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Consilience
- The Unity of Knowledge
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 17 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
One of our greatest living scientists - and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants - gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities.
Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.
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Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a "bombshell" linguist and "instant folk hero" (Tom Wolfe, Harper's), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than 7,000 languages that exist today.
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Hard to endure
- By Michael D. Busch on 09-09-18
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What Is Life?
- How Chemistry Becomes Biology
- By: Addy Pross
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrdinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: What is life?. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology?
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Profound & Life Changing...
- By Daegan Smith on 04-06-15
By: Addy Pross
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A Troublesome Inheritance
- Genes, Race, and Human History
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years - to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes.
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This is NOT Racism!...
- By Douglas on 06-01-14
By: Nicholas Wade
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Leonardo's Brain
- Understanding da Vinci's Creative Genius
- By: Leonard Shlain
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Bestselling author Leonard Shlain explores the life, art, and mind of Leonardo da Vinci, seeking to explain his singularity by looking at his achievements in art, science, psychology, and military strategy (yes), and then employing state of the art left-right brain scientific research to explain his universal genius. Shlain shows that no other person in human history has excelled in so many different areas as Da Vinci and he peels back the layers to explore the how and the why.
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As distracted as Da Vinci
- By D. McCracken on 05-12-15
By: Leonard Shlain
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Breaking the Spell
- Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why - and how - it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma.
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Great Reader Actually Enhances A Great Book!
- By Don Caliente on 07-14-14
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Hidden Dimensions
- The Unification of Physics and Consciousness
- By: B. Alan Wallace
- Narrated by: Stow Lovejoy
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
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Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, Wallace, a pioneer of modern consciousness research, offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physics and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism.
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Great companion piece to Anathem by Stephenson
- By Kal on 02-20-09
By: B. Alan Wallace
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The Blank Slate
- The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
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Don't bother. Outdated science & poor logic...
- By ejf211 on 03-31-10
By: Steven Pinker
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The Deeper Genome
- Why There Is More to the Human Genome than Meets the Eye
- By: John Parrington
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Over a decade ago, as the Human Genome Project completed its mapping of the entire human genome, hopes ran high that we would rapidly be able to use our knowledge of human genes to tackle many inherited diseases, and understand what makes us unique among animals. But things didn't turn out that way.
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Great Scientific Writing/ Wrong Narrator
- By Richard on 11-24-15
By: John Parrington
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Deep Truth
- Igniting the Memory of Our Origin, History, Destiny, and Fate
- By: Gregg Braden
- Narrated by: Gregg Braden
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A new world is emerging before our eyes, while the unsustainable world of the past struggles to continue. Both worlds reflect the beliefs of our past. Both exist - but only for now. Which world do you choose? Best-selling author and visionary scientist Gregg Braden suggests that the hottest issues that divide us as families, nations, and civilizations-seemingly separate concerns such as war, terror, abortion, suicide, genocide, the death penalty, poverty, economic collapse, and nuclear war - are actually related.
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Good Information
- By David on 08-13-12
By: Gregg Braden
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The Big Picture
- On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?
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ABSOLUTE MUST READ!
- By serine on 05-12-16
By: Sean Carroll
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Terrible narration, pointless rambling writing.
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Important book, but..
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Wow, Wilson has a lot to say and boy can he write.
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Terrible narration, pointless rambling writing.
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Pleasant Humble Simple Rationalism
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Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least 17 - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.
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Simply awful
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A wonderful Biography, I feel like I know him.
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The worst book purchase I’ve made in a long while
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Edward O. Wilson - winner of two Pulitzer prizes, champion of biodiversity, and Faculty Emeritus at Harvard University - is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Yet his celebrated career began not with an elite education but from an insatiable curiosity about the natural world and drive to explore its mysteries. Called "one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written" by the Los Angeles Times, Naturalist is a wise and personal account of Wilson's growth as a scientist and the evolution of the fields he helped define.
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insightful journey of the scientific life
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You just have to love ants
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By: Edward Wilson
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Only the first couple chapters are about complexity
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One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks where the self comes from - and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop" - a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I". The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
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In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
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You won't learn anything you didn't know
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The Intelligence Trap
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Smart people are not only just as prone to making mistakes as everyone else - they may be even more susceptible to them. This is the "intelligence trap", the subject of David Robson's fascinating and provocative book. The Intelligence Trap explores cutting-edge ideas in our understanding of intelligence and expertise, including "strategic ignorance", "meta-forgetfulness", and "functional stupidity."
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Great except for one big thing
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The Selfish Gene
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Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands to rethink their beliefs about life.
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Better than print!
