Wilson Edward O. - Consilience: the unity of knowledge

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION , APRIL 1999

Copyright 1998 by Edward O. Wilson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.

Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments of permission to reprint previously published material will be found following the index.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Wilson, Edward Osborne.

Consilience: the unity of knowledge / Edward O. Wilson.1st ed.

p. cm.

A Borzoi book.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-679-45077-7

1. Philosophy. 2. Order (Philosophy). 3. Philosophy and science.

I. Title.

B 72. W 54 1998

121dc21 97-2816

Vintage ISBN : 0-679-76867- X

eBook ISBN : 978-0-8041-5406-2

Author photograph J. D. Sloan

Designed by Cassandra J. Pappas

www.randomhouse.com

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Thus have I made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world, as truly and faithfully as I could discover.

F RANCIS B ACON (1605)

I REMEMBER very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning. It was in the early fall of 1947, when at eighteen I came up from Mobile to Tuscaloosa to enter my sophomore year at the University of Alabama. A beginning biologist, fired by adolescent enthusiasm but short on theory and vision, I had schooled myself in natural history with field guides carried in a satchel during solitary excursions into the woodlands and along the freshwater streams of my native state. I saw science, by which I meant (and in my heart I still mean) the study of ants, frogs, and snakes, as a wonderful way to stay outdoors.

My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genusall the species of crowsand ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdomsplants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.

I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of AField Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.