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- However, it should be noted that Wilson forgets to mention the theory of “biopolitics” in the study of politics which is an attempt to link politics with biology or nurture with nature. See, for example, Masters.[26]
- Of course, there are more than one kind of hedgehog. According to Lukes,[23]there are at least four kinds of hedgehog: (1) positivist, (2) universalist, (3) rationalist, and (4) monist. Wilson may best be characterized as “positivist.” However, his consilient theory contains the other kinds as well.
- See[38]for a collection of essays on the controversy of Wilson's sociobiology. A comparable volume on Wilson's theory of consilience is yet to appear.
- For an account of scientism, see Jung.[[17]: particularly 33–35, 96–98, and 152–57]
- See Sokal and Bricmont[39]which is an extended argument based on the physicist Sokal's original controversial and academically dubious article which ridicules the so-called “postmodernist abuse of science.”
- The controversial bioethicist Singer[35]recently suggests that the political left should take Darwinian evolutionary biology seriously because it teaches us cooperation as well as competition. As such it may be even beneficial to the weak and poor. See his commentary on Wilson's “ethical premises” in pp. 12–14.
- Curiously, Wilson mentions the social historian Frank J. Sulloway, but he forgets Sulloway's work on Freud as a “biologist of the mind.” Sulloway[[40]: 5] maintains that “In my historical appraisal, Freud stands squarely within an intellectual lineage where he is, at once, a principal scientific heir of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century and a major forerunner of the ethologists and sociobiologists of the twentieth century.”
- See Jung[18]where he proposes the idea of transversalityin place of (Eurocentric) universality in the age of globalization in the multicultural world. As the motto of postmodernism is to “decenter the center,” the idea of transversality shuns all types of centrism: Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Sinocentrism, Indocentrism, etc.
- The zoologist Richard Lewontin,[[22]: 110] who is no intellectual friend of Wilson's sociobiology, concedes that “Whatever the faults of reductionism, we have accomplished a great deal by employing reduction as a methodological strategy” (italics added).
- Berry,[7]who prefers to call himself a “non-academician,” wrote a scathing critique of Wilson's theory of consilience with a focus on reductionism and materialism.
- Wilson[[44]: 119] who comments on the subject of ethology from the perspective of his “epigenesis”: “To recapitulate the total argument, human aggression cannot be explained as either a dark-angelic flaw or a bestial instinct. Nor is it the pathological symptom of upbringing in a cruel environment. Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escape their hostility sufficiently to overwhelm the source of the threat by a respectable wide margin of safety. Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens, in the same sense that birds are inclined to learn territorial songs and to navigate by the polar constellations. We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression. These learning rules are most likely to have evolved during the past hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and, thus, to have conferred a biological advantage on those who conformed to them with the greatest fidelity.”
- Arendt[2]considers actionas the defining moment of human specificity. She[[1]: 179] writes: “What makes man a political being is his faculty of action; it enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises that would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift to embark on something new. Philosophically speaking, to act is the human answer to the condition of natality. Since we all come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings, we are able to start something new; without the fact of birth we would not even know what novelty is, all ‘action’ would be either mere behavior or preservation.”
- For an anthropological critique of Wilson's sociobiology in relation to Hobbes, see Sahlins.[[32]: 101–6]
- The anthropologist Sahlins[[32]: 61] also emphasizes: “Human society is cultural, unique in virtue of its construction by symbolic means.…If we were to disregard language, culture would differ from animal tradition only in degree. But precisely because of this ‘involvement with language’–a phrase hardly befitting serious scientific discourse–cultural social life differs from the animal in kind.”
- Sahlins[[32]: 106] explains: “The net effect is a curious form of totemism of which scientific sociobiology is the latest incarnation. For if totemism is, as Lévi-Strauss says, the explication of differences between human groups by reference to the distinctions between natural species, such that clan A is related to and distinct from clan B as the eagle hawk is to the crow, then sociobiology merits classification as the highest form of the totemic philosophy. For its sophistication and advance over the primitive varieties, both in the West and abroad, it does seem to merit a special name, one in keeping with its own synthetic pretensions as the latest branch of the sciences and the principal hope of civilization. Give it its due: sociobiology is a Scientific Totemism.”
