Consilience: the unity of knowledge, E. O. Wilson at Harvard, 2010

Edward O. Wilson · 2010 · 1:04:46 · ▶ Watch

Summary

Central question. Can the three great branches of learning (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities) be joined into one body of knowledge by cause-and-effect explanation, and is the supposed wall between science and the humanities real?

Main thesis. There are, he says, “only two ways to account for the human condition”: the natural-science way and “all the other ways”. He argues for the first. The wall between the “two cultures” is not a “fault line” but “a broad domain of poorly understood material phenomena awaiting cooperative exploration”. That borderland is already being worked by cognitive psychology, biological anthropology, neuroscience and others. The centre of the programme is human nature, which he defines not as genes or cultural universals but as epigenetic rules, “the inherited regularities of mental development”.

The proof-of-concept examples (all in the first 40 minutes).

Colour terms. Language divides the colour space where perception is slow to change. Societies add colour words in a near-fixed order.
Incest avoidance. The Westermarck effect, and the dismissal of Freud’s account as “a failed hypothesis”.
Aesthetics. Brains are most aroused by designs with about 20% redundancy.
Biophilia. People choose homes and offices with a savanna-like prospect.
Faces. Cross-cultural preferences for a blended “ideal” young female face.
Neural circuits. The loop through the basal nuclei, thalamus and frontal cortex, linked to rhythmic behaviour and to OCD.

The pivot. He names gene-culture coevolution as “the central problem of the social sciences and much of the humanities” and “one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences”.

Close. The programme is “a renewal of the Enlightenment agenda”. It may be established or discarded; “I’m willing to accept, personally, either one. I think we’re going to establish it.” The humanities should gain from it because they supply the “problems” and the “databases”.

Q&A. A novelist question (the Anthill novel and the “Billy Sunday strategy” for conservation), a Wendell Berry rebuttal about reverence and poetry, and a humanities question about whether scientists respect humanist epistemology. His closing image: reductionism and synthesis alternate like a pendulum, and the mind sciences are “where molecular biology was maybe 1955”.

Stance to note. Wilson is frank that this is not yet science. He calls it “a metaphysical worldview, and a minority one at that” supported by “little more than an extrapolation of the consistent past success of the natural sciences”. He is a believer who says so openly. Most of the evidence in the talk is suggestive, and he says so at times (“none of this is proof”).

Map: talking points

#	Point
1	Losos: Wilson as teacher (Science B-15, 18 years), his books, Naturalist (1994), his list of contributions
2	Opening claim: only two ways to account for the human condition
3	The choice: make the branches of learning consilient or not. “Surely universal consilience is worth a serious try”
4	Definition of consilience; Whewell, 1840; why not “coherence”
5	Honest status: a metaphysical worldview, not yet science
6	The four-quadrant “cross” (environmental policy, ethics, biology, social science) and the practical need to travel the circuit
7	C. P. Snow’s two cultures. The boundary is not a fault line
8	Borderland disciplines: cognitive psychology, biological anthropology, even literary criticism
9	Why it matters: a more objective account of human nature; the Enlightenment dream
10	Definition of human nature as epigenetic rules
11	Example 1: colour terms and the Munsell array; the 11-term sequence
12	Example 2: the Westermarck effect vs Freud
13	Example 3: aesthetics, alpha-wave damping, 20% redundancy, calligraphy; “awaits its Mendeleev”
14	Cezanne vs Picasso: curves calm, angles jar
15	Example 4: biophilia and habitat selection
16	Example 5: face averageness and attractiveness
17	Gene-culture coevolution as the central problem
18	The anti-reductionist objection and his reply; reeler mice; OCD circuit; brain scanning
19	Summary: the humanities as a source of problems; Inca gold; “either one”
20	Q&A 1: what did writing a novel change? Anthill and the Billy Sunday strategy
21	Q&A 1 cont.: rethinking the curriculum
22	Q&A 2: Wendell Berry’s rebuttal; reverence; scientists as romantics
23	Q&A 3: humanities and science as equals; reductionism then synthesis; Holton; molecular biology in 1955

Putting it together

Mental model. Wilson’s consilience is a bet that the map of knowledge has no true walls: every question about humans, including taste, morality, belief and art, has a material basis in brains shaped by genes and culture, so cooperation across the “borderland” can link the branches. His working unit is the epigenetic rule, a small inherited bias in perception, learning or preference that is shared by humans and shapes what cultures build. The proof is a handful of cases (colour terms, incest avoidance, design arousal, habitat preference, faces) plus one chain from gene to circuit to behaviour (reeler mice, OCD). He argues from success, admits the programme is a worldview, invites the humanities in as partners, and forecasts that the mind sciences stand where molecular biology stood in 1955. The strong points are the narrow, well-traced cases and the honesty about status. The weak points are the jump from simple biases to complex culture, the thin spots in his examples (colour, savanna, faces), the quiet change from “evidence converges” to “fields link”, and the limited reply to the claim that meaning is not the kind of thing causes explain.

Open tensions

Whewell’s consilience vs Wilson’s. Evidence-convergence within a theory is a methodological virtue. Field-linkage across disciplines is a metaphysical bet. The talk slides between them.
Material basis vs explanatory reduction. Everyone agrees mind is physical. The fight is over whether physical explanation can replace or only accompany interpretive explanation.
Partnership vs takeover. He says the humanities supply “problems” and “databases”; critics hear a division where science does the explaining.
Strength of the examples. Colour universals are contested; Westermarck is strong but with open edges; savanna preference and facial “ideals” are suggestive. The programme’s credibility depends on the average, not the best case.
Human nature as uniform vs varied. The talk’s “human nature” is a single set of rules; the “WEIRD” critique and cultural evolution work ask whose nature is measured.
Gene-culture feedback. Agreed in principle; disputed on the weight of culture’s own dynamics and on whether Wilson’s rules or learning biases are the right unit.
Wilson’s later turn. After this talk he moved toward group-selection explanations for social behaviour†, which changes what the “genes” side of the loop is.

Reading path

Start: E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998); this talk is its short form. For a fair critic’s view, read Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition (1985), and Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle (2000).
Then: C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959); William Whewell’s passages on consilience (1840); Gould, Rocks of Ages (1999) for the NOMA answer; Pinker, The Blank Slate (2002) for the allied position; Boyd & Richerson or Henrich for the cultural-evolution view.
Deeper: Lumsden & Wilson, Genes, Mind and Culture (1981); Berlin & Kay (1969) and the World Color Survey critiques; Lieberman, Tooby & Cosmides on kin detection; Oppenheim & Putnam (1958), Fodor (1974), Anderson (1972) on reduction and emergence; Dilthey on Verstehen vs Erklären; Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (2001).

Part 1: Before you read

Key terms

Consilience. Wilson’s gloss: “the interlocking of cause and effect explanation across different disciplines”. The older meaning (Whewell) is narrower and about evidence: a theory is strong when independent lines of evidence from different kinds of facts converge on it. Wilson stretches the word from evidence converging to whole fields being linked. Watch which one is meant.

Reductionism. Watch out: it means different things in different traditions.

Sense	Where used	What it says
Methodological	Working scientists	Study the parts to understand the whole
Ontological	Philosophy of science	The whole is nothing but its parts
Theory reduction	Nagel (1961)	One theory can be derived from another (thermodynamics from statistical mechanics)
Explanatory (“greedy”, Dennett)	Critics, polemics	Explaining high-level things only at the low level, skipping the middle
Disciplinary (“imperialism”)	Humanities critics	Science taking over the humanities’ questions
Wilson mostly argues the first and the last two get blurred in the objections he quotes (“vivisectional”, “melts the Inca gold”). When he says “all science goes through reductionism and then synthesis” he uses the first sense.

Emergence / emergent properties. Properties of a whole that do not show up in its parts. Anti-reductionists say these cannot be reduced. Philosophers split into “weak” emergence (surprising but derivable) and “strong” emergence (not derivable even in principle).
Epigenetic rules. Wilson’s term (from Lumsden & Wilson, 1981) for “the inherited regularities of mental development”: biases in what we see, how we code symbols, which options feel easy. Do not confuse with epigenetics in molecular biology (chemical marks like DNA methylation that change gene expression). Wilson’s sense is closer to “developmental biases of the mind”. The two uses share a prefix and little else.
Gene-culture coevolution. The idea that genes and culture feed back on each other in a loop. Standard example (not in the talk): lactase persistence in dairying peoples.
Biophilia. “The innate affiliation people seek with other organisms, especially with the natural world”.
Human nature. Watch out. Philosophers use it for a list of universal traits (or deny there is one). Wilson explicitly says it is not the genes and not the cultural universals but the rules that produce those universals. Many critics attack a different definition than the one he gives.
Borderland disciplines. His name for hybrid fields: cognitive psychology, biological anthropology, neuroeconomics, and similar.
The two cultures. C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture claim that literary intellectuals and scientists no longer understood each other.
Westermarck effect. Reduced sexual interest between people who grew up together in early childhood.
Munsell array. A standard grid of colour chips varying in hue and brightness, used in colour-naming experiments.
Releaser (visual releaser). An ethology term (Lorenz, Tinbergen) for a simple cue that triggers an innate response. Wilson uses it for calligraphy styles that signal dominance.

