
Consilience
The Unity of Knowledge
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Hogan
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By:
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Edward O. Wilson
About this listen
One of our greatest living scientists - and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants - gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.
Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.
©1999 Edward O. Wilson (P)2018 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Terrible narration, pointless rambling writing.
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Copy & Paste Book
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insightful journey of the scientific life
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Wow, Wilson has a lot to say and boy can he write.
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Pleasant Humble Simple Rationalism
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-
Overall
-
Performance
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Story
This revised edition of Human Nature begins a new phase in the most important intellectual controversy of this generation: Is human behavior controlled by the species' biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?
With characteristic pungency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate.
-
-
A Heralding Voice...
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By: Edward O. Wilson
-
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- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
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- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
"Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony.... Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg", writes Edward O. Wilson in his most finely observed work in decades. In a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambique and New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico's Dauphin Island and even his parents' overgrown yard back in Alabama, Wilson thrillingly evokes his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with more than 15,000 ant species.
-
-
Terrible narration, pointless rambling writing.
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-
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- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
"Creativity is the unique and defining trait of our species, and its ultimate goal, self-understanding", begins Edward O. Wilson's sweeping examination of the humanities and its relationship to the sciences. By studying fields as diverse as paleontology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, Wilson demonstrates that human creativity began not 10,000 years ago, as we have long assumed, but over 100,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Age.
-
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-
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-
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Edward O. Wilson - winner of two Pulitzer prizes, champion of biodiversity, and Faculty Emeritus at Harvard University - is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Yet his celebrated career began not with an elite education but from an insatiable curiosity about the natural world and drive to explore its mysteries. Called "one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written" by the Los Angeles Times, Naturalist is a wise and personal account of Wilson's growth as a scientist and the evolution of the fields he helped define.
-
-
insightful journey of the scientific life
- By Glenn A. Martinez on 10-21-20
By: Edward O. Wilson
-
The Social Conquest of Earth
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edward O. Wilson is one of the world’s preeminent biologists, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of more than 25 books. The defining work in a remarkable career, The Social Conquest of Earth boldly addresses age-old questions (Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?) while delving into the biological sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts.
-
-
Wow, Wilson has a lot to say and boy can he write.
- By Gary on 05-21-12
By: Edward O. Wilson
-
The Meaning of Human Existence
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called “the rainbow colors” around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a 21st century treatise on human existence. Once criticized for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls here his most expansive and advanced theories on human behavior, recognizing that, even though the human and spider evolved similarly, the poet’s sonnet is wholly different than the spider’s web.
-
-
Pleasant Humble Simple Rationalism
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Simply awful
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Abridged - no Appendix!
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Performance
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Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career - both his successes and his failures - and his motivations for becoming a biologist.
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Long on biography, short on advice
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Worthwhile if you have the patience
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Don't bother. Outdated science & poor logic...
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In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
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You won't learn anything you didn't know
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exactly what I've been looking for
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Such a disappointment
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From the creator of the wildly popular blog Wait but Why, a fun and fascinating deep dive into what the hell is going on in our strange, unprecedented modern times.
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Good for a while but then goes hard off the rails
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Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive.
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Disappointing
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The Patterning Instinct
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Wonderful book! Changes your perspective on the human race and where we might be going.
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Critic reviews
"A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." (The Wall Street Journal)
"An original work of synthesis... a program of unrivalled ambition: to unify all the major branches of knowledge—sociology, economics, the arts and religion—under the banner of science." (The New York Times)
"As elegant in its prose as it is rich in its ideas... a book of immense importance." (Atlanta Journal & Constitution)
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Overall
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Performance
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Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career - both his successes and his failures - and his motivations for becoming a biologist.
-
-
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By: Edward O. Wilxon
-
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
-
-
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-
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- Unabridged
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-
-
The problem is not with the book
- By Marcus on 08-09-09
By: Thomas S. Kuhn
-
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- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called “the rainbow colors” around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a 21st century treatise on human existence. Once criticized for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls here his most expansive and advanced theories on human behavior, recognizing that, even though the human and spider evolved similarly, the poet’s sonnet is wholly different than the spider’s web.
