The nineteenth century philosopher William Whewell first used the word consilience to refer to the "jumping together," or connecting, of knowledge. In his latest book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, world-renowned entomologist and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson borrows this term and explores its far-reaching implications for all realms of human thinking.

Contrary to what the title might suggest, Wilson does not attempt to create a grand, unified body of all knowledge within the context of his own book. Instead, he explores the history and theories behind consilience, the concept that certain principles underlie every branch of learning, and those principles are in turn determined by a few all-encompassing and fundamental natural laws. The book is intended to promote recognition of this unity of knowledge.

Wilson chose Whewell's term to denote this grand conception of unified learning because "its rarity has preserved its [descriptive] precision." He admits that the metaphysics of consilience are shared by only a few scientists and philosophers. Nonetheless, the author attempts to show that a grander synthesis of knowledge is emerging, at least within some basic endeavors, such as the study of human behavior. In light of this, consilience should establish itself as a full-fledged science. But according to Wilson, the scientific testing of consilience will be "the greatest of all intellectual challenges." In support of his argument, Wilson cites early historical attempts to establish cross-border or interdisciplinary studies that were, in his view, successful.

In his book The End of Science (Broadway Books, 1997), author John Horgan observes one indication of why Wilson's pioneering writings, which also include Sociobiology (Harvard University Press, 1980) and In Search of Nature (Island Press, 1996), are worth reading. Horgan noted that Wilson's works "combined great intelligence and learnedness with, paradoxically, a kind of naiveté, almost an innocence."

Wilson's great learning is apparent throughout Consilience. The author dissects diverse subjects and translates them into common English with ease. This quality alone should make the book appealing to a broad audience.

The author's innocence shines through his erudition as an almost romantic desire for a "jumping together" of knowledge. Such a notion in itself is both romantic and noble in an era so dominated by reductionism. Indeed, Wilson referred to the codiscoverer of DNA structure and callow future Nobel Prize winner James D. Watson as "the Caligula of modern biology" when Watson was damning nonmolecular biology as a waste of time.

Wilson begins his exploration of consilience by summarizing early attempts to unify knowledge, or at least to establish a mechanistic baseline for understanding the world and ourselves. For this purpose, he draws upon the writings of late-eighteenth-century French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, along with other Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, Newton, and Goethe. With these examples, such as Condorcet's application of mathematics to the social sciences, Wilson demonstrates how the concept of consilience is founded in history.

While scientific inquiry is the application of objective reasoning in the natural world, Wilson is well aware that science is nonetheless performed by subjective creatures. He argues that "no one, philosopher or scientist, could explain the physical acts of observation and reasoning in other than highly subjective terms." Yet earlier in the text, he says one should at least try, given a better understanding of the computational machinery that does the searching - the human mind.

Later chapters are filled with examples of current cross-border analyses, some of which are based on the author's own research. Through these examples, Wilson illustrates the need for human beings to understand the complexity of the natural world, including our own species' role in it. Any given theme, such as the phenomenon of dreams, opens instant access roads that pass through the territories of biochemistry, physiology, psychology, nonhuman behavioral science, evolution, and culture. Wilson suggests that if it is ever possible to submit these examples to mathematical modeling, "success . . . will be measured by the power . . . to predict emergent phenomenon."

If, for example, one accepts that genes play even a minor role in behavior, then the next logical step is to interpret genetics in relation to culture. This is an idea for which Wilson has received his fair (and some say unfair) share of criticism. Wisely, Wilson demonstrates caution when he discusses this concept in the book; he says that "what we inherit are neurobiological traits that cause us to see the world in a particular way and to learn certain behaviors in preference to other behaviors."

Wilson attempts to show that a gene-culture association provides a "Darwinian advantage." This idea represents a collusion between the "hard" sciences, such as biology, and the traditionally "soft" sciences, such as sociology. Through this means, Wilson shows how the social sciences have "gain[ed] in predictive power," which is a requisite for any hard science.

For most people, nothing is more detached from the activities of science than the realm of art. But as Wilson has proven repeatedly through his writing, he is not most people. He believes "the common property of science and art is in the transmission of information." This belief may appear tenuous, but Wilson argues that a scientifically literate artist may express a more comprehensive view of the world than one whose understanding is limited solely to the humanities. In reverse fashion, an artistically inclined scientist might have the tools to express his or her craft in a more fluid, real, and understandable manner. The problem with cross-border relationships between art and science (and even across fields of science) is the dependence of each field on jargon - unique languages and sublanguages. The inability to merge these languages produces ignorance, separate camps of assumed authority. Without interdisciplinary understanding, Wilson suggests that "we are still Paleolithic thrill seekers, preferring Jurassic Park to [knowledge of] the Jurassic Era, and UFOs to astrophysics."

In its final two chapters, Wilson's entertaining book touches upon a higher spiritual level, for lack of a better phrase. The author explores how ethics, religion, and dogma-reinforcing moral codes are almost an integral part of human beings.

In light of this, how can anyone explain the competing, nonaltruistic, purely reductionists factors that sometimes override these seemingly intrinsic beliefs? How does one account for the influences that steer the global community toward ethical gray areas such as genetic manipulation and population control, as well as toward the less gray areas of cultural conflict and ecologically questionable projects? Is this direction due to a lack of consilience? Do human beings still hold the belief that we are the pinnacle of the evolutionary line, instead of its physical and cultural products, as Wilson suggests?

What makes human beings unique is that for the first time in the 3.5 billion years of life on this planet, this single species has a choice in its future. Whether or not one agrees with environmental conservationism, global communities, and any other seemingly left-wing "ism" or "ology," the simple facts are that the planet's resources and space are limited. Wilson pushes the reader toward a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships between human beings and other species - their work, their world, the environment as a whole. Through this means - consilience - he asks the reader to realize human beings have a choice.

If humanity does not accept this realization and continues to extinguish what is around us, Wilson suggests we may be faced with the beginning of a depressing, post-Cenozoic geological era. He names this age the "'Eremozoic Era,' the Age of Loneliness."

Despite this romantic ploy and the author's historical examples, one still wonders if consilience can really work over the long term. Can the general populace grasp a wider, more complex interpretation of existence through a mist of information overload? Can scientists learn other investigative languages, in order to paint their world in broader explanatory strokes? Can they afford not to? If nothing else, Consilience, the Unity of Knowledge gives readers a possible new path into knowledge. It may lead nowhere, or it could lead to another level of understanding that is uniquely human.

Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from pre-scientific cultures. Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of natural sciences . . . humans are trapped in a cognitive prison . . . They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above, and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong, because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.