People named (a reading list)

Person	Why they come up	Start with
William Whewell (1794–1866)	Coined “consilience” in 1840	The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840)
C. P. Snow	”Two cultures” lecture, 1959	The Two Cultures (1959)
Edward Westermarck	Discovered the effect named for him	The History of Human Marriage (1891)
Sigmund Freud	The “failed hypothesis” of incest avoidance	Totem and Taboo (1913)
Mendeleev	Wilson’s image for what the theory of the arts needs	The periodic table (1869)
Cezanne, Picasso	Curve = calm, angle = jarring	(Wilson’s example; no work named)
Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver	Reviewers of Anthill, named by Losos	Their reviews†
Billy Sunday	Evangelist; model for the conservation strategy	His sermons (recorded)
Wendell Berry	Author of Life Is a Miracle, a rebuttal of Consilience	Life Is a Miracle (2000)
Charles Darwin	”the citadel” line about the mind. Unverified	The Descent of Man (1871)
Gerald Holton	In the audience; interpreter of scientific method	Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (1973)
Jonathan Losos	Host	The Improbable Destiny (2017), on evolution’s repeatability

Wilson’s own frame

Wilson (1929–2021) is known for ant biology, island biogeography (with Robert MacArthur, 1967), sociobiology (Sociobiology, 1975; On Human Nature, 1978, Pulitzer), biophilia (1984), biodiversity (he popularised the word) and, late in life, the case for protecting half the Earth. Losos lists several of these. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) is the book this talk summarises. In the talk he does not spend time on his earlier fights over sociobiology. He presents the programme as an invitation to the humanities rather than a conquest, and he spends the Q&A defending that tone. For his own account of his life, Losos recommends Naturalist (1994).

The current debate (live search, 9 Nov 2026; searches were limited)

Is consilience a research programme or a worldview? A philosophy paper in the PhilPapers index argues that the consilience worldview presumes an underlying unity and that this presumption could harm the aims of science (PhilPapers record). Reviews from 1998–99 stress that Wilson’s gene-culture claims are controversial among biologists (Nature review, Reason, 1998). I did not find a recent (2020s) survey of the evolutionary-humanities debate, so I cannot summarise its current state.
Colour universals are contested. Berlin and Kay’s 1969 claim of 11 basic colour categories is the base of Wilson’s first example. Critics argue the method was flawed and drew on only 20 languages, while defenders say the World Color Survey found anomalies that modify the scheme without refuting it. One cited paper states that “the existence of cross-linguistic universals in color naming is currently contested” (core.ac.uk PDF, Nautilus piece on red). No 2020s replication found in this search.
The Westermarck effect has strong support but open edges. Lieberman, Tooby and Cosmides (2000s papers) report that co-residence in childhood predicts incest aversion and sibling altruism (CEP kin detection page). A 2023 study of fathers did not support the hypothesis for fathers, and the “critical window” (often given as the first 6 years) is unsettled (PMC article, Wikipedia summary). This differs from Wilson’s “30 months”.
Wilson’s own later turn. In 2010 (after this lecture) Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson published a Nature paper attacking inclusive-fitness theory, and in 2012 he published The Social Conquest of Earth arguing for group selection. Many biologists objected in print.† in this session. It matters because the gene-culture story in this talk depends on how selection works at group level.
Other live threads†. Cultural evolution research (Boyd & Richerson, Henrich) now builds formal models of gene-culture coevolution. “WEIRD” critiques (Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010) question whether lab findings from Western students show human nature at all. Digital humanities and “distant reading” (Moretti) use data on texts, a different route to cooperation than Wilson’s.

The ideas

Wilson spoke for 48 minutes to an audience that knew the stakes: the Harvard of Gould, Lewontin, Pinker, Holton. He names almost none of the thinkers behind him. Here are the traditions he leans on, including those he leaves unnamed. Eight families of ideas meet in this talk:

  UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE ──────┐                    ┌──── SCIENCE vs HUMANITIES
  Bacon · Descartes ·      │                    │     Vico · Dilthey · Snow
  Comte · Whewell ·        │                    │     Leavis · Gould (NOMA)
  Vienna Circle · Oppenheim│                    │
  & Putnam                 ▼                    ▼
                    ┌──────────────────────────────────┐
  REDUCTION &  ───► │  WILSON: link natural science,   │ ◄──── SOCIOBIOLOGY & HUMAN NATURE
  EMERGENCE         │  social science and humanities   │       Darwin · Westermarck · Lorenz
  Nagel · Anderson  │  through a science of human      │       Hamilton · Trivers · Lumsden
  Mayr · Dennett    │  nature (epigenetic rules)       │       & Wilson · Tooby & Cosmides
                    └──────────────────────────────────┘
                      ▲             ▲              ▲
   GENE-CULTURE       │  EVOLUTIONARY│  BRAIN &     │  CRITICS OF BIOLOGISING
   COEVOLUTION        │  AESTHETICS  │  MIND SCIENCE│  Sahlins · Lewontin · Rose
   Cavalli-Sforza     │  & BIOPHILIA │  Penfield    │  Kitcher · Midgley · Berry
   Boyd & Richerson   │  Dissanayake │  Ramachandran│  Gould · Dupre
   Henrich            │  Orians      │  Damasio     │
   Laland             │  Ulrich      │  fMRI        │

Where each school of thought is covered:

The unity-of-knowledge tradition: from Bacon to the Vienna Circle: idea 1
The rival tradition: knowledge of the human is different in kind: idea 6
Reduction, emergence and what “explaining across levels” means: idea 4
Sociobiology and the science of human nature: idea 2
The critics of biologising the human sciences: idea 5
Evolutionary aesthetics, biophilia and environmental preference: idea 3
Gene-culture coevolution and cultural evolution: idea 4
Brain science as the hinge: idea 4

1. The two ways, the cross, and the “borderland”

In short. Wilson says there are only two ways to account for the human condition: the natural sciences, or all the other ways. He asks whether we should try to make the branches of learning coherent by cause and effect. His word for that unity is consilience. He calls it a metaphysical worldview and a minority one, supported mainly by the past success of the natural sciences. He sees the boundary between science and the humanities as a broad borderland that is poorly understood, not a fault line.

🎙 In the talk

The opening claim: “there are only two ways to account for the human condition”. One comes from the natural sciences; “The second way to account for the human condition is all the other ways”.
The choice he puts to the audience: trying to make the branches of learning “coherent and interconnected by cause and effect explanation, or on the other hand, not trying to make them conciliate”. (The captions say “conciliate”. He means consilient.)
His argument from the material: “the brain, mind, and culture are composed of material entities and processes. They do not exist in an astral plane above and outside the tangible world”.
The word: “The most useful term to capture the unity of knowledge is surely consilience”. He picks it because “its rarity of usage since 1840 has preserved its original meaning”.
His status check: “It is a metaphysical worldview, and a minority one at that”. Its best support is “little more than an extrapolation of the consistent past success of the natural sciences”.
The cross diagram: environmental policy, ethics, biology, social science, each with “its own experts, its own language, its rules of evidence, its criteria of validation, its many endowed professorships at Harvard”. A real problem makes us travel the whole circuit “in a sentence or two”.
Snow: “The solution to the problem… is the recognition that this boundary is not a fault line”, “it is not a Hadrian’s Wall”, and the line “does not exist at all. It is instead a broad domain of poorly understood material phenomena”.
The borderland: “cognitive psychology and biological anthropology and biological investigations of the foundation of political and economic behavior”, and “even literary criticism, which is beginning to stir up troubles along the borderland in the home countries”.
Why it matters: it “offers the prospect of characterizing human nature with greater objectivity and precision”.

📚 Deeper theory

The first claim is a rhetorical dichotomy. “Two ways” is a stronger claim than “science is one way”. It is a demarcation argument: whatever is not natural science is lumped into one residue. Philosophers of knowledge would object that “all the other ways” includes mathematics, history, law, ethics and the arts, which differ among themselves as much as they differ from physics. (Added context; see idea 6.)
“Material, therefore explainable by science” is two steps, not one. (a) Mind and culture have a physical basis. (b) Therefore they can be explained by the kind of explanation that works for atoms. Many philosophers of mind accept (a) and deny (b). This is the exact slot where emergence (idea 4) sits.
The “cross” is a real insight about interdisciplinary work. Policy problems (climate, health, education) cut across the quadrants, and real disagreement often hides a change of discipline mid-sentence. The practical case is stronger than the metaphysical case; you could accept the first without the second. (Added.)
Metaphysical vs methodological. Wilson concedes the programme is metaphysical. Compare Kant’s “regulative idea” (a guide for inquiry, not a claim about the world) (Roots). On a regulative reading, the claim is “act as if the unity exists, and see how far you get”. That is a milder claim than “the unity exists”.
Snow’s lecture is used for a different purpose. Snow asked for two cultures to learn each other’s language. Wilson says the boundary does not exist. A hostile reader would say this removes the humanities’ own territory; a friendly reader would say it opens it to exchange (idea 6).