-
-
Pleasant Humble Simple Rationalism
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By: Edward O. Wilson
What listeners say about Consilience
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- Lucy DuPree
- 03-01-25
Eye-opening wake up call for a moderate conservative!
Wilson appears to make every attempt to be balanced in his argument. The union of the natural sciences and humanities is a difficult thesis but he is up to the task. You need to brace yourself for a genuinely academic presentation, hard to follow at times, but a rewarding experience in the end.
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- Chasseur
- 08-01-22
The philosophy of science, and why we should view culture and behavior with its method
Wilson’s ambitious mission is to argue for an overall understanding of the fundamental unity of the natural physical universe and the behavioral, ethical, and social human experience. In part he argues that the lessons of physical science are superior in reliability, progression, and especially in method. Furthermore, he argues that the rules of the biological and physical cores of the development of human life are the foundation of all of the thousands and millions of details within human culture and civilizations. There should be a recognition of the unity of sciences and of human cultural structures, and where they are oppositional, the hypotheses of science must be given greater authority and deference. Only by understanding government, culture, and art as fundamentally steered by our physical existence and history can humanity have the necessary basis to develop an ethically defensible and actually sustainable existence.
It’s such a big and comprehensive synthesis of all the areas of academic and civilizational areas of knowledge, I even doubt my ability to be really correct in summarizing the author’s positions. So I’m listening twice. But it is interesting, insightful, and well developed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-07-19
absolutley lovely
Edward o Wilson is one of my favorite authors and this is one of his centerpieces of writing.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Carson
- 12-04-18
everyone should read this
A fantastical and expressively deep dive into the connective tissues of the sciences. Informative and poetically prosed explanations, that pose a question we must all internalize, "is the way that categorically organize and interprete all the culminated scientific observations and data wrong at it's most fundamental core?" The answer suggested by this reading is a resounding "yes!"
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- Purchaser
- 11-11-18
Very Informative!
I enjoyed this great book about connecting knowledge. Great book and enjoyable listen. Highly recommended!! #Inspiring #SelfDiscovery #Provocative #tagsgiving #sweepstakes
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- Dave Wilson
- 09-13-18
A Call For Unity
This book still has the potential to reconcile every area of human knowledge. A source for numerous strands of intellect conversations, it may still do the same for you.
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- The Saint
- 02-25-19
A Singular Achievement!
Ed Wilson has tied four great arenas of study into a comprehensive whole ... physics, molecular biology, sociology and the humanities are glimpsed tracking towards a common science ... the science of life ... we're not there yet, and we must still pass existential bottlenecks, but parts of the way forward are now more illuminated ... a tour de force of rigorous scientific aspiration and realization!
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- DD
- 02-02-23
This is a deep and insightful Book
In reading this book I become very impressed with the expansive and deep nature of knowledge of EO Wilson. This book is very relevant for today and It's predictions and insights are the same we are working with today. If you read only one chapter of this book read the last chapter which essentially puts together the theme of this book and of our society and species in general.
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- Chris Stamplis
- 10-09-18
A legendary ecologist, via a commanding narrator
Excellent narrator; I don't believe I heard more than two mispronunciations, and these were Latin words. Great voice lends authority to well-developed ideas. Even better imo if listened to at ~1.3x.
Wilson is a polymath and a modern Renaissance man. I can't imagine how much time he spent acquiring his comprehensive knowledge, which spans a wide gamut of very relevant history, literature, arts, ethics, psychology, and the domains of anthropology, all from a grounded and rigorous devotion to science, within a reduction-reintegration framework of synthesis. I cannot imagine that this book didn't make a few waves in the humanities and social sciences. If I have a critique, it's that Wilson was catering to too many audiences simultaneously, and felt compelled to explain perspectives behind known bodies of scientific theory. He was at his best, however, when building freely off of such frameworks, arguing compellingly and eloquently in a tour de force that will be quoted by generations of scientists to come. The very end of the book leaves a lasting impact.
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- Jiri Klouda
- 10-03-18
Surprisingly useful for 20 year old book
Many of the concepts mentioned are now advanced, but the book is a surprisingly useful view into the state of humanities 20 years ago and great indicator of the lack of progress in the 2 decades since. Definitely worth listening to for some interesting ideas, especially if you keep comparing what is said with the current state of affairs.
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