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By: Richard Dawkins
What listeners say about Consilience
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- Chasseur
- 08-01-22
The philosophy of science, and why we should view culture and behavior with its method
Wilson’s ambitious mission is to argue for an overall understanding of the fundamental unity of the natural physical universe and the behavioral, ethical, and social human experience. In part he argues that the lessons of physical science are superior in reliability, progression, and especially in method. Furthermore, he argues that the rules of the biological and physical cores of the development of human life are the foundation of all of the thousands and millions of details within human culture and civilizations. There should be a recognition of the unity of sciences and of human cultural structures, and where they are oppositional, the hypotheses of science must be given greater authority and deference. Only by understanding government, culture, and art as fundamentally steered by our physical existence and history can humanity have the necessary basis to develop an ethically defensible and actually sustainable existence.
It’s such a big and comprehensive synthesis of all the areas of academic and civilizational areas of knowledge, I even doubt my ability to be really correct in summarizing the author’s positions. So I’m listening twice. But it is interesting, insightful, and well developed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-07-19
absolutley lovely
Edward o Wilson is one of my favorite authors and this is one of his centerpieces of writing.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Carson
- 12-04-18
everyone should read this
A fantastical and expressively deep dive into the connective tissues of the sciences. Informative and poetically prosed explanations, that pose a question we must all internalize, "is the way that categorically organize and interprete all the culminated scientific observations and data wrong at it's most fundamental core?" The answer suggested by this reading is a resounding "yes!"
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5 people found this helpful
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- Purchaser
- 11-11-18
Very Informative!
I enjoyed this great book about connecting knowledge. Great book and enjoyable listen. Highly recommended!! #Inspiring #SelfDiscovery #Provocative #tagsgiving #sweepstakes
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5 people found this helpful
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- Dave Wilson
- 09-13-18
A Call For Unity
This book still has the potential to reconcile every area of human knowledge. A source for numerous strands of intellect conversations, it may still do the same for you.
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- The Saint
- 02-25-19
A Singular Achievement!
Ed Wilson has tied four great arenas of study into a comprehensive whole ... physics, molecular biology, sociology and the humanities are glimpsed tracking towards a common science ... the science of life ... we're not there yet, and we must still pass existential bottlenecks, but parts of the way forward are now more illuminated ... a tour de force of rigorous scientific aspiration and realization!
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- DD
- 02-02-23
This is a deep and insightful Book
In reading this book I become very impressed with the expansive and deep nature of knowledge of EO Wilson. This book is very relevant for today and It's predictions and insights are the same we are working with today. If you read only one chapter of this book read the last chapter which essentially puts together the theme of this book and of our society and species in general.
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- Chris Stamplis
- 10-09-18
A legendary ecologist, via a commanding narrator
Excellent narrator; I don't believe I heard more than two mispronunciations, and these were Latin words. Great voice lends authority to well-developed ideas. Even better imo if listened to at ~1.3x.
Wilson is a polymath and a modern Renaissance man. I can't imagine how much time he spent acquiring his comprehensive knowledge, which spans a wide gamut of very relevant history, literature, arts, ethics, psychology, and the domains of anthropology, all from a grounded and rigorous devotion to science, within a reduction-reintegration framework of synthesis. I cannot imagine that this book didn't make a few waves in the humanities and social sciences. If I have a critique, it's that Wilson was catering to too many audiences simultaneously, and felt compelled to explain perspectives behind known bodies of scientific theory. He was at his best, however, when building freely off of such frameworks, arguing compellingly and eloquently in a tour de force that will be quoted by generations of scientists to come. The very end of the book leaves a lasting impact.
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- Jiri Klouda
- 10-03-18
Surprisingly useful for 20 year old book
Many of the concepts mentioned are now advanced, but the book is a surprisingly useful view into the state of humanities 20 years ago and great indicator of the lack of progress in the 2 decades since. Definitely worth listening to for some interesting ideas, especially if you keep comparing what is said with the current state of affairs.
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- Aaron Frank
- 06-23-24
Great topic, diminished by final chapter
Fantastic treatise on the importance of combining the knowledge gained from multiple educational disciplines -- consilience -- in order to have the best possible understanding of the world. Much of the book provides a blueprint for maximizing individual knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and success, and how striving towards this state of interdisciplinary knowledge makes it possible for individuals to better serve society. Unfortunately, Wilson throws much of it out the window when he decides to end the book with the usual world-ending environmental scare tactics and a thinly veiled suggestion that a Marxist world order is humanity's best solution. I'm not sure how he can spend over 16 hours talking about the importance of bringing together knowledge from multiple disciplines and then go completely one-sided for the final hour. Consilience seemed to be completely lacking during the final hour since there was no mention of the growing number of dissenting voices and data. Wherever one falls on the climate change debate spectrum, one should be able to recognize the contradiction between the final chapter and the rest of the book.
Overall, I still recommend this title. It was well performed by the reader, and a majority of the information in the first 90% of the book should be very useful to most people.
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