Consilience
The fact of ‘jumping together’ or agreeing; coincidence, concurrence; said of the accordance of two or more inductions drawn from different groups of phenomena.
1840 Whewell Philos. Induct. Sc. II. 230 Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have thus jumped together, belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains. And, as I shall have occasion to refer to this particular feature in their evidence, I will take the liberty of describing it by a particular phrase; and will term it the Consilience of Inductions.
1847 Hist. Induct. Sc. II. 582 Such coincidences, or consiliences ... are the test of truth.
1861 Mill Utilit. 94 The consilience of the results of both these processes, each corroborating and verifying the other.

In July 2005, an article appeared in the Financial Times, which proposed that global warming should not be considered only as an endless argument about carbon monoxide. We should stop arguing and attack the vaguely defined problem from several quarters (efficiency, insulation, exploration, nuclear, fusion, etc., etc.). He proposed to call this the principle of confluence.

I e-mailed the author to suggest “consilience”, explaining that this was a dead word meaning “jumping together”, invented in 1840, and never heard since. I checked that it is not present anywhere in the 2002 DVD edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He replied that he had no idea what this word meant, but he had a book of this title at home, and he would have a look.

I was astonished that such a book existed. I presumed that it must date from Whewell’s time. But no, on checking I found that it was the 1998 book by this totally unknown “greatest living scientist”, E O Wilson. Clearly he had taken the word over. A word unknown to the Encyclopaedia Britannica now returns 69,000 entries in Google (although only 3,600 if restricted to UK). An examination of the first 100 shows that virtually all are related in some way to Wilson. There is even a recently founded wine company which has taken the name.

I ordered the book (Consilience: Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O Wilson, Abacus, 1998) to see what Wilson had made of this word.

After reading 100 pages or so, I e-mailed the FT author again to express regret that I had wasted his time, since “consilience” had been hi-jacked and rendered meaningless (or at least given a changed and vacuous meaning) by this “dreadful, philistine” book.

However, and rather at variance with this judgement, I continued to read, plastering the margins with more and more comments, almost uniformly dismissive.

Wilson, of whom I have never heard, is eulogised by the publisher – “a new Darwin …. considered to be one of the world’s greatest living scientists …. brilliant and savage argument …. a thrill …. exalted brilliance …. one of the most eminent thinkers of his day”.

The meaning of “consilience”

Whewell, the originator of the word, was, as far as I can establish, fairly vague about what exactly his new word meant, and this presumably is why the notion and the word disappeared until Wilson excavated it. I do not remember Popper making any reference to it, although it is squarely in Popper territory. Whewell thought that Newton used consilience to arrive at his theory of gravity. If induction in science involves posing the question, “what lies behind, what explains, what brings order to, what would enable us to predict future configurations of, all the observational data amassed around a given group of phenomena”, then consilience in Whewell’s definition simply means that the more observations can be extended over seemingly disparate types of phenomena, the better. Whewell also stressed that the induction process was not a rational or mathematical procedure, but involved imagination, inspiration, invention. Whether this is totally true or not is a moot point. The acid test would be, “if Newton had died earlier, would someone have come along inevitably and soon to produce exactly the same theory?”. The answer to this cannot be tested, but it would seem convincing that if a theory emerges which then withstands all subsequent testings and assaults by competitors for four centuries, then it must have unique and objective truth, accessible in time to (more or less) anyone. And so, if imagination was involved in its original formulation, it was not personal imagination, in the sense that the imagination embodied in a Turner painting is personal to Turner, but an imaginative process of thought accessible to all, or many.

However, vague or not, Whewell’s meaning of the word, “consilience” was to do with scientific induction, and since he invented it, and as far as I know no one developed the idea further, that was its meaning until 1998.

