Consilience 4 & 5

To discuss these two chapters we went back to the basics of the book by talking about the main theme of the book and these are some of the conclusions we reached.

What is Wilson trying to do?

He wants to find a way to link the sciences and the humanities, and to find out how this linkage is important to human welfare.

Wilson is trying for us to return to the values and principles of the Enlightenment in order to solve the metaquestion of the book. These are some of the values that we went over during the discussion:

• Humans can always be perfected.
• Progress is inevitable.
• We should be driven by the thrill of discovery.
• Power of science.

A question that came up during the conversation that I found interesting was this one: Will we learn from the attempt to link sciences from humanities or will we learn from the actual linkage? This was one question we didn’t have the answer to, but I hope I will be able to once we read more of the book.