Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

As a teen, Edward Wilson packed his science books in a satchel and explored the woods and streams of his native Alabama, observing frogs, snakes, and especially ants. He learned the Linnaean system of categorizing life forms, then studied the theory of evolution at the University of Alabama. He realized that evolution has implications, not only for genetics, but for all of biology and even philosophy. Wilson experienced “the Ionian Enchantment […] a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws" (4-5). Indeed, physics, perhaps the most central science, is closing in on a unified theory of all the forces of nature. As a college student, Wilson, raised a Baptist, came to doubt his childhood faith—though he read the Bible twice through, he found no mention of evolution—and wondered whether science might be an improvement on revealed truth, to become “religion liberated.” 

Consilience is “literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation" (8). Wilson believes that