February 17, 2025
Recently I 'finished' reading Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O. Wilson and here are my notes.
A few months back when I set out to really get started, a friend asked what I was reading, and I told him this book. At first glance, he thought it was pretty fluffy. I agreed at the time. Now, I would disagree — pretty strongly so. Published in 1998, his accurate predictions give him authority, and that aside, his claims resonate and the research he includes is dense but grounding. For example, he acknowledges the power of protein structure prediction but suggests that it will be solved. Of course, today DeepMind's AlphaFold is well-known and capable. But he also awaits predictive models for environmental science. He claims that it's harder — cells and proteins are much more deterministic than entities and organisms. And indeed, we've yet to crack that puzzle.
The meat of the book dives into his tranches of knowledge, including the natural sciences, the mind, genes and culture, the social sciences, ethics, and religion. He commends them for their progress since inception but ends each chapter questioning how they can be better.
He spends much of his time explaining how disciplines can improve on the basis of how strong their models are. For the most part, these models are assessed on their accuracy and their generalizability. But you're still left asking: so what? At the end, though, you gain clarity that models are the only means in which we can reason about the world. Models are consilience.
He mentions how, with evolution, will come conservatism. The kind of conservatism that implies a narrow perspective and narrower trajectory. We'll remedy our ailments with the new treatments we work to discover, we'll fix our man-made problems with man-made technology. Perhaps it is that simple but he calls us to pay attention to the human ethic.
A core focus of this book is explaining how subscribing to monoliths as a scientist is stifling. A question, though, that arises while reading this book, is why? Why venture into other fields when you have your own? Well, I believe Wilson is motivated by being able to understand specific complex systems (p. 93), and doing so simply requires being able to point to different fields.
He touches on religion and ethics very beautifully and states that "Science faces in ethics and religion its most interesting and possibly humbling challenge. [...] Religion will possess strength to the extent that it codifies and puts into enduring, poetic form the highest values of humanity consistent with empirical knowledge."
In the Natural Sciences chapter (p. 53), he writes that "the theory that unites [...] basic phenomena is an interlocking set of graphical representations and equations." Here, he refers to 'quantum electrodynamics (Q.E.D.)' to describe the wave-particle duality (Louis de Broglie (1924)).
He also gives his takes on the nature of theory. He satisfyingly writes that complexity without reduction is art, and complexity with reduction is science (The Natural Sciences, p. 59). As I interpret this, dimensionality reduction — figuring out how to do it — is an act of rigor. Dimensionality reduction is seeking signal in the noise: it's how we engineer understanding. And to engineer understanding is to do science.
While he does condemn computational theorists to some degree — those who make themselves victims to combinatorial explosition by simulation — Wilson writes about the value of theory (p. 56). In fact, he claims that science is nothing without theory. To theorize is to narrate. And to build a theory either from scratch or to build someone else's is a way of reconstructing the system — to tell the story again.
"Each advance is also a prosthesis, an artificial device dependent on advanced expertise and intense continuing management."
"A united system of knowledge is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality. It provides a clear map of what is known, and it frames the most productive questions for future inquiry."
"Historians of science often observe that asking the right question is more important than producing the right answer. The right answer to a trivial question is also trivial, but the right question, even when insoluble in exact form, is a guide to major discovery. And so it will ever be in the future excursions of science and imaginative flights of the arts."
"The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper."