not physics and chemistry, should be called the hard sciences.  They just seem easier, because we can talk with other human beings but not […]

E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: The current status of the social sciences can be put in perspective by comparing them with the medical sciences.  Both have been entrusted with big, urgent problems.  …  In both spheres the problems have been intractably complex, partly because the root causes are poorly understood. The medical […]

E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge Still, except for the rare behavioral conditions approaching total genetic determination, heritabilities are at best risky predictors of personal capacity in existing and future environments. …  The message from geneticists to intellectuals and policy-makers is this: Choose the society you want to promote, then prepare to live […]

E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge Perhaps God did create all organisms, including human beings, in finished form, in one stroke, and maybe it all happened several thousand years ago.  But if that is true, He also salted the earth with false evidence in such endless and exquisite detail, and so thoroughly from […]