Content area
Full Text
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson. New York, NY: Vintage, 1999, 367 pp., $14.00 paperback.
E. O. Wilson has written a provocative and sweeping treatise on the nature of human knowledge. While a good deal of the book's subject matter may not appeal to readers in the public policy and management field, three groups within the field will benefit from reading this book: deans of public policy schools, behavioral policy researchers, and anyone interested in public policies related to genetic engineering and human population growth. I will consider the relevance of Wilson's argument to each group in turn, but first it is necessary to briefly summarize his main thesis.
Wilson argues that the entirety of human knowledge can be and will be consolidated into a single framework of understanding. By knowledge, Wilson means not only science (natural and social) but also ethics and aesthetics. This consilience is possible because of the collapse of the mind-brain duality in the face of recent research into brain functioning. To paraphrase MIT computer scientist Marvin Minsky, Wilson asserts that the mind is what the brain does. Wilson augments this point with a more controversial assertion that the human species' evolutionary legacy, as evident in the architecture of the brain, is a significant factor in the organization of all human knowledge. Consequently, Wilson champions the cause of research into the consequences of human evolution on brain functioning and the implications of that research for all of human knowledge.
Having established this thesis, Wilson then turns a critical eye to the current state of the social sciences. In his view, the social sciences are deeply flawed because they have isolated themselves from biology in building theories of human behavior. While this isolation may have been justified 40 years ago, the rapid development of biological...