Wilson is regarded as a scientist, and indeed “one of the greatest living scientists”, and one would have thought that if he picks up an old but forgotten word, and elevates it to a globally significant idea, giving his book that one-word title, he would discuss its origins, its meaning, and any new meaning he wishes to propose (and of course, the meaning of any word in the English language may be developed in this way). He fails to do this. The only candidate passage consists of the second and third paragraphs of Chapter 2. He begins by making the claim that he chooses this word because “its rarity has preserved its precision”. He quotes Whewell’s definition, which is not at all precise, but which does contain the word “induction”. Indeed, the definition is not of “consilience”, but of the whole phrase, “the Consilience of Inductions”. The remaining sentences of those two paragraphs, and indeed the remainder of the book, make not the slightest attempt to explain that this “precise” word is going to be used as a high-flown or eye-catching word for a perfectly good but very imprecise idea, which does not involve any scientific notion of induction. The index of the book does contain an entry for induction, but that refers only to the “father of induction”, Francis Bacon.

I’m not sure that Wilson anywhere descends to defining this new meaning of consilience. His style, in the words of the novelist Ian McEwan, as quoted on the outside cover of my edition, is one “of exalted brilliance”, and tends to exclude the academic tedium of definition. If he had stooped to definition, it might have been “cross-discipline collaboration”, or a little more fully, as follows:

“The social sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc., etc.) are dreadfully lacking in scientific method. For that matter, the study of art, ethics, religion, history and indeed everything in the academic curriculum, pay little attention to scientific fundamentals. Academics in all subjects should emerge from their little separate peer-driven worlds, and collaborate right across the board, on the basis that everything human is in the end shaped by our innate human nature, i.e., by our genes, and they in turn obey the rules of biology, chemistry and physics.

“To this process of collaboration I would ascribe the adjective “consilient”, and the process itself, I name “consilience”. The name comes from Latin meaning “jumping together”. It is not very precise, but seems appropriate for the general notion of jumping together that I propose. The words were invented in 1840 by someone named Whewell, but with a much narrower and now forgotten notion, to do with scientific induction, in mind.

“The scientific basis for my proposal is that the entire behaviour, development, and culture of human beings is unarguably based on the fact that they are human beings, who at all historic times and in all parts of the globe share a common human nature, embodied in our common pool of genes. A short Greek way I will use to express this is that everything we are and do is “epigenetic”, or proceeds according to “epigenetic rules”.

To this I add some of Wilson’s own words which I found belatedly on page 297 of his book (the first page of the last chapter):

“The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena …. are ultimately reducible to the laws of physics.”

Consilience - to what end?

To my mind, Wilson’s book adds nothing to the few words said above. Speaking personally, I learned absolutely nothing from the book, except for one remark which directed me to Deuteronomy 20, 16-17, where God is recorded as having ordered his people to destroy Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, and “let nothing that breathes remain alive”.

The notion that everything human is “epigenetic” seems to me, as a fellow unbeliever, virtually a tautology. As to the notion that academics who study everything human should steer their studies in a way that “cuts down” (to use a Wilson phrase) via “epigenetic rules” to the genes, chemistry and physics, this apparently being the whole point of the book, I can only say that the “exalted brilliance” of the Wilson’s exposition was exalted in terms of rhetoric, but to my mind failed to convey what outcome he had in mind, if his proposed “consilience” was adopted by all.

I can agree at once that, say, religion in all its historical and world-wide manifestations has in all cases proceeded by epigenetic rules, because like Wilson, I do not believe in any transcendental origin of those religions. They are cultural developments. But I, along with the majority of scientists, shared this opinion with Wilson before reading the book. If I was a theologian, with a readership or audience interested in theology, I imagine I would see no point whatever in following Wilson’s advice. The same would apply if I was an art historian, or a moral philosopher. Obviously, it adds to human thought if it is said, “a human being is one animal among others”, but it adds little or nothing to say “Picasso was one animal among others”, because that says almost nothing about the art of Picasso.

Following this line of thought, I would point out that the glowing testaments to Wilson on the cover of the book come from literary reviewers, who presumably judged the quality of rhetoric rather than the science.