📚 Roots: The unity-of-knowledge tradition: from Bacon to the Vienna Circle

The problem. Knowledge grows by splitting into specialties. Is there still one world described, or just many descriptions?

The chain of thinkers

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620) and the “great instauration”. Knowledge as a single tree, with natural philosophy as the trunk. Bacon fixed the programme of cooperative, empirical, cumulative inquiry that Wilson calls the “mother’s milk of the natural sciences” (the phrase is Wilson’s; the lineage is added).
René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637). “All philosophy is like a tree”: metaphysics the roots, physics the trunk, medicine, mechanics and morals the branches. Descartes’ hope for a mathesis universalis sits behind every later unity project, including the rationalist stage of the Enlightenment that Wilson wants to renew.
The Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert, 1751–72). The Enlightenment project proper: a map of all knowledge with the “tree” of the sciences drawn in the preface. Wilson’s “the dreams of the Enlightenment which stumbled and failed so painfully before romanticism and the lack of sufficient evidence in the early 1800s” points to this period. Key point: Wilson reads Romanticism as the reaction that broke the project. Historians read it as a different rival programme with its own claims (see idea 6).
Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42). The “law of three stages” and a hierarchy of sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, then a new “social physics” which he renamed sociology. Comte is the direct ancestor of Wilson’s ordering from physics through biology to the social sciences. He also made the case that sociology should be a natural science, which is Wilson’s case.
William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). Coined consilience of inductions: when a theory explains a class of facts it was not designed to explain, and facts from different classes jump together, that is the best sign of truth. Whewell’s own examples were Newton’s gravitation and the wave theory of light. Key point: Whewell’s consilience is within a theory’s evidence. Wilson’s is across fields. He says himself that the term is chosen because its “rarity of usage since 1840 has preserved its original meaning”, but he widens the meaning without saying so.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843). Argued against Whewell on induction, but also hoped for a science of “ethology” (the science of character) built from psychology. Mill is the bridge between Comte’s sociology and later attempts to reduce the human sciences.
E. O. Wilson’s immediate sources, named in Consilience (1998), not in this talk†: the Ionian Enchantment (a belief in the unity of science that he dates to the Greek Ionians), the Vienna Circle’s Unity of Science movement (Neurath, Carnap), and Oppenheim & Putnam’s “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis” (1958). That 1958 paper is the best-argued statement that levels of science (particles, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, societies) can be ordered so that each reduces to the one below.
The reaction inside philosophy: Jerry Fodor, “Special Sciences” (1974) argued that higher-level sciences have laws that are not reducible because the same high-level kind can be built many ways (multiple realizability). This is the main philosophical objection to the Oppenheim–Putnam picture, and it is the formal version of the “emergent properties” worry Wilson answers. (†)

The thread that ties them together. From Bacon on, the claim “there is one world and so, ideally, one knowledge” is a regulative hope. It guided research long before anyone proved it. Wilson uses that history to say the hope is respectable, and then also admits it is “a metaphysical worldview”. The unresolved question, inherited from Fodor, is whether linking fields means deriving the upper from the lower, or only keeping them compatible. Wilson’s own wording (“interlocking of cause and effect explanation”) sits between the two.

Where others push back

Dilthey and the hermeneutic tradition: understanding meaning is a different task from finding causes, so the border is real.
Gould’s NOMA: different magisteria, different questions.
Dupré: a pluralism of methods suits a pluralism of phenomena.
Fodor: even inside science the “interlocking” may fail because higher-level kinds cut across lower-level ones.

What they leave out

Wilson does not address mathematics and logic or the status of normative claims. In Consilience he treats ethics as a field open to biology (via a “transcendentalist and empiricist” dialogue, mentioned), but in this talk the cross just includes “Ethics” as a quadrant without saying how it is joined.
He does not say what would count as failure. He says the idea might be “discarded” but gives no test.
The word “consilience” has two senses (Whewell’s evidence-convergence vs Wilson’s field-linkage); the talk uses both without marking the shift.

Check yourself

Wilson says there are “only two ways”. What does “all the other ways” lump together, and why might a historian or mathematician object?
What is the difference between saying mind is material and saying mind can be explained by natural science? Which one does Wilson state outright?
Wilson calls consilience “a metaphysical worldview”. What would a regulative (Kantian) reading of that claim look like, and does it fit his tone?

2. Human nature as epigenetic rules, and the colour-term and incest examples

In short. Human nature, he says, is not the genes and not the cultural universals. It is the epigenetic rules, the inherited regularities of mental development. They shape how we see and classify colour and which fears we acquire. Colour terms follow a few sequences out of thousands that are possible. The Westermarck effect, in which people raised close together lose sexual interest in each other, runs counter to the Freudian theory of incest avoidance.

🎙 In the talk

The definition: “Human nature is not the genes which prescribe it. It is not the cultural universals… Rather, human nature is the epigenetic rules, the inherited regularities of mental development”.
What the rules do: “the genetic biases and the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we open to ourselves and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make”.
Where they show: they “alter the way we see and linguistically classify color”, shape aesthetic judgment, and lead us to “acquire certain fears and phobias” such as snakes and heights.
Age: “Most are evidently ancient, dating back millions of years in mammalian ancestry, and others, like the stages of linguistic development, are uniquely human and probably only hundreds of thousands of years old”.
Colour: native speakers place terms on a Munsell array; terms cluster where perception changes more slowly. “Where it slows down is where we place the color terms”. He adds the caveat that this “is an area that’s in rapid change in defining of the analysis”.
The sequence: the Dani of New Guinea “with two terms” up to Europeans “with 11”. “Two terms, it’s black and white. Three, black, white, red”. Of the 2,036 possible sequences (the figure he gives; see slip list), “only 22 are actually followed, or close to 22”. His comment: “So there’s something going on here that I don’t think it yet fully understood”.
Incest: the Westermarck effect, “When two people live together in close domestic proximity during the first 30 months in the life of either one, both are desensitized”. Evidence from “Israel kibbutzim and in the shim-pua marriage systems of older China”, and “all of the non-human primates whose sexual behavior has been closely studied also display the Westermarck effect”.
The Freud point: the effect “runs directly counter to the more widely known and romantic and exciting Freudian theory of incest avoidance which, being a failed hypothesis, will receive no more attention tonight”.

📚 Deeper theory

Why define human nature this way. The old objection to “human nature” is that cultures vary hugely. Wilson’s answer is to put nature one step earlier: not the behaviours (which vary) but the biases in how learning goes (which are shared). A fair analogy (added): grammar is not what people say but the constraints on what a child can learn. This is the same move as Chomsky’s innate language faculty.
Why “epigenetic” and not “innate”. Lumsden and Wilson (1981) wanted a term for developmental biases that need the environment to operate. The rules are “inherited” but not fixed outputs. A child raised without language does not speak. A “bias” is a pull on the probability of an outcome. (Added; from the Roots in idea 2.)
Colour: what the evidence actually shows.
- Berlin & Kay (1969): 20 languages, 11 basic categories, a partial order of emergence (black/white → red → green/yellow → blue → brown → purple/pink/orange/grey). Wilson’s sequence matches this.
- Kay & McDaniel (1978) tied the focal colours to the opponent-process channels of the visual system. The “perception speeds up / slows down” story is a simplification of this. The foci (best examples) cluster across languages even where the boundaries differ.
- Contested: criticisms say the method pre-defined “basic” terms by English-like criteria, relied on a small sample of industrial-world-influenced languages, and ignored languages with no clean colour term for blue/green (search results above). Defenders point to the World Color Survey (110 languages) and say the sequence needs refinement, not rejection. Newer work finds that statistical regularities in colour naming can arise from communication efficiency in a population (a different, culture-led explanation). Last point†
- So what Wilson claims is a reasonable summary of the 1970s–80s consensus, and the field has moved to a more mixed view. He himself signals this.
Incest and the logic of a good consilience example. Westermarck’s hypothesis was made before the data, was tested in kibbutz peer groups (Shepher, 1971: almost no marriages among children raised together in the same age group) and in Taiwanese sim-pua marriages (Wolf & Huang, 1980: higher fertility problems and divorce). Wilson’s added argument is phylogenetic: other primates show it, so the mechanism is old. That raises it above a cultural rule. († for primates.)
Modern support and limits. Lieberman, Tooby and Cosmides argue the cue is duration of childhood co-residence (and, for siblings, seeing a mother care for the infant), and that this sets both sexual aversion and moral disgust toward sibling incest (CEP). A 2023 study found no support in fathers (PMC). The critical window is variously given as the first 30 months (Wilson), about 3 years, or about 6 years (Shepher).
Freud as “failed hypothesis”. Freud’s account (Oedipal desire plus a taboo to hold it back) predicts that people raised together should be more drawn to each other. The kibbutz data cut the other way. The dismissal is Wilson’s; most (not all) anthropologists would agree on the kibbutz point, though some argue that a taboo and an aversion both exist (Westermarck effect for siblings; taboo for broader kin). Added.

