Richard Feynman in "What Do YOU Care What Other People Think?"

"We are at the beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. but there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends, man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before."

"It is our responsibility as scientists knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."

More Consilience

Short of reproducing the last 100 pages of Wilson's book I will not be able to do it justice. A few juicy tidbits:

"As Kurt Voggegut, Jr. master fantasist once pointed out, the arts place humanity in the center of the universe, whether we belong there or not. ... In both the arts and sciences the programmed brain seeks elegance, which is the parsimonious and evocative description of pattern to make sense out of a confusion of detail." (p 239)

"Imitate, make it geometrical, intensify. That is not a bad three-part formula for the driving pulse of the arts as a whole." (p 241)

"As Louis Armstrong is reported to have said about jazz: If you have to ask, you'll never know. Scientists, in contrast, try to know." (p242)

"..every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals. The swiftest road to success has always been sponsorship by a conquering state." (p 267)

"A better life later on, either an earthly paradise or resurrection in heaven, is the promised reward that cultures invent to justify the subordinating imperative of social existence. Repeated from one generation to the next, submission to the group and its moral codes is solidified in official doctrine and personal belief. But it is not ordained by God or plucked from the air as self-evident truth. It evolves as a necessary device of survival in social organisms." (p 268)

"Meanwhile, the melanges of moral reasoning employed by modern societies are, to put the matter simply , a mess. They are chimeras, composed of odd parts stuch together. ... Little wonder then, that ethics is the most publicly contested of all philosophical enterprises. Or that political science, which at foundation is primarily the study of applied ethics, is so frequently problematic. Neither is informed by anything that would be recognizable as authentic theory in the natural sciences. " (p 278)


""Fear," as the Roman poet Lucretius said, "was the first thing on earth to make gods." ... If the religious mythos did not exist in culture, it would be quickly invented, and in fact it has been everywhere, thousands of times through history." (p 281)

"People need a sacred narrative. ... If the sacred narrative cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology, it will be taken from the material history of the universe and the human species." (p289)

"The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics." (p 291)

"..most people ... respect science but are baffled by it. ... The productions of science, other than medical breakthroughs and the sporadic thrills of space exploration, are thought marginal." (p 293)

"Science, however, is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity... Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." (p 294)

Consilience - E. O. Wilson

E. O. Wilson, renowned entomologist, covers a broad range of subjects with the aim of developing a unifying knowledge system. His prime focus is human intellect, its development, limits, influences, and relationship to the biosphere.

On creativity, quoting Herbert Simon:
" "What chiefly characterizes creative thinking from more mundane forms are (i) willingness to accept vaguely defined problem statements and gradually structure them, (ii) continuing preoccupation with problems over a considerable period of time, and (iii) extensive background knowledge in background and potentially relevant areas." To put that in a nutshell: knowledge, obsession, daring." (p70)

On society:
"In mammals, social life is a contrivance to enhance personal survival and reproductive success."

On the direction of scientific funding:
"Science, like art, and as always through history, follows patronage." (p 101)

"For the immediate future the genetics of human behavior will travel behind two spearheads. The first is research on mental disorders, and the second is research on gender difference and sexual preference. ... They fit a cardinal rule in the conduct of scientific research. Find a paradigm for which you can raise money and attack it with every method of analysis at your disposal." (p170)

How often have we seen that played out! Through the 60's with cancer and space, the 70's and 80's with alternate energy, artificial intelligence, and cold fusion, the 90's with nanotechnology and genome research, and now with 'global warming/climate change', stem cells, energy independence, biofuels, etc. In one sense this is the ideal of a market- or needs-driven process, in another sense that market is woefully uninformed and hijacked by political hacks exploiting societal whims.