Consilience Rebalanced: Edward O. Wilson on Science, the Humanities and the Meaning of Human Existence.

摘要

Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology founded a discipline and sparked one ofthe most heated controversies in modern evolutionary biology. Lately Wilson hasbeen back in the fray, this time with a series of papers and books arguing for theabandonment of the theory of inclusive fitness—the core of Neo-Darwinism, and byWilson’s own account a key framework for his own thinking in Sociobiology(Meaning of Human Existence 69-70)—and the reinstatement of the earlier concept ofgroup selection. The hubbub around Wilson’s apostasy on this central tenet of modernevolutionary theory has unsurprisingly obscured what appears to be another recentchange of mind, or perhaps of heart, on his part. For scholars working at the interfacebetween science and the humanities, Wilson’s influence has been no less pronouncedand no less controversial than it has among his fellow biologists. Like Sociobiology,Wilson’s Consilience, first published in 1998, gave a name to a burgeoning field ofstudy. Here Wilson called for a coming together of the sciences and the humanities“to create a common groundwork of explanation” (6). His specific proposal for acritical method was to apply the findings of evolutionary psychology to the arts, onthe grounds that “even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentallywith knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them” (237).Wilson did not instigate the project of interpreting literature and the other arts asexpressions of our evolved biology, but his manifesto became its rallying cry, notleast because his work in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology was alreadyconstitutive of its approach. Wilson’s centrality to this movement is apparent in hisplace within its own major manifesto collections. Brett Cooke and Frederick Turnerincluded a selection of his writings on art in Biopoetics, which appeared in 1999, theyear after Consilience. Wilson himself contributed one of the two Forewords toJonathan Gottschall’s and David Sloan Wilson’s The Literary Animal in 2005. In amore recent collection, published in 2012, Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard taketheir title Creating Consilience from Wilson’s book. They define their own project asformulating methodological principles for a second wave of consilient scholarship onanthropology, cultural studies, religion, ethics, and literature.