📚 Roots: Sociobiology and the science of human nature

The problem. If humans evolved, which of our minds’ features were shaped by selection, and how do those features constrain culture?

The chain of thinkers

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions (1872). Mind and morals have an evolutionary history; facial expressions are shared across species. Wilson’s “communicate with certain facial expressions” is Darwin’s research programme.
Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (1891). Proposed that early shared upbringing causes sexual indifference. Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) argued the reverse: incest desire is real and must be prohibited by taboo. Wilson sides with Westermarck. Note the structure of the argument: the Westermarck effect is tested by anthropology, which is why Wilson uses it as a model of consilience.
Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen (1930s–70s), ethology. Innate “releasers” and “fixed action patterns”. Their idea that simple stimuli trigger built-in responses is what Wilson invokes.
W. D. Hamilton (1964), Robert Trivers (1971–72), George Williams (1966), John Maynard Smith (1970s). The theory of kin selection, reciprocal altruism and parental investment. The tools Wilson used to write Sociobiology (1975). Not named in the talk.
E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), On Human Nature (1978). The first treated human social behaviour in its last chapter; the second developed it. They triggered the “sociobiology controversy” (see idea 5).
Charles Lumsden & E. O. Wilson, Genes, Mind and Culture (1981). Where the term epigenetic rules and the gene-culture coevolution model come from. They proposed that genes set biases in individual development (“epigenetic rules”), which shape choices, which add up to cultural patterns, which feed back on gene frequencies.
Evolutionary psychology: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind (1992); Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002). A Harvard/Santa Barbara programme that models the mind as many specialised modules shaped in the Pleistocene. The Westermarck work of Debra Lieberman is of this school (CEP). Key point: this school and Wilson’s overlap, but they are not the same programme. Lumsden–Wilson is about coevolution with culture; evolutionary psychology often treats culture as downstream.
Color terms: Brent Berlin & Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms (1969). The 11-term sequence. Kay and McDaniel (1978) tied the pattern to the neurophysiology of colour opponent channels, which is the “perception speeds up / slows down” story. Heider (Rosch) (1970s) studied the Dani with two terms.

The thread that ties them together. The core move is to look for constraints on culture that come from biology, found by comparing many cultures and then searching for a mechanism. The strongest cases in the literature are the narrow ones (colour, incest aversion, disgust, fear of snakes). The weak spot is the jump from narrow universal biases to claims about large cultural forms like religion, art or morality.

Where others push back

Colour: Roberson, Davidoff, Davies and Shapiro (2000s) argued that Himba (Namibia) colour categories shape recognition memory, supporting a relativist reading. Others (Regier & Kay) argue for a middle path: universal tendencies plus language effects.†
Culture-first accounts: a social-constructionist reads kinship terms as the cause of incest rules.
Methodological: kibbutz and sim-pua data are observational. Sample sizes are modest, and “no marriage” can reflect social pressure.
Definition: Philosophers say “epigenetic rules” is too elastic: any regularity of learning could be called one.

What they leave out

The number and size of the rules. He says “increasing numbers of epigenetic rules” will come to light, yet the examples (four or five) are all perception, aversion or preference. There is no case here of a rule that shapes belief systems, which is where the humanities live.
How strong a rule is. A bias of 51% and a bias of 99% both count.
Variation between people. The talk treats human nature as uniform, though individual variation is the raw material of evolution.

Check yourself

Why does Wilson say human nature is not the genes and not the cultural universals? What does he put in their place?
What does the Westermarck example show that the colour example does not, and what does each example leave unproven?
Which of Wilson’s three figures (20, 2,036, 22) seem to be misquotes, and does correcting them change his argument?

3. Aesthetics, biophilia and faces: the arts as a target for science

In short. Wilson argues that the arts are a target for science. The brain is most aroused by patterns with about 20% redundancy of elements, a level found in friezes, logos and glyphs. Biophilia is the innate affiliation people seek with other organisms, which explains why we prefer open savanna-like terrain and water. Faces rated most attractive show signs of juvenescence. He says none of this is proof but it is very suggestive.

🎙 In the talk

Aesthetics from the brain: “measurements of the damping of the alpha wave during presentations of abstract design… have shown that the brain is most aroused by patterns in which there is roughly a 20% redundancy of elements”. Of three designs of rising complexity, “you are most aroused, whether you will admit it or not or know it or not, by the one in the middle”.
The spread of that level: it is shared by “friezes, grillwork, colophons, logo graphs, and flag design”, and by Egyptian glyphs and Asian pictographs.
Calligraphy: the reisho style “to give a stern and commanding appearance”, the wayō style “delicate, elaborate, graceful”. His explanation: art “arise[s] from upon the compounding of the epigenetic rules, in this case maximum arousal and also the visual releasers”. He hedges: “if I’m not stretching things too far, and likely I may be”.
A possible cause: this “is the maximum level of complexity, focused image by focused image, that the brain can immediately process as, for example, numbers of objects up to seven”.
His own verdict: “none of this is proof, but the universal nature and preponderance of the effect has to be considered very suggestive”. And: “The theory of the arts… awaits its Mendeleev, the one who first put all the information about the elements into a periodic table”.
Cezanne and Picasso: “Cezanne takes these figures and rounds the curve so as to create a sense of calm. Picasso makes the angles of the figures jagged and it jars and puts one on guard”.
Biophilia: “the innate affiliation people seek with other organisms, especially with the natural world”. People “want to be on a height looking down”, “prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees”, and “want to be near a body of water”. They even “want trees with low, nearly horizontal branches”.
The evolutionary argument: “All mobile animal species, all of them, have a powerful, often sophisticated inborn program guide for habitat selection, so why not human beings?”
Faces: the blended average of the faces rated most attractive, not the plain average, gets “the greatest response”. The ideal “has higher cheekbones than the average, a smaller chin, shorter upper lip, and wider eyes”. He reads these as “signs of juvenescence”. Then the joke about “any middle aged professor whose second wife is a graduate student”. (The room laughed.)
The lesson he draws: “genetic evolution and cultural evolution are closely interwoven”. “We’re only beginning to obtain a glimmer”.

📚 Deeper theory

The shape of the argument. In each case: (1) find a cross-cultural regularity; (2) offer an adaptive or neural reason; (3) conclude that art or taste is built on a biological rule. The strongest step is (1); step (2) is where “just-so story” criticism bites (idea 5).
The 20% redundancy claim. It resembles the inverted-U in Berlyne’s work (moderate complexity is most pleasing) and the Birkhoff measure (order divided by complexity, 1933). I could not find the specific alpha-wave source in this session.† The “seven objects” explanation echoes Miller’s “magical number seven” (1956), a working-memory limit usually given as 7 ± 2 (and, in more recent work, closer to 4).
Calligraphy as evidence. A hostile reading: showing that different Japanese scripts convey “stern” or “graceful” tones is a point about cultural convention (a script’s social history), not a biological rule. Wilson combines two things: arousal (universal) and releasers (tied to signalling). The step from “this script looks strong to a Westerner” to “a visual releaser of dominance” is not tested in the talk.
Cezanne vs Picasso. Cross-cultural work on rounded vs angular shapes (the “bouba/kiki” effect, Köhler 1929, Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001) and on the preference for curved contours (Bar & Neta, 2006) supports a general tendency to find sharp angles threatening. Wilson’s point fits that line, though he cites no studies. Added;†
Biophilia, evidence and critique. The “savanna hypothesis” says people prefer savanna landscapes because that is where our lineage evolved. Orians & Heerwagen and Balling & Falk (1982) report preferences in children for savanna-like images. Critics note that people prefer landscapes they know and that preference differs with culture and age. The health effects (Ulrich 1984; restoration studies) are better supported than the savanna-origin explanation. The distinction matters: nature is good for us is not the same claim as we inherited an innate preference for a particular habitat. (Added; from memory.)
Biophilia as an architectural movement. Wilson says biophilia “is now beginning to have an impact in architecture”. Examples are green walls, daylight and views in buildings (Kellert and others’ “biophilic design”). The design practice has since grown; I did not check particular projects.
Faces. The finding that averaged faces look attractive is robust in several labs, but two things are contested: (a) whether averageness itself or the smoothness/symmetry it brings drives it; and (b) whether the “ideal” is a youth signal, a fertility signal or a health signal. Wilson’s reading (youth) is one option. Also the images are mostly of Caucasian women; cross-cultural tests cover other groups, but with smaller samples. (Added;†)
“Awaits its Mendeleev”. The image sets the bar: a periodic table predicts new elements. A theory of the arts would need to predict works or reactions in advance. Neuroaesthetics offers proposals (Roots) but none predicts at that level.