- Berlin[6]enlists Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Georg Hamann in addition to Vico in the “Counter-Enlightenment” movement. Berlin[[4]: 1] characterizes the Enlightenment as “[t]he proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge.” It is worth noting that the entire corpus of Foucault's writings on “biopolitics,” which, according to Wilson, embodies the essence of postmodernism, inherits the “Counter-Enlightenment” tradition.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty[[28]: viii] also makes the same point with clarity: “The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression.”
- The humanistic psychologist Abraham H. Maslow[[25]: 30] comments that “It seems…that these ‘good,’ ‘nice’ scientific words–prediction, control, rigor, certainty, exactness, preciseness, neatness, orderliness, lawfulness, quantification, proof, explanation, validation, reliability, rationality, organization, etc.–are all capable of being pathologized when pushed to the extreme. All of them may be pressed into the service of the safety needs, i.e., they may become primarily anxiety-avoiding and anxiety-controlling mechanisms.” I wonder if these safety needs are encoded in Wilson's epigenetic rules.
- In his Time in the Ditch,[27]John McCumber discusses the politics of philosophy and the impact of politics on philosophy during the McCarthy era in the United States. I am indebted to his allusion to Thales's fall into a ditch which McCumber recounts in the beginning of his work. “Thales,” McCumber[[27]: xv] remarks, “was not the last philosopher to lose his footing so badly that his quest for truth was impeded or even ended. Much of the time, the footing involved is political.” It is, therefore, naive to assume that science as human activity, as well as philosophy, is purely scientific in pursuit of truth. Here we should take heed of Michel Foucault, whom Wilson regards as one of the foremost postmodern philosophers and who makes us pause and reflect, when Foucault[[9]: 32] contends that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth.” It is worth commenting that Wilson's Consilience [47]or C-theory is not a scientific inquiry but belongs to the meta-scientific realm called the philosophy of science. Thus it belongs to the broad genre of what Foucault calls “critique” (see further Foucault[10]).
- Gaston Bachelard,[[3]: 12] who is a forerunner of Kuhn's theory of paradigm making and unmaking, cogently comments that “objectivity cannot be separated from the social aspects of proof.”
- Fung[[11]: 262] characterizes the principal distinction between the East and the West as follows: “the West is extension, the East is intension” and “the West emphasizes what we have, the East emphasizes what we are.” My grandfather, who was a practitioner of Chinese herb medicine with the legendary reputation of even containing leprosy, kept his knowledge in privacy or secrecy the condition which, unlike the open tradition of modern Western science, makes public scrutiny, peer reviews, and the transmission of knowledge impossible.
- In Il Saggiatore[see [17]: 76] Galileo wrote: “Philosophy is written in that vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe; but it cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it was written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.”
- At the international colloquium in the philosophy of science in London in 1965, Kuhn[[19]: 21] stated without equivocation: “Already it should be clear that the explanation must, in the final analysis, be psychological or sociological. It must, that is, be a description of a value system, an ideology, together with an analysis of the institutions through which the system is transmitted and enforced. Knowing what scientists value, we may hope to understand what problems they will undertake and what choices they will make in particular circumstances of conflict. I doubt that there is another sort of answer to be found.”
- Charles Taylor comes to view that the hermeneutical sciences of man cannot be measured or judged by their predictive power as is propounded by Wilson in his C-theory. “These sciences,” he[[41]: 51] contends, “cannot be ‘wertfrei’; they are moral sciences in a more radical sense than the eighteenth century understood. Finally, their successful prosecution requires a high degree of self-knowledge, a freedom from illusion, in the sense of error which is rooted and expressed in one's way of life; for our incapacity to understand is rooted in our own self-definitions, hence in what we are. To say this is not to say anything new: Aristotle makes a similar point in Book I of the Ethics. But it is still radically shocking and unassimilable to the mainstream of modern science [and, I might add, Wilson's C-theory notwithstanding].”