In order to expose the hollowness of Wilson’s proposal, I look to his own presumed answer to my question above, “what outcome did he have in mind, if his proposed “consilience” was adopted by all”. In other words, “to what end?”.

To what end? - Wilson’s answer

The answer might be expected to be found in his final chapter entitled, precisely, “To What End?”

This chapter consists of 37 pages, split up as follows.

First 4 pages. These contain a general rhetorical appeal to the “liberal arts” to proceed in the direction of science. The words “consilience” or “consilient” are mentioned six times, but never in any context in which it carries or advances meaning. Three mentions are in the phrase “the consilience world view” which I think simply means Wilson’s world view. Two more mentions are “the consilience argument” and the “consilient explanations” but no argument or explanation follows. The sixth mention is that “for centuries consilience has been the mother’s milk of the natural sciences”, a really odd statement since no one seems to have noticed this mother’s milk except Whewell in 1840 and Wilson in 1998. There is no answer to the question “consilience - to what end?” here.

The next 8½ pages. This section reads either like a panegyric to the progress of science, or like a nightmarish account leading up to a near-future when we will have “the full volitional period of evolution”. By this is meant a situation where the human race will have enough knowledge of those wonderful genes to re-design itself into anything one might wish. To this reader, the concluding words of this section were the very first in the book to sound any word of doubt or pessimism. For 300 pages up to this point, Wilson seemed to be gung-ho for “progress”. But now he lets us know that he “predicts” that people will be “conservative”. They will reject any move which might make them “better, but no longer human”. In the first sentence of this section, “the consilient world view” makes another appearance, but is mentioned no more. So, certainly no answer to the question “consilience - to what end?” here either.

The last 24 pages. This concluding passage is the most astonishing in the entire book. Why? First, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the supposed subject of the book, although the word “consilience” does appear about ¾ of a page from the end in a throwaway role. Second, because it discusses something real and important for the first time, namely the headlong and largely undiscussed rush of the planet to overpopulation and over-exploitation. Of course, my word “undiscussed” seems overdone, since Kyoto and global warming are quite frequently the subject of media discussion, but for once, Wilson’s exalted brilliance is deployed in a passionate exposure of the danger of something far beyond the normal head-shaking, a prospect of near-Armageddon. Thirdly, because for nearly all of the book, Wilson has been almost comically dogmatic on the wonderful capacity of a consilient academia to express everything from galaxies to Mozart in terms ultimately of physics (appearing not to know that physicists themselves have virtually given up hoping to express even physics in terms of physics), but is now reduced to predicting that we are now going to have to move heaven and earth to stop ourselves innovating the planet into extinction. I feel that he is probably right, but even so, he does not try to show how consilience is going to be of much help. So, finally, this end-section neither answers or even addresses the question in the title of the chapter, nor does it have any detectable bearing on the title of the book.

I conclude that a book bearing as title a newly re-invented word, “consilience”, fails to say much about what it means, and nothing at all about what the project advocated under this name would achieve

At this point, I have expressed everything relevant to my opinion of the book. But it is a full-sized book, and I have not mentioned at all Wilson’s eleven chapters. An attempt at review is given below.

1. The Ionian Enchantment

Wilson does, throughout the book, show a rare roundedness for a scientist, and that can only be good. But he betrays a weakness for the unconscious wiles of the humanistic rhetoricians – letting “exalted brilliance” (which I have already conceded) have rein, allowing this to cloak vagueness, and to supplant boring and plodding scientific precision. There are innumerable examples of unnecessary and high-flown adjectives being dropped in, sometimes biological ones which Wilson must know the average reader will not know, and which he must also know they do not need to know. It turns out that “the Ionian Enchantment” is an expression borrowed from some physicist, who traced it to 6th century BC Ionia, where Thales of Miletus lived. (This brings to mind that some large French company has recently changed its name to Thales – obviously an in-name.)

As Wilson mentions, Thales is worth remembering