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There is an ambiguity in Wilson's position, however, because he adopts at least two opposing views of consilience. Sometimes he identifies consilience as a strong form of reductionism, which seems implausible to me. At other times, he identifies consilience as emergent complexity, which seems more plausible. For consilience as strong reductionism, all phenomena would have to be explained by reduction to the laws of physics. But even as Wilson affirms this position, he concedes that it could be wrong, and it surely is an oversimplification. Complete reduction to the laws of physics cannot work, because at each higher level of organization in nature, Wilson indicates, phenomena emerge that could not be explained or predicted by laws that govern the lower levels of organization.
This ambiguity runs throughout Wilson's book. On the one hand, he insists on reduction of everything to the laws of physics as the ultimate aim. On the other hand, he insists that emergent phenomena at higher levels of organization cannot be predicted by the laws of physics. "Biology is almost unimaginably more complex than physics," Wilson writes, "and the arts equivalently more complex than biology." He observes that "it is not even possible to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from a complete knowledge of its constituent atoms," and he urges his fellow biologists to cure themselves of "physics envy," for "they inevitably encounter emergence, the appearance of complex phenomena not predictable from the basic elements and processes alone." Hence, although constrained by genes, culture has acquired a "life of its own," so that we cannot understand human life without understanding both genes and culture. We must reject the genetic determinism that would assume that genes dictate the specific forms of culture."
This seems clear, unambiguous, yet elsewhere in the book we find Wilson explaining "the central idea of the consilience world view[:] … 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." Here Wilson's language is vague: "based on" cannot mean "specifically determined by," because to say the latter would fall into the oversimplified determinism that he explicitly rejects. Wilson identifies human beings as "emergent animals" who have capacities that are constrained by, but not specifically determined by, the laws of physics.
This is clearly the case for the ethical experience of human beings. Wilson affirms "the fundamental principle that ethics is everything." This must be so because "human social existence, unlike animal sociality, is based on the genetic propensity to form long-term contracts that evolve by culture into moral precepts and law." Yet, again, his words "based on" cannot mean "specifically determined by." For as he indicates in his book, to explain "the biology of the moral sentiments" would require research at many levels, including the social histories of ethical systems and the individual histories of people living in a variety of cultures. Moreover, the "base" here is biology rather than physics. The "genetic propensity to form long-term contracts" is surely not a predetermined effect of the causal laws of physics.
How can Wilson simultaneously affirm reductionism and emergence? One way out of this ambiguity would be to take the side of strong reductionism, so that "emergence" would mean what we cannot now explain by reduction to the laws of physics, because of our limited computational capacity for figuring out the interaction of the many causal factors that determine complex phenomena, but for which there must in principle be a reductionistic explanation that we can find once we have sufficient computational capacity.1 I do not find this position persuasive, be cause he never explains how this could happen, and thus it remains little more than an unsupported assertion.
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