Consilience

The chief insight of Chaos theory is that complex, nonlinear systems display exponentially increasing possible outcomes. This means that, for example, the path of a bubble on a stream depends critically on tiny fluctuations of the stream’s surface around the bubble, which cause the number of possible paths for the bubble to rise so rapidly that it becomes essentially impossible to predict its future location. This also explains why it’s so hard to make accurate predictions about the weather, stock prices, political change, and the decisions of individuals over time. 

Simple systems—atoms, molecules—combine to form complex macromolecules whose structures are nearly impossible to predict from their building blocks. These molecules, in turn, combine to form organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, species, and ecosystems, and at each higher level of complexity appear properties and traits quite unexpected from the simpler levels. These surprises are called emergent properties; they also include such phenomena as technological innovation, the rise of civilizations, and the colors of butterfly wings.

Complexity theory is “the search for algorithms used in nature that display common features across many levels of organization" (95), that can, in effect, predict, from simple building blocks, the more complex levels of organic organization. It is a new theory with much headway still to make. 

Consilience is the jumping together of various bodies of knowledge under a unifying theme. If knowledge is a tree, then each art and science is a branch, and consilience is the trunk. Wilson believes that combining fields of learning within overarching theories, especially those of science, can lead to a common language of thought that’s useful across all areas and disciplines of human endeavor. 

The two most important changes that need to be made to protect the environment are decarbonization—the replacement of oil, coal, and wood as energy sources with solar, wind, and fusion power—and dematerialization, or the reduction in the size of products used by people. Both these efforts can help to reduce the “footprint” of human pressure on ecosystems. 

Deism is the belief, developed during the Enlightenment, that God created the universe and doesn’t interfere with it thereafter. Modern deists wonder whether God manages many universes, adjusting their parameters “in order to observe the outcome" (35). By the anthropic principle, only those universes with certain precise characteristics can support life, especially intelligent life, and that humans can only dwell in such universes, and that this may give clues that point to God’s existence. Christians counter that God can only be known first by revelation and then by pure reason. 

The Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s ushered in an era in which new discoveries could be made, new ideas tolerated, and science could begin to blossom. It is a philosophy of the betterment of society through curiosity, thought, and careful experimentation. Wilson believes a revival of Enlightenment ideals can lead to a unification of all fields of art and science into a grand theory of knowledge that benefits humankind. 

Epigenesis is “the development of an organism under the joint influence of heredity and environment" (210). Epigenetic rules are the physical outcomes of genetic assemblages that form the foundation for basic behavioral patterns. They are “the neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development by which the individual mind assembles itself" (138). A fear of snakes is a near-universal behavioral rule dictated by genetic pre-programming; it manifests in a variety of ways, depending on the environment in which a human grows up, and is represented in art and religion by serpent spirits. 

One of two types of memory, episodic memory is a recollection of past events. The other type is semantic memory. 

This is Wilson’s term for the belief that humans are exempt from the laws of nature insofar as they have established dominion over the planetary environment and can alter it to suit themselves. Exemptionalism leads to a new type of person Wilson calls Homo proteus, “shapechanger man,” who is adaptable, restless, and willing to live with environmental degradation as the price of progress. This contrasts with the older Homo sapiens, “wise man,” a glorified ape, fragile, dependent on the rest of life on Earth, and regretful about damage to the environment. 

Developed in the early 1980s by Wilson and his colleague Charles Lumsden, the theory of gene-culture coevolution states that human genetics and cultures have coevolved over the millennia, with new physical traits changing cultural norms and cultural changes affecting genetic alterations. 

A central theorem of population genetics, Hardy-Weinberg posits that, in a given population with a gene that comes in two forms, and the percentages of those forms within the population are known, the percentages of different combinations of those genes can be calculated. This theory can be written simply as a quadratic equation, (p+q)2 = 1, and used to generate useful predictions about future gene expression in populations of concern. 

From the early Greek philosophers to today, the Ionian Enchantment inspires scientists with the conviction that all of nature can be explained by a few natural laws. The search for those laws, and the working out of their implications, drives most scientific research. Wilson was hit hard by this enchantment in college, and he promotes respect for the scientific method, which has led humanity to the brink of understanding the general principles of the physical universe. 

Swedish natural philosopher Carolus Linnaeus in 1735 codifies all life forms into a system that lists every animal and plant into a kingdom—plant, animal, fungus, protist, moneran, archaea—and each kingdom into phyla, each phylum into orders, orders into families, families into genera, and genera into species. Every creature is named in Latin by its genus and species—for example, a fish crow is Corvus ossifragus; a white oak is Quercus alba; a house cat is Felis catus. 