📚 Roots: Evolutionary aesthetics, biophilia and environmental preference

The problem. Why do humans find some shapes, faces and landscapes pleasing, and how far does biology explain it?

The chain of thinkers

Kant (1790) and the autonomy of the aesthetic (see idea 6). The position to beat.
Gordon Orians & Judith Heerwagen, savanna and habitat selection (1980s–90s). Orians proposed that humans carry a preference for savanna-like landscapes, an inheritance from the African habitat of early humans. Wilson’s three features (height, savanna with scattered trees, water) are Orians’ list. Key point: Wilson says the evidence includes cross-cultural tests of tree shape. Balling & Falk (1982) found that young children preferred savanna images; later work found the effect fades with age†.
Roger Ulrich, “View through a window may influence recovery from surgery” (Science, 1984). Patients with a view of trees recovered faster than those facing a wall. The classic evidence for the health side of biophilia†.
Stephen Kaplan and Rachel Kaplan, attention restoration theory (1989). Natural settings restore directed attention. Related but a different theory of why nature calms.
E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (1984); Stephen Kellert & Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis (1993). The formal hypothesis. The “article 25 years ago” and the “biophilic architecture” movement he mentions later come from this.
Ellen Dissanayake, What Is Art For? (1988) and Homo Aestheticus (1992). Argued art is a behaviour, “making special”, that evolved. A leading evolutionary theory of the arts alongside Wilson’s.
Faces: Langlois & Roggman (1990); David Perrett and colleagues (1994). Averaged faces are rated more attractive; an average of the attractive subset, exaggerated toward some features, is rated higher still (“supernormal”). That is the finding Wilson describes. His reading, that the cheekbones/chin/lip features signal juvenescence, is one hypothesis among several (symmetry and health cues are others).†
Neuroaesthetics: V. S. Ramachandran & William Hirstein (1999), Semir Zeki (1999). Proposals for “laws” of aesthetic experience based on visual brain function. These are the nearest thing to Wilson’s call for a “Mendeleev” of the arts. Contested.
The complexity/arousal literature. Berlyne’s Aesthetics and Psychobiology (1971) is the classic account: pleasure peaks at moderate arousal, an inverted U. Wilson’s “roughly 20% redundancy” belongs to that family of results. I could not trace the specific alpha-wave study he refers to in this session;†
The critiques. Savanna preference is weaker in adults and varies with culture and experience; averageness effects in faces depend on the sample; colour-term order is contested (idea 2); “just-so stories” worry (Gould & Lewontin). Wilson says himself “I may be stretching things too far, and likely I may be”.

The thread that ties them together. The method is the same in all cases: find a cross-cultural regularity, find a plausible adaptive reason, look for a brain mechanism. The first step is often solid, the second is weak unless there is independent evidence, and the third is mostly missing for art. This is why Wilson ends on “a glimmer”.

Where others push back

Kantians / humanists: beauty is a judgment, not a measured arousal. Measuring arousal answers “what draws attention?” not “what is good art?“.
Art historians: art changes by rule-breaking. A “maximum arousal” rule cannot explain avant-garde work that deliberately violates it.
Philosophers of biology: “Why art?” has several evolutionary answers (sexual selection, by-product, social bonding), and the evidence does not choose between them.
Feminist critics: using “ideal” female facial beauty as a model case tends to treat one gendered, culture-specific standard as biology. The “second wife” joke and the room’s laugh illustrate the tone problem even if the science stands.

What they leave out

Music, narrative, metaphor, humour and religious art, where the humanities do most of their work.
Any account of why a work matters to its maker or audience: the “meaning” that the Berry questioner defends.
Variation across time. Aesthetic norms shift rapidly within a culture; a fixed 20% rule would not explain that.

Check yourself

Which parts of the aesthetics argument are observation, and which are explanation? Mark each with 🎙 or 📚.
Why might “people prefer savanna-like views” be true while “this preference is an inherited habitat-selection program” is still unproven?
What would the “periodic table of the arts” have to predict to earn the comparison?

4. Gene-culture coevolution and the answer to anti-reductionism

In short. He calls gene-culture coevolution the central problem of the social sciences and much of the humanities. Cultural evolution is shaped by biology, and the brain evolved in a social context. To the charge that the programme is impossible, he answers that the first steps are being taken, such as the reeler mutants in mice and brain scanning. He expects epigenetic rules to multiply once people look, and he is willing to accept either outcome.

🎙 In the talk

The loop: “We know that cultural evolution is shaped substantially by biology and that biological evolution of the brain, especially the neocortex, has occurred in the social context”.
The claim: “gene culture co-evolution, represented here as a cycle, is the central problem of the social sciences and much of the humanities, and it is one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences”. “Solving it is the obvious means by which the branches of learning can be foundationally united”.
The objection, as he states it: “the program is impossible”, the gaps “genes to brain and brain to culture” being “just too wide and complex for us to master”; plus “emergent properties that can never be reduced” and “fundamentally different epistemologies”.
His reply: “I think we can lay that to rest. My answer to radical anti-reductionism is that, quite the contrary, the first steps are being taken”. He gives “the reeler mutants worked out in mice” and the circuit of “the basal nuclei of the brain through the thalamus… to the frontal cortex” linked to “obsessive compulsive behavior”. Then brain scanning: “the rapidity with which brain scanning has advanced”.
The humanities’ role: they “provide many of the problems for the biological sciences to investigate and help solve”.
The discovery argument: borrowing the hormone case, “One hormone is discovered… before long, you have an entire discipline”. So he expects epigenetic rules to multiply once people look.
The objectors’ strongest words, in his voice: “Reduction, they say, rips human thought from its context. It is vivisectional and it bleeds away the artist’s true intended meaning. It melts the Inca gold of the humanities”.
The wager: “we appear to have acquired the means either to establish the truth of the fundamental unity of knowledge or to discard the idea. I’m willing to accept, personally, either one. I think we’re going to establish it”. And: “Surprises, even shocking surprises, may occur”.

📚 Deeper theory

Gene-culture coevolution has real examples, but not the ones in this talk. The standard demonstration is lactase persistence (Roots). It shows a culture → gene loop with a known mechanism. Wilson’s examples go the other way (gene → perception → culture), where the mechanism is weaker.
The reeler mouse and OCD examples work as “first steps” because the chain (gene → protein → circuit → behaviour) is traced. But the gap to culture is the point of the objection, and these examples are about disorder and simple behaviour. They show that some behaviour reduces; they cannot show that meaning does. (Added.)
What Anderson (1972) would say. “More is different”: at each level, laws appear that are not simple consequences of lower ones. Wilson does not refute this; he answers a weaker form of anti-reductionism (the claim that no link is possible) with examples of some links. (Added; Roots.)
The hormone analogy is about discovery rate. It argues that the first findings of a kind open a flood. It’s a fair historical pattern (hormones, then neurotransmitters, then genes), though the 40 years since Sociobiology have produced fewer rules than the analogy predicts. The “1955” claim (molecular biology then; the mind sciences now) is a forecast. I cannot verify which year is the better match.
“Strengthened by this approach” is a claim about how the humanities benefit. A related, real development: biocultural or evolutionary approaches to literature (Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories, 2009; Joseph Carroll’s literary Darwinism) and digital methods. Wilson says literary criticism “is beginning to stir up troubles”. Their reception in literary studies has been mixed†.
The “either one” statement is rare in programme manifestos. He treats unity as an empirical bet. Popper would say a claim is scientific only if it says what would refute it. Wilson names the form (the programme succeeds or is discarded) but not the test.
Why “Enlightenment” matters. By calling it “a renewal of the Enlightenment agenda”, Wilson places himself against Romantic and postmodern critiques of reason, and also takes on its baggage: the historical link between Enlightenment “science of man” and 19th-century racial science. Critics raise that link (added; contested).

📚 Roots: Reduction, emergence and what “explaining across levels” means

The problem. If a thing is made of parts, does explaining the parts explain the thing? Wilson’s whole programme turns on yes (mostly).

