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BOOKS REVIEW
In This page Kwabs.com will present a review of the work of one or two authors. Most of the time we will review books that can further the healthy debate about philosophical, political, scientific, literary and cultural issues.
Our current literary review is a book publish in 1998 called: "Consilience:The Unity of Knowledge" by the biologist Edward Osborne Wilson.
We also presenting,
without commentary, the book entitled : Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind written between late 1793 and early 1794 by Marie Antoine Jean Nicholas Caritat Marquis de Condorcet..
CONSILIENCE : THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE
Edward O.Wilson is a versatile pluridisciplinary scientist. His contribution to the advancement of science embraces a wide field which encompasses population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology and ethology.
The first important book of Wilson was The Theory of Island Biogeography published in 1967 in collaboration with Robert H. Mac Arthur. From this scientific foundation
which, as Hans Seylie said, is the cathedral of his intellectual achievement, Wilson expanded his grasp on the separate domains of philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences
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Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge is a continuation of a book published in 1973 entitled Sociobiology: the New Synthesis.
On this book Wilson talk about the advances in the theoretical and empirical understanding of the evolutionary origins of social behaviors of non human animals and set forth the idea of the possible application of that knowledge to explain human behavior and social organization.
At the time of his publication, "Sociobiology" raised a storm of scientific and political controversy.
The intellectual engine located at the core of the controversy was the irreconcilable opposition between the nurturist and the naturist perspective of the evolution of human culture and certainly the germane question of the genetic inheritance of intellectual characteristics. This debate has tremendous social and political implications.
It cannot, for instance, escape the discussions about the value of the I.Q test as a measure of the intellectual capacity of one
social group or one ethnic group versus another
In the 19th century, the idea of superiority of certain races of human over some other was at the heart of the pseudoscientific arguments of Gobineau in his book about The Inequality of Human races.
In the 20th century, the NAZI of Germany used the idea of the superiority of the Aryan race
as a base for the conquest and the genocide of people belonging to another
race.
Consilience was published in 1998 after the The Ants(1990) , The Diversity of Live(1992) and The Naturalist(1994).). It is a widening of the synthetic and speculative view set forth in Sociobiology. Starting from the establishment of the genetic foundation of all human behavior, Wilson searches for the means to realize the consilience of all intellectual endeavor.
By using evolutionary biology as the base of the understanding of the branches of learning that are
traditionally outside the domain of the sciences, Wilson proposes the unification, the Consilience of all human
activities.
The book could be brought online at the
Kwabsstore. You could also buy the
Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by Jean A. Condorcet
click on the book cover
to buy Consilience
Next review
the
The
Journey of Man
By Spencer Wells
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