A meme is a unit of culture in the human mind, located in a node or nodes of semantic memory within the brain. It is made up of one or more linked propositions or, if it is complex, linked schemas. 

The three most basic sciences—physics, chemistry, and biology—have as their domain the entire universe, their purpose to explain all-natural phenomena. Physics describes the actions of things; chemistry describes the interactions of materials; and biology describes the phenomena of living beings. Because together they describe everything, and the proofs of their theories are the most clear and rigorous, the natural sciences display the highest standards of truth of any field of study. 

All the possible varieties of a group of genes in all its survivable environments make up the group’s norm of reaction. For example, the genes responsible for leaf shape in the amphibious arrowleaf plant produce a three-part norm of reaction: leaves with an arrowhead shape on dry land, a lily-pad shape on the surface of water, and eelgrass-like ribbons under water. 

Pleiotropy is “the prescription of multiple effects by a single gene” (169). An example is phenylketonuria, a disease with several symptoms—including darkened urine, lightened hair color, and mental retardation—all caused by one gene.

Polygenes are “multiple genes spread across different chromosome sites and acting in concert" (169). The combination of such genes creates physical and mental traits in animals and humans. Additive inheritance, or genes that vary in length, can cause a syndrome suddenly to appear or alter the size or amount of a trait. 

Positivism is a late-19th-century philosophical system whose central precept is that "the only certain knowledge is the exact description of what we perceive with our senses" (67). Positivism took inspiration from the powerful discoveries of science, and it formed the basis for a universal system for determining truth. Its descendant, logical positivism, founded in Vienna in 1924, proposes further that the language of proof must be clearly defined, with no use of slipshod words, and that all terms must operate strictly within the rules of logic. The positivists’ heroes were scientists like Einstein, with his elegant demonstration of general relativity; their goal was nothing less than the development of a universal system for determining truth. By the 1950s, positivism had foundered on the rocks of disagreement over how language should be used rigorously. 

Postmodernism is a prevailing belief among art critics that all artistic viewpoints are subjective and valid, and that there are no fundamental human artistic preferences. Pairing this belief with the related philosophy of deconstructionism—which posits that literary interpretation is completely arbitrary—many current critics confine themselves to interpreting what’s left out of an artwork or what’s implied politically by the artist’s efforts. Postmodernism gets pilloried by Wilson, who believes that science already has discovered distinct aesthetic and storytelling preferences in the human mind.

A class of epigenetic rules that predispose humans to assemble cultures in certain ways, prepared learning means that “animals and humans are innately prepared to learn certain behaviors" (163). From these tendencies, cultural universals appear across all human societies, including religion, marriage rituals, governance, property rights, humor, art, folklore, and medicine, to name a few.

A proposition is a linked set of episodic memories; for example, “hound” and “hare” form the proposition “hunt.” Linked propositions become schemas.

Wilson’s term for the growth of technology, the Ratchet of Progress is a kind of Faustian bargain that progressively moves humans away from their prehistoric origins, giving people more and more prosperity while also making them more and more dependent for survival on technology and more vulnerable to its side effects, including environmental degradation, social upheaval, epidemics, and industrial war. The Ratchet comes with a second Faustian bargain, conscious genetic evolution, by which advancing genetic technology will tempt people to alter their own genotype or that of their offspring. 

A series of connected propositions, or linked episodic memories, add up to a schema. Apollo’s frustrated courtship of Daphne is a schema.

A semantic memory is a symbolic representation of a set of episodic memories to create a meaning. For example, the experience of eating berries that makes one ill gets symbolized as the fruit combined with the idea of poison and a danger signal such as a skull and crossbones. Semantic memory is one of two types of memory, the other being episodic memory. 

Sociobiology studies the biological basis of human behavior. Among its practitioners who call themselves “evolutionary psychologists,” sociobiology is a politically controversial science, in that it makes assertions about human gene-culture coevolution that some critics believe imply racial differences in intellect. 

The main belief system for the social sciences, SSSM posits that cultures are complexes of meaning and symbol that shape social institutions and individual minds, and that they arise uniquely and are not the product of built-in human preferences and tendencies. SSSM parts with sociobiology, which posits that cultures are defined by innate human traits and, in turn, affect those traits over time. 

“Transcendental” is Wilson’s term for the belief that ethics and morals come from outside humanity, as with “natural rights” or God-given laws. Disagreeing are the empiricists, who believe morality arises from innate human preferences that form the basis for cultural codes of conduct.