The chain of thinkers

J. S. Mill and G. H. Lewes (1860s–70s). Mill separated “homopathic” laws (effects add up, as in mechanics) from “heteropathic” ones (effects are new, as in chemistry). Lewes coined the word “emergent” in 1875. This is where the term comes from.
Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (1961). The classic account of theory reduction: a theory is reduced when its laws are derived from another theory’s laws plus bridge principles linking the vocabularies. Textbook case: thermodynamics to statistical mechanics.
Oppenheim & Putnam (1958). The layered “micro-reduction” ladder (see idea 1). The strongest form of the programme Wilson believes in.
Ernst Mayr and the organismic biologists (1960s–80s). Mayr, Wilson’s senior colleague, defended emergence and held that biology has autonomous concepts (the species, selection). The “Harvard fight” Losos mentions was between molecular biologists and these organismic biologists. Wilson’s Naturalist tells it from his side. Key point: Wilson, a champion of the organismic side, is here arguing for reduction, not abandoning his past. His pendulum image is how he squares the two.
P. W. Anderson, “More Is Different” (Science, 1972). A Nobel physicist argues that the ability to reduce everything to simple laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. At each level, new principles appear. This is the best-known statement of the anti-reductionist worry Wilson names, from inside physics.
Fodor (1974) on multiple realizability (see idea 1) and Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition (1985) against sociobiology (see idea 5).
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995). Separates “greedy reductionism” (skipping levels) from “good reductionism” (explaining what each level does in terms of the next). Dennett and Wilson are allies on this point. Wilson’s own wording “the first steps are being taken” is close to Dennett’s modest version.
The 20th-century molecular story Wilson uses as an analogy. Molecular biology succeeded by a “powerful reductionist phase”, and now its challenges are about “how the whole thing can be put together”. Systems biology is the field name (from memory).

The thread that ties them together. There are three claims that people run together: (a) the world is made of parts obeying physical law (almost everyone accepts); (b) explanations at one level can be derived from the level below (disputed); (c) the higher-level concepts are dispensable (mostly rejected, even by reductionists). Wilson argues (a), works toward a weak (b), and explicitly denies (c) when he says the humanities will be “strengthened”. His critics often attack (c) as if it were his claim.

📚 Roots: Gene-culture coevolution and cultural evolution

The problem. Culture changes much faster than genes. Is it a free-floating layer, or is it tied to biology by feedback?

The chain of thinkers

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) and the “meme”. Culture as replicators. Influential but criticised as a loose analogy.
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza & Marcus Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution (1981). Population-genetic models of how cultural traits spread.
Lumsden & Wilson (1981). The version Wilson presents: genes set biases; biases shape culture; culture changes the environment of selection.
Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985). Dual inheritance theory: culture is a second inheritance system with its own dynamics (conformity bias, prestige bias). Differs from Wilson by giving culture more independence.
Kevin Laland, niche construction (2000s), and Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success (2016). The modern empirical and modelling wing. Standard example: lactase persistence, where dairying culture selected for adult lactose tolerance in some populations. The mechanism is documented in the genetics†.
John Hawks et al., “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution” (2007) and the genome studies of selection in the last 10,000 years: genes respond to cultural change. (†)
Cultural attraction (Dan Sperber, 1996). Cultural items spread because the mind finds them easy to remember or share, an idea close to Wilson’s epigenetic rules.
Critique. Cultural evolution theorists ask for Wilson-type claims to show mechanisms in transmission, not just plausible adaptive stories. Others (Richerson & Boyd) argue culture can drive genetic change strongly (as with lactase), so the flow is two-way, as Wilson’s cycle says.

The thread that ties them together. The modern literature agrees with Wilson that the feedback loop is real and central. It disagrees on how much independence culture has and on whether the loop is better modelled with Wilson’s “epigenetic rules” or with learning biases. Wilson’s claim that this is the “central problem of the social sciences” is a strong claim; it is a respected programme rather than the consensus view of social science.

📚 Roots: Brain science as the hinge

The problem. To connect genes to culture one needs the middle step: the brain. Can the mind be studied as a biological organ?

The chain of thinkers

Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the neuron doctrine (1890s). The brain is made of discrete cells. Foundation.
Wilder Penfield (1950s). Mapping function by electrical stimulation of the cortex during surgery: the cortex has local specialisation.
Hubel & Wiesel (1960s). Single-cell recordings in visual cortex: edges, orientation. The idea that perception is built from neural feature detectors, which stands behind Wilson’s remark about perception “speeding up” and “slowing down”.
The cognitive revolution (Miller, Chomsky, Newell & Simon, 1950s–60s). The mind as information processing; innate structures for language (Chomsky). Wilson mentions the “stages of linguistic development” as uniquely human epigenetic rules.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (1994). Emotion is part of reasoning; patients with damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex reason badly about decisions. A bridge from brain to value.
Functional imaging (PET 1980s, fMRI from 1991). The technology Wilson refers to: “the rapidity with which brain scanning has advanced”. Caveat added in the 2010s: small studies, and “dead salmon” and double-dipping critiques of fMRI statistics†.
Reelin and the reeler mouse (1990s). The reeler mutant mouse (a gene, Reln, causing disorganised cortical layering and abnormal behaviour) is Wilson’s first example. Used because a single gene mutation can be followed to a behaviour.†
Cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical loops and OCD. The circuit Wilson describes is the standard model of OCD in the 2000s: over-activity in orbitofrontal cortex, caudate, and thalamus, with deep brain stimulation as treatment†. Wilson’s description is accurate in outline.
Darwin’s “citadel” (unverified) and the “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1995). A reductionist like Wilson sees the mind as a very hard but ordinary problem. A philosopher like Chalmers argues that explaining the mechanisms does not explain why there is experience. The talk does not mention this.

The thread that ties them together. The best case for Wilson is where a single chain runs from a gene to a circuit to a behaviour (reeler mice, OCD circuits). The weakest case is where one jumps from circuit-level facts to culture-level facts (art, religion, morality). His “1955” analogy is his admission that the chain is mostly not built yet.

Where others push back

Gould & Lewontin on adaptationism; Kitcher on thin evidence; Fodor and Anderson on levels.
Cultural evolution theorists (Boyd, Richerson, Henrich) accept the loop but say the transmission of culture has its own dynamics.
Humanists say the “problems” the humanities supply are not problems of the kind science solves, so the offered partnership is lopsided: science takes the data, humanities get the credit of being “problems”.
Wilson’s own later work shifted his view of how selection works (group selection; see Part 1 “current debate”), which affects what the “genes” side of the loop looks like.

What they leave out

Economics and politics, apart from one passing line about “the foundation of political and economic behavior”. There is little about institutions, which the social sciences treat as primary.
Learning and plasticity. The brain is shaped by experience; the talk emphasises inherited biases and says little about how cultural learning reshapes them.
The fact that human genetic variation is small compared with cultural variation, which is why cultural evolution models stress learned transmission.

Check yourself

Wilson answers “the program is impossible” with reeler mice and OCD circuits. Why does that answer a weaker objection than the one stated?
In the gene-culture loop, which arrow is best documented (lactase) and which arrows does Wilson illustrate?
What would count as “discarding” the consilience programme, according to his “either one” wager?

5. Q&A: the novel, the curriculum, and Berry’s rebuttal

In short. In Q&A he says he wrote the novel Anthill for conservation, because people respect nonfiction but they read novels. He expects the traditional disciplines to stay, with new subjects added. He answers Wendell Berry’s charge that science is bloodless and robotic by calling it a misunderstanding of how scientists work. Scientists and artists think the same way when they start, and the joy of discovery makes science a romantic activity.

🎙 In the talk

On Anthill: “I’ve gone into fiction one time only, and so far, I haven’t been killed for it”. His purpose was conservation, not scholarship: “people respect nonfiction but they read novels”.
The “Billy Sunday strategy”: he has written nonfiction, “appealed to the religious community, and now I’ve written a novel”. Then an impression of Sunday: “I’m against sin… ” with “think instead of ‘sin,’ think extinction”.
The curriculum: “the traditional disciplines taught in a relatively narrow, vertical way will always be necessary” but “we’re going to have to develop new subjects, new disciplines, and new ways of teaching them”.
The Berry rebuttal, read by the questioner: “Empiricism, the empiricist concedes… is bloodless. People need the poetry of affirmation”. And the sting: “to feel reference, to be referent, is exactly to surrender the precious self and is nothing more”. (The captions say “reference”; the quoted word is reverence.)
Wilson’s reply: “Wendell Barry and I are certainly one in terms of conservation”. But the critique is “typical of the kind… about a view of science as being a kind of robotic, laser focused way of looking at the world” and “a major misunderstanding of how scientists work”.
The scientist and the artist: “Scientists and creative artists think the same when they start working”. “The ideal scientist thinks like a point, works like a bookkeeper, and if they have a full quiver, fights like a journalist”.
What drives them: “the joy of discovery, the allure of the unknown, the authentic unknown”. And: “Then science becomes a highly romantic activity”.
On Berry’s alleged farm return: “he wants us all to go back to the farm”. The questioner corrects: “No, he doesn’t” and explains that Berry wants cities to stop being unsustainable. Wilson: “let’s invite Wendell Berry to Harvard, just not as a Prather lecturer”.

