Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Mar 30, 1999 - Science - 384 pages
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." —The Wall Street Journal

One of our greatest scientists—and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants—gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.

Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.

From inside the book

Contents

The Ionian Enchantment
3
The Great Branches of Learning
8
The Enlightenment
15
Copyright

12 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1999)

Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. He is the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, On Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990, with Bert Hölldobler), as well as many other groundbreaking works, including Consilience, Naturalist, and Sociobiology. A recipient of many of the world’s leading prizes in science and conservation, he was a Pellegrino University Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He died in 2021.

Bibliographic information