CAN SCIENCE MAKE SENSE OF EVERYTHING? CONSILIENCE The Unity of Knowledge By Edward O. Wilson Knopf 332pp $26 In the summer of 1936, in the small Florida community of Paradise Beach not far from Pensacola, a young 7-year-old boy sat fishing on a dock, occasionally jerking a perchlike pinfish out of the water. When he carelessly yanked one too hard, it flew into his face, and a spine in its dorsal fin penetrated the lens of his right eye. ''The pain was excruciating,'' he wrote years later. ''But being anxious to stay outdoors...I continued fishing.'' Several months later, a cataract clouded the injured lens, and it was removed, leaving the boy with one good eye. That good eye, though, turned out to be particularly acute at close range, and the boy turned it on nature. He grew up to become one of the world's most distinguished biologists, responsible for some of the most influential and widely debated ideas in biology in the late 20th century. Edward O. Wilson has spent his life studying ants, but he is best known for his efforts to link biology and human behavior. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Wilson's writings on what he calls sociobiology have been widely accepted by many researchers. In those efforts, he revived the nature-nurture debate by arguing not that genes determine human behavior but that they exert an important gravitational pull on it. The argument provoked fierce criticism from some who said Wilson was putting human beings in a genetic straitjacket, denying them the freedom to choose. In his new book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson argues for a new science of human nature, one that would help explain the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities, as well as the physical sciences. For centuries, science has found order in a world once thought to be so mysterious as to be beyond comprehension. Once we used myths to explain the workings of the universe and the human body. Many of those mysteries have since yielded to scientific explanation. Why, Wilson asks, should literature, music, and the arts be any different? Wilson borrows the word ''consilience'' from William Whewell, a 19th-century philosopher. It means ''a jumping together,'' and Wilson uses it to refer to the underlying links between different fields of human learning. Many such links have emerged in the natural sciences, as biologists have, for example, incorporated knowledge from physics and chemistry to help explain the workings of living cells. Wilson is now arguing for ''the possibility of consilience beyond science and across the great branches of learning.'' The only way to establish that, he says, ''is by methods developed in the natural sciences.'' To make his case, Wilson takes readers on an invigorating tour through the history of ideas and some of the most exciting recent discoveries in neuroscience, complexity theory, and genetics. Wilson wanders through history, economics, sociology, religion, and literary criticism, providing illuminating thumbnail sketches of such thinkers as Darwin, Bacon, Descartes, and Einstein. Many of the examples he discusses illustrate how scientific evidence is supplanting unscientific belief. Until the 1960s, for example, schizophrenia was thought to be a consequence of something parents did to children in the first three years of life. Now it is known that genetics plays a strong role in the development of the disease. To take another example, Sigmund Freud, in proposing his famous Oedipus complex, concluded that infant boys had a strong incestuous attraction to their mothers and that society should therefore enact ''the most stringent prohibitions'' to prevent such behavior. That was an intriguing explanation of incest, but it was based on Freud's interpretation of dreams--not on scientific experiment. ''To put it as kindly as possible--he guessed wrong,'' Wilson writes. Experiments have shown, Wilson says, that humans have an intense natural aversion to incest. Many species of animals, too, avoid incest. The most likely explanation, Wilson says, is that the aversion is a consequence of evolution. Incestuous unions produce offspring with a high chance of genetic defects, and evolution selects against that. Society therefore needs no prohibitions against incest. Wilson knows there are some who would say the social sciences and the humanities ''are too complex to be mastered by contemporary imagination and may lie forever beyond reach.'' Wilson worries about that attitude. If past generations had felt so humble before the unknown, ''our comprehension of the universe would have stopped growing in the 16th century,'' Wilson writes. ''It is the opposite conviction...that has propelled science and technology into the modern age.'' 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 Wilson a congenial and approachable host. He isn't quite successful in making the case that the humanities and the arts are amenable to scientific investigation. He contends, however, that such issues as ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, and environmental crises ''cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities.'' Unifying human knowledge might be difficult or impossible, he admits. But he argues persuasively that we ought to try. By PAUL RAEBURN To read a Letter to the Editor about this story click here RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``Consilience''

Updated Apr. 9, 1998 by bwwebmaster
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