Consilience: The Unity
of Knowledge (IDS 3932) 1 credit
Spring 2005
James Wetterer and
Daniel White
Course
description
An introduction to the
interdisciplinary search for deep laws that unite all areas of human knowledge
from physics to the biological and social sciences and the humanities.
Place of
the Course in the
“The
greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the
attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities. The ongoing fragmentation
of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real
world but artifacts of scholarship.”–E.O. Wilson, Consilience (8)
“Consilience”
Ecology and the
Curriculum: Toward an Ecology of Knowledges
“‘Growth
for the sake of growth,’ notes environmental writer Edward Abbey, “is the
ideology of the cancer cell.’ Just as continuously growing cancer eventually destroys
its life-support systems by destroying its host, a continuously expanding
global economy is slowly destroying its host–the Earth’s ecosystem.”–Lester
Brown, State of the World 1998 (4) Citing IMF and World Bank reports that paint
a glowing picture of world economic progress over the past decade, Brown argues
this alleged progress is an artifact of overspecialized scholarship: “Although
. . . symptoms of economies outgrowing ecosystems are numerous and visible,
they do not seem to catch the attention of traditional economists” (12). The
result of the discontinuity between disciplinary concerns in economics and
ecology is an increasingly dire mismatch between political-economic and
ecological futures, “business as usual” and the “state of the biosphere”: the
bright, the other dismal. Which is correct? Is the traditional curriculum
capable addressing the relations between these two projected images?
Required
text
Wilson,
E.O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Paperback - 367 pages. Reprint
edition (April 1999), Random House; ISBN: 067976867X
In
addition to the text, students will read articles and chapters on a wide
variety of topics.
Textbook Description
(from book cover)
One
of our greatest living 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,
Course
structure
The first half of the course will follow the
text. The second half will explore specific topics relevant to
Course requirements and
assessment
1) Attendance (25% of grade):
We will pass around an attendance sheet each class. We will allow two unpenalized absences, no excuse required. More than two
absences, no excuse accepted.
2) Class questions and class participation (25% of grade):
We expect students to have read the assigned chapters and papers before class
and contribute to discussion every class. While reading the assigned chapter
and papers, students should note interesting questions that come to mind.
Before midnight on the day before each class, please e-mail at least one
question related to each assigned chapter and one related to each of the
assigned papers (usually two questions per week). Because we will use these for
class discussion, we cannot accept any late, but we will allow you to miss two
weeks of questions. Thus, you need questions for 12 of the 14 weeks; otherwise
you will be penalized.
3) 20 Questions (10% of grade):
Write out 20 consilience-related questions (large or small) on a wide range
topics that interest you. Please submit this assignment by e-mail by 11:59 PM
on February 15th. We will combine the responses to hand out in class.
4) Choose an outside source (an article or chapter from a list provided) for
the class to read and lead 15 min. class discussion (20% of grade):
By the 7th week of class, each student will choose a subject area that
interests them, read more papers relevant to this general subject, and assign one
or more for the class to read. In weeks 14 and 15, each student will lead a
discussion concerning the assigned paper(s) and the general subject area. The list of readings which appear on the syllabus from Week 8
are examples from which students might choose. The class will read
representative examples of these selections.
5) Final Essay (20% of grade)
Links for Further
Reflection:
Millenium
Ecosystem Assessment
Course Schedule and
Assignments
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Week 1 Jan. 10 Introduction to the course
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Week 2 Jan. 17 Holiday
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Week 3 Jan. 24 Consilience: pp. 3-48
CHAPTER 1 The Ionian Enchantment
CHAPTER 2 The Great Branches of Learning
CHAPTER 3 The Enlightenment
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Week 4 Jan. 31 Consilience: pp. 49-104
CHAPTER 4 The Natural Sciences
CHAPTER 5 Ariadne's Thread
Paintings by Pablo Amaringo and The
Amazonian School
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Week 5 Feb. 7 Consilience: pp. 105-177
CHAPTER 6 The Mind
CHAPTER 7 From Genes to Culture
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Week 6 Feb. 14 Consilience: pp. 178-228
CHAPTER 8 The Fitness of Human Nature
CHAPTER 9 The Social Sciences
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Week 7 Feb. 21 Consilience: pp. 229-290
CHAPTER 10 The Arts and Their Interpretation
CHAPTER 11 Ethics and Religion
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Week 8 Feb. 28 Consilience: pp. 291-326
CHAPTER 12 To What End?
20 Questions
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March 7-11 Spring Break
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Week 9 March 14 Student-led Discussion
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Week 10 March 21 Student-led Discussion
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Week 11 March 28 Student-led Discussion
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Week 12 April 4 Student-led Discussion
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Week 13 April 11 Student-led Discussion
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Week 14 April 18 Student-led Discussion
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Week 15 April 25 Student-led Discussion
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Week 16 May 2 Student-led Discussion (in lieu of a final)
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Final Essays due no later than 2:00 PM, Monday, May 2nd
Editorial
Reviews of Consilience by E.O. Wilson
Amazon.com
The
biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long career made
signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology,
and ethology, he has also steeped himself in
philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. The result of his
lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means "a
jumping together," in this case of the many branches of human knowledge),
a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that
yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps
should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a
common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all "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." In making
his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which
science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia,
and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns
to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for
case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants
and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigor and vigor to be
brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for
us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for "Homo sapiens,
the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the
force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what
we wish to become."
The
The San Francisco
Chronicle, Harry E. Demarest
Thoughtful
readers with an interest in the future should consider
Business Week, Paul Raeburn
Consilience
is a provocative book, worth reading simply for the opportunity to spend time
with one of today's great scientific minds. Nonscientists will find
From Booklist
Thanks
to the rampant success of Stephen Hawking's Brief
History of Time (1988), a great many are familiar with the project to formulate
a grand unified theory linking together all the basic physical forces. In a
book that is truly a magnum opus,
Kirkus Reviews
A tour de force from a scholar for whom such tours are par for the
course.
Wilson, who sowed the seeds of sociobiology decades ago, expands his agenda to
the whole of human learning and behavior. All, in both the realms of art and
science, can be reduced to a common set of unifying principles, or consilience.
All can be subsumed under the basic laws of physics and their offspring in
chemistry and biology. For instance, the reductionist
new genetics and molecular biology have revolutionized our understanding of
biology in terms of evolution, human development, and the brain as the vehicle
of human behavior. Further, Wilson restates his notion of the co-evolution of
genes and culture, but it is here that his argument is weakest, based on the
premise that we are genetically programmed toward certain archetypal forms and
themes which he finds in primitive and ancient art but which are dubiously
applicable in the modern world.