Consilience: E. O. Wilson's word, and why it names this

What this is

Whewell's term, revived by Wilson: the unity of knowledge, and the proposition that the causal ladder running from physics to ecology should continue into the human sciences.

It stops at ecology. Above it sit psychology, language, culture, economics, politics and morality — never joined to the layers beneath. This architecture's claim is that the ladder stops for a mechanical reason rather than a metaphysical one: no substrate existed in which obligation, attribution and value were properties of a resource rather than descriptions applied from outside.

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

Into the explainers

This page is the anecdote — the thing that draws you in. The explainers are where the mechanism is set out in full, with the problem it solves and the condition on which it fails.

What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.