Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge - Tapa dura

The first great ecologist, a pioneer in sociobiology and biodiversity...a giant among popularisers of science (Bryan Appleyard, INDEPENDENT)

There's a new Darwin. His name is Edward O. Wilson. (Tom Wolfe)

Edward O. Wilson seems to me the most important active naturalist we still have with us. It's not for nothing that he is a world expert on both ants and evolution. We really cannot do withou such intelligences as his. He makes one proud to be the same species. (John Fowles)

You can't fault his prose... This is science written with the passion of a zealot. (THE TIMES)

In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning. Edward O Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos. This vision found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialisation of knowledge in the last two centuries. Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world.