📚 Deeper theory

The “Billy Sunday strategy” and the role of narrative. Wilson separates knowledge (nonfiction), authority (religious communities) and emotion (stories) as three channels for one end. This is a rare moment in the talk where he treats narrative as a tool of persuasion rather than as data. It is consistent with his later book The Creation (2006), an open letter to a Baptist pastor, which Losos mentions as a “rapprochement between the evangelical Christians and the environmental movement”.
The transcendentalist–empiricist dialogue. In Consilience (ch. 11)†, Wilson stages a conversation between two voices about morality. The line Berry quotes is the empiricist conceding that “people need the poetry of affirmation”. Berry’s rebuttal reads it as a concession that science cannot supply reverence and then tries to have it back. Wilson’s answer in the talk is different: he does not defend the passage’s wording; he argues that scientists have the emotions.
Berry’s actual argument († beyond the quote). In Life Is a Miracle, Berry holds that the “reductionist” method cannot grasp the wholeness of living things and that its claim to total explanation is a superstition. His positive view is of knowledge tied to a place and its care. Wilson’s reply (“go back to the farm”) is a caricature, as the questioner points out.
Wilson’s three-part analogy (point, bookkeeper, journalist) is about scientific practice: creative idea (a point of insight), meticulous record, and persuasive defence. It is a claim about the psychology of scientists, not about the logical status of their results. It answers the charge that science is “bloodless” with psychology, which the critic might say is beside the point: Berry’s objection is about the form of knowledge, not the feelings of the knower. (Added.)
The president anecdote (an unnamed “previous president” telling the humanities to be “analytic and objective”) is Wilson’s evidence that the demand for a scientific humanities can also be a political demand. He distances himself from it. I do not name the president; the transcript does not.
The curriculum point. Wilson wants deep single-discipline training and new cross-disciplinary subjects. This is the “T-shaped” ideal, and it matches the broader Harvard “General Education” reforms of the period†. The hint that learning “will be a more interesting way” is an appeal to engagement, not evidence.

📚 Roots: The critics of biologising the human sciences

The problem. The suspicion that “the science of human nature” smuggles in politics: a hierarchy, a status quo, a naturalised sexism or racism.

The chain of thinkers

Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology (1976). An anthropologist’s attack on sociobiology: culture is symbolic, so kinship terms and social forms are not read off genetic fitness.
The “Sociobiology Study Group” and the 1975 letter in The New York Review of Books (Gould, Lewontin and others) and later Lewontin, Rose & Kamin, Not in Our Genes (1984). Argued that sociobiology is determinist and politically loaded. The episode at the 1978 AAAS meeting where a protester poured water on Wilson is part of the history†. The memory of this fight shapes how Wilson frames his talk as a “controversial notion” and asks the humanities to join, not submit.
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco” (1979). The adaptationist programme assumes every trait is an adaptation. They argued that some traits are by-products. Applied to Wilson’s examples: is aesthetic preference an adaptation, or a by-product of how the visual system works?
Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (1985). The fairest philosophical critique: human sociobiology’s evidence is weaker than its claims, and the arguments about the gap between genes and behaviour are mostly unfilled.
Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (1978) and “Science as Salvation” (1992). Midgley sympathised with the idea that humans have a nature but attacked “scientism”: the habit of treating science as an answer to every kind of question. Her objection is close to Berry’s.
John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (2001). Argues that the sciences of human nature need pluralism, not unification.
Wendell Berry (2000), whose point in the Q&A is about reverence and about a kind of knowing that comes from living in a place.
Wilson’s own replies in the talk. (a) The charge is a “major misunderstanding of how scientists work”. (b) Reduction is half of a cycle. (c) The humanities provide data and problems, so there is no takeover. (d) “I’m willing to accept, personally, either one” (he treats the claim as testable).

The thread that ties them together. Critics split into (i) political (sociobiology serves bad politics), (ii) methodological (the evidence is thin, adaptationism is a storytelling habit), and (iii) philosophical (human meaning is not the kind of thing causal science captures). Wilson’s talk answers (iii) head-on and (i) by tone. It answers (ii) only by saying “none of this is proof”. Ask of each example in this talk: is its evidence strong, or is it a story told about a pattern?

Where others push back

Berry and the agrarian tradition: scientific knowledge is partial and tends to feed industrial exploitation.
Midgley: “scientism” is not about scientists’ feelings but about treating science as the only valid source of meaning.
Humanists: the offered partnership assumes humanities have “problems” and science has “answers” (see idea 5).

What they leave out

He does not reply to the question of whether “shared reverence” can survive being explained. Berry’s point (that explaining a feeling changes it) goes unanswered.
He does not discuss religion beyond using it as an ally for conservation.
He does not say how a novel’s claims count as knowledge.

Check yourself

What is the Billy Sunday strategy, and which three audiences does it reach?
How does Wilson’s “point, bookkeeper, journalist” reply differ from the question Berry actually raised?
Why does the questioner correct Wilson’s “back to the farm” remark, and what does it show about the exchange?

6. Humanities as epistemology, and the pendulum of reduction and synthesis

In short. Asked whether biologists will come to see humanists as epistemologists, Wilson says a branch of science now uses the materials of the humanities to learn about the human nature that artists portray. He credits Holton with the image of a pendulum that swings between reduction and synthesis. Molecular biology had its golden age because of a reductionist phase and now faces the task of putting the whole together. He says work with the humanities is where molecular biology was in about 1955.

🎙 In the talk

The question: biologists see humanities as “reductionistic, too material” but “honorable representatives of science probably just as deeply misunderstand the quest for epistemology in the humanities where literature becomes some kind of a leisurely activity, spirituality or theology becomes some kind of a made up thing”. Will biologists now see humanists “as also leading epistemologists”?
Wilson’s answer: “there’s a whole branch now of scientific investigation that’s using the materials of the humanities to get insight into parts of human nature which the creative artists are trying to portray”.
The pendulum: “all science goes through reductionism and then synthesis”. He credits Gerald Holton with the image of “the pendulum that swings back and forth between reductionism and synthesis”. (He asks Holton not to correct him in public.)
The molecular biology case: it “had its golden age in the second half of the 20th century because it went through a powerful reductionist phase, but now the challenges in molecular biology are not reductionism anymore”. They are about “how the whole thing can be put together”.
The forecast: research with humanities scholars “has to be done in a reductionist manner, then beginning to put it together in syntheses that incorporate some of the best insights from the humanities”. “We’re, say, where molecular biology was maybe 1955”.

📚 Deeper theory

The questioner exposes an asymmetry. Wilson’s answer says science will use the materials of the humanities. The questioner asked about the humanities as knowing. He answers with data use, not with epistemic respect. That gap runs through the whole talk. (Added; Roots.)
The pendulum and Holton. Holton’s work on “themata” (recurring organising ideas in science) and on the tension between analysis and synthesis is the likely source. The image has a history: Kuhn’s “normal science and revolution”, Lakatos’ research programmes, and cycles in biology between reduction (molecular) and integration (systems). I did not verify what Holton wrote; Wilson’s paraphrase is all there is.
The “1955” analogy. In 1953 Watson and Crick published the double helix; by 1961–66 the genetic code was cracked. The date implies the “double helix” for the mind is yet to come and that the decisive decades lie ahead. A sceptic would note that mind science has had several “1955” claims (cognitive revolution, 1956; connectionism, 1986; fMRI, 1991). The prediction is not testable at the date it is made. Added.
Where this has gone since 2010†. Connectomics, large-scale neuroimaging, human genomics of cognition (GWAS of educational attainment), and cultural evolution modelling have all grown. None has produced a “Mendeleev” for art or an account of meaning. How much each counts as progress toward consilience depends on the reader.
A different reading of “synthesis”. If synthesis “incorporates some of the best insights from the humanities”, then the humanities contribute insights, which then need to be translated into testable hypotheses. This is a division of labour: humanities propose, science tests. A humanist might accept this for some questions and reject it for questions of interpretation, value or judgment.

📚 Roots: The rival tradition: knowledge of the human is different in kind

The problem. Do human beings, who make meanings, call for a different kind of knowledge than falling stones?

The chain of thinkers

Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725). Verum ipsum factum: we can know history truly because humans made it. We can only know nature from outside. This is the oldest argument that human affairs need their own method.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790). Judgments of beauty are not reducible to concepts or to desire. Aesthetic experience is “purposive without purpose”. Relevant because Wilson’s aesthetics example proposes the opposite: that beauty has a measurable biological cause.
Romanticism (Herder, Goethe, Schiller, early 1800s). The Romantic reaction to Enlightenment mechanism: organism not machine, meaning not law, the unique not the general. Wilson blames this and “the lack of sufficient evidence” for the Enlightenment’s failure.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883). The sharpest version: natural sciences explain (erklären) from outside by causes; human sciences understand (verstehen) from inside by meaning. Two methods. Wilson’s thesis is a denial of this split, though he does not name it. When the Berry questioner says reverence is “to surrender the precious self”, that is the verstehen side speaking.
Max Weber, interpretive sociology (1900s–1920s). Causal explanation of social action must also be “adequate at the level of meaning”. Social science explains by causes and meanings.
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959). Wilson cites this directly. Snow said literary intellectuals and scientists barely talk, and that the split harms policy. Key point: Snow wanted mutual understanding; Wilson wants unification. Those are different asks. (Snow’s lecture is also well known for its sequel and for F. R. Leavis’s furious reply, 1962;†)
Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages (1999). The “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) proposal: science covers fact, religion covers values, and they should not trespass on each other. Gould wrote this partly in answer to Wilson’s Consilience. Gould’s position is the clean opposite of “there are only two ways”. († The Wilson–Gould disagreement is well documented.)
Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000). The Q&A rebuttal. Berry argues that scientific reductionism is a “superstition” that cannot see the unity of living things in their places. He and Wilson agree on conservation; they disagree on the status of the science and on what reverence means.

The thread that ties them together. The line from Vico to Berry says: meaning, value and place are not extra layers on top of facts; they are the subject itself. Wilson’s reply has two parts. The scientists have those emotions too (“Most scientists have deep emotions about the work they do”). And the meaning-making brain is itself a material object that can be studied. The unresolved issue: can a causal account of why we find a face beautiful replace the first-person judgment, or only sit beside it?

Where others push back

Humanists: interpretation has its own standards of rigour (textual, historical, argumentative) that are not weaker versions of scientific standards.
Philosophers of science: the “pendulum” is too neat; fields combine both modes at once.
Complexity scientists: whole-system understanding often needs new concepts (not just assembling parts), a point Anderson makes in 1972.

What they leave out

What counts as a successful synthesis in the humanities (a better reading? a prediction?).
The reverse flow: what the sciences might have to change in their own concepts after contact with humanist work.

Check yourself

Did Wilson answer the question asked (humanities as epistemology), or a neighbouring question (humanities as data)?
What does the “1955” analogy predict, and what would count as the “1953” event for the mind sciences?
Why might a humanist accept “reduction then synthesis” for some questions and reject it for others?

About the source and how this page was made

Speaker: Edward O. Wilson (introduced by Jonathan Losos)

Event: John M. Prather Lecture in Biology, Harvard University, third and final lecture of the 2010 series

Date: 2010-04-07 (inferred, not confirmed on video. Harvard’s announcement lists the series as April 5, 6, 7 2010 and this is the third lecture; the Gazette says the last two lectures covered “The Superorganism” and “Consilience”)

Uploaded: 2014-10-14

Length: 1:04:46 (about 48 min lecture, about 16 min Q&A)

Channel: Harvard Museum of Natural History

Video: Consilience

Speakers

Label Who Role
Host Jonathan Losos (names himself,) Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Former student of Wilson’s course “Science B-15”. Introduces
Wilson Edward O. Wilson (named by Losos,; he answers to “Ed”) Harvard ant biologist; author of Consilience (1998). Main speaker
Audience 1 Not named Asks what writing a novel did to his view of consilience
Audience 2 Not named (a reader of Wendell Berry) Reads Berry’s rebuttal of Consilience aloud
Audience 3 Not named, “coming from the humanities field” Asks if scientists will treat the humanities as equals in epistemology
Named in the room Gerald Holton, physicist and historian of science, sitting in the hall Not a speaker. Wilson teases him

Confidence on identities: high. Losos names himself and names Wilson. The venue, year and “third and final” are in the first lines. The exact date and the video source are not in the transcript.

Caption warnings. This is an English auto-caption of a live talk, with the room microphone and a hard-of-hearing speaker (Wilson says he has “a hearing aid” and has trouble hearing the audience). Corrections used on this page:

“conciliate” = be consilient (the word Wilson means is consilient). Treat as a caption error.

“Wendell Barry” = Wendell Berry (the author of Life Is a Miracle, 2000).

“Hadrian’s Wall” is correct. “anastomosing” is correct (growing together like veins). “auto catalytic” = autocatalytic.

“the Reisho style” = reisho (隷書), the clerical script. “wayo” = wayō (the Japanese-developed calligraphy style). Spelling†

“shim-pua” = sim-pua (Taiwanese “little daughter-in-law” adoption marriages). The captions say “older China”. See the slip list below.

“Mendeleev” is correct. “Munsell array” is correct (a standard grid of colour chips).

The caption “[INAUDIBLE]” marks a word lost. Wilson’s sentence there is incomplete. I do not guess it.

A garbled stretch: Wilson’s slides jammed. He says the “machine seems to be racing ahead” and jokes about the Harvard Crimson. The thought “several borderland disciplines” is cut off.

Speaker turns are merged in places. At Wilson’s reply and the questioner are in one block.

Factual slips and claims to check (Wilson’s, in the talk).

“2,036 possible ways… only 22”. The widely cited figure for the colour-term sequences is 2,048 (2 to the power 11) possible orderings against about 22 that occur. “2,036” looks like a slip or a caption error.† against Consilience or Berlin & Kay. The point (a tiny fraction of the possible orders is real) does not change.

“This has been done with some 20 classic experiments with 20 native language speakers”. This is a fusion of two facts: Berlin & Kay (1969) used 20 languages. The speaker count in each is much smaller†. Treat his wording as loose.

Westermarck window “first 30 months”. Wilson says the effect needs shared domestic life in the first 30 months of life of either person. Other sources put the sensitive window at about the first 6 years (Shepher 1971, kibbutz data) with the strongest effect in the early years. A 2023 search result also reports one study of fathers that did not support the hypothesis. See idea 3.

“sim-pua… older China”. This was a custom in parts of China and Taiwan. Wolf’s classic data (1960s–70s) are from Taiwan. Minor.

“Darwin once called the citadel” of the mind “that will never be taken by direct assault”. I could not find the Darwin source in this session.† Treat as unverified.

“Whewell… founder of the modern philosophy of science” is Wilson’s framing. Whewell did coin consilience (1840, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences) and also the word scientist (1833). “Founder” is generous. Many name Bacon, Mill, Peirce or Popper. Opinion, not a slip.

“Billy Sunday… great evangelist of the 1920s”. Sunday’s peak was the 1910s into the 1920s. Close enough.

🎙 marks what the speaker says. 📚 marks added background and the wider debate, not the speaker’s claim. † marks background from general knowledge that was not checked against a source.

Talks

Consilience: the unity of knowledge, E. O. Wilson at Harvard, 2010

Summary

Map: talking points

Putting it together

Part 1: Before you read

Key terms

People named (a reading list)

Wilson’s own frame

The current debate (live search, 9 Nov 2026; searches were limited)

The ideas

1. The two ways, the cross, and the “borderland”

📚 Roots: The unity-of-knowledge tradition: from Bacon to the Vienna Circle

2. Human nature as epigenetic rules, and the colour-term and incest examples

📚 Roots: Sociobiology and the science of human nature

3. Aesthetics, biophilia and faces: the arts as a target for science

📚 Roots: Evolutionary aesthetics, biophilia and environmental preference

4. Gene-culture coevolution and the answer to anti-reductionism

📚 Roots: Reduction, emergence and what “explaining across levels” means

📚 Roots: Gene-culture coevolution and cultural evolution

📚 Roots: Brain science as the hinge

5. Q&A: the novel, the curriculum, and Berry’s rebuttal

📚 Roots: The critics of biologising the human sciences

6. Humanities as epistemology, and the pendulum of reduction and synthesis

📚 Roots: The rival tradition: knowledge of the human is different in kind

Table of Contents

Label	Who	Role
Host	Jonathan Losos (names himself,)	Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Former student of Wilson’s course “Science B-15”. Introduces
Wilson	Edward O. Wilson (named by Losos,; he answers to “Ed”)	Harvard ant biologist; author of Consilience (1998). Main speaker
Audience 1	Not named	Asks what writing a novel did to his view of consilience
Audience 2	Not named (a reader of Wendell Berry)	Reads Berry’s rebuttal of Consilience aloud
Audience 3	Not named, “coming from the humanities field”	Asks if scientists will treat the humanities as equals in epistemology
Named in the room	Gerald Holton, physicist and historian of science, sitting in the hall	Not a speaker. Wilson teases him