Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

• Author: Silber, Kenneth

by Edward O. Wilson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 332 pages, $26.00

This is a book about everything, in a sense, and it contains something to provoke, disturb, or irritate just about everybody. Edward O. Wilson argues that all fields of knowledge and inquiry - ranging from physics and chemistry to art criticism and moral reasoning, with the social sciences somewhere in between - can and should be knit together into a comprehensive worldview. His case for "consilience," literally a "jumping together" of disciplines, encompasses, among other things, an attack on postmodernism, a brief for environmentalism, a critique of religion, a dismissal of Freudianism, a couple of swipes at the economics profession, and a protracted defense of biological explanations for human consciousness and behavior.

Wilson, a biologist who taught at Harvard for over four decades before his semiretirement in 1997, has carved out an influential career in several intellectual niches: as one of the world's leading authorities on ants and other social insects; as an exponent of the concepts of bio-diversity and "biophilia" (the latter being a deep, inborn human affinity for nature); and as a founder and popularizer of human sociobiology (also known by the roughly synonymous term "evolutionary psychology"), a school of thought that emphasizes genetic and Darwinian influences on culture and society.

Sociobiology, following its advent in the 1970s, sparked sharp criticism from thinkers in various disciplines who were committed to conceptions of human nature as highly flexible, nonexistent, or socially constructed. (Nonthinkers entered the debate as well; in one much-reported incident, leftist protesters at a conference dumped a pitcher of ice water over Wilson's head.)

These varied elements of Wilson's career all are evident in Consilience. While the book's sweeping thesis may seem to have little to do with insects, the tiny critters enter the narrative at several points. (In one of the book's best and most amusing passages, Wilson speculates about what sort of political speeches would be heard in a world where termites had evolved a high level of intelligence.) Wilson's concerns regarding biodiversity and biophilia are manifest in his discussion of the environment.

Most central to the book's argument, however, is sociobiology, which emerges as a crucial strand in the seamless web of knowledge that Wilson seeks to construct. For if human minds and societies are shaped by genes - segments of DNA, which in turn are...