Edward Wilson views the humanities today with alarm. In the hard sciences, the pursuit of objective knowledge remains the order of the day. Not so in literary studies, where deconstruction dissolves hard facts into arbitrary perspectives.

Each author’s meaning is unique to himself, goes the underlying premise; nothing of his true intention or anything else connected to objective reality can be reliably assigned to it. His text is therefore open to fresh analysis and commentary issuing from the equally solipsistic world in the head of the reviewer.

Mr. Wilson, a world-renowned biologist, will have none of this: In the sciences, we have just the sort of knowledge our literary nihilists declare impossible. When, through painstaking study, Wilson discovered that ants communicate by releasing chemicals called pheromones, he was not adding a new fantasy to the world’s stock of stories; to the contrary, he had found out a hitherto unknown aspect of the natural world. Moreover, Mr. Wilson maintains, the facts that scientists have discovered, and the theories they have devised to account for them, fit together to form a coherent world outlook. He designates this unified view with the recondite word “consilience,” which he has taken from a 19th-century British philosopher, William Whewell.

Mr. Wilson is, of course, free to adopt the terminology he wishes, but one wonders why he employs a term Whewell intended for an entirely different use. As a glance at his own quotation from Whewell suffices to show, by “consilience” the philosopher meant several “inductions”—generalizations from empirical data—supporting a common theory: Mr. Wilson, by contrast, means that the theories of the various sciences comport well with one another.

In what way? Physics is the most basic science: Its laws govern all matter. Consistent with it, scientists have devised an account of the origin of our universe from the Big Bang. And, of course, science does not stop here. Biological life and, later, consciousness arose from nonliving matter, in the way Darwinian biology has elucidated. Here, it is safe to say, Mr. Wilson’s heart is to be found. The evolutionary story lies at the center of the consilient outlook that Wilson wields against the deconstructionists. By resort to the wonders of evolution, especially as this concerns the human brain, the tangled problems of philosophy may be solved and objective knowledge vindicated.

Mr. Wilson’s defense of science against “social constructionist” detractors commands our admiration. But his attempt to dissolve the world-riddle through evolution succeeds no better than that of his great predecessor Ernst Haeckel. Though widely read in philosophy (especially the works of sympathetic theorists such as the Churchlands and Daniel Dennett), Wilson has little understanding of how philosophical argument proceeds. He writes, for example:

The canonical definition of objective scientific knowledge avidly sought by the logical positivists is not a philosophical problem nor can it be attained, as they hoped, by logical and semantic analysis. It is an empirical question that can be answered only by a continuing probe of the physical basis of the thought process itself.

How can he say such things? The conclusions of brain science are themselves, obviously, statements. What does it mean to say that they are true? What is further resort to the anatomy or physiology of the brain supposed to tell us? Mr. Wilson has confused a problem of the theory of knowledge—what is truth?—with another issue, to which the workings of the brain may indeed be relevant—what is consciousness?

Ethics, as Mr. Wilson sees matters, may also be disposed of quickly:

John Rawls . . . offered the very plausible premise that justice be defined as fairness, which is to be accepted as an intrinsic good. . . . But in making such an assumption, Rawls ventured no thought on where the human brain comes from or how it works. . . . I find it hard to believe that had Kant, Moore, and Rawls known modern biology and experimental psychology they would have reasoned as they did.

Once more our author rides his hobby horse. How can an elementary moral truth, e.g., “It is wrong to torture babies for fun,” be set aside (or for that matter confirmed) by an account of what goes on in the brain? Is the immorality of mass murder a conjecture dependent on the results of neurology for confirmation?

Mr. Wilson speaks slightingly of moral intuitions and what he is pleased to call “secular transcendentalism.” But the biological account of morality that he proposes to substitute for the unscientific vaporings of Kant and similar amateurs is palpably inadequate. He has a very plausible account of how rules that maximized the inclusive fitness of our ancestors during the Pleistocene might have developed, but what has this to do with the moral principles that we should now adopt? Evolutionary stories of the sort our author favors are powerless to account for the Golden Rule: Inclusive fitness can, at least prima facie, explain only altruistic actions among small groups.

Mr. Wilson may respond that this objection assumes the truth of the transcendental view he rejects, but the point is not so easily evaded. He himself eloquently advocates efforts to preserve a wide variety of species from destruction. How can he account for his own conservationist principle on the evolutionary theory he espouses? Whatever its merits, Mr. Wilson’s biophilia has little to do with the inclusive fitness he thinks central to ethics. If he dissents, what is his argument?

Like ethics, religion must also be subsumed within biology. Wilson grew up as a devout Southern Baptist; in his adult years, however, he has “put away childish things” and found in his consilient worldview adequate solace and sense of purpose. He is not an atheist: “On religion I lean toward deism but consider its proof largely a problem in astrophysics”! Nevertheless, God—whatever He may be—has nothing to do with our life on earth.

Mr. Wilson fails once more to slay the transcendentalist dragon. In a well-written dialogue between a Transcendentalist and an Empiricist, he has the former say:

Where do the laws of nature come from if not a power higher than the laws themselves? . . . Put another way, why is there something rather than nothing? The ultimate meaning of existence lies . . . outside the province of science.

Here, for once, is excellent philosophy; unfortunately, Mr. Wilson passes by this argument entirely when the Empiricist speaks. The imperatives of consilience and reductionism will not be denied.

When Wilson sticks to science, his work is valuable and illuminating. He quickly demolishes a key tenet of Freudian psychology, using the “Westermarck effect,” and he has wise things to say about the excesses of Franz Boas and his school of anthropology. If only he had left philosophy alone!

 

[Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) 332 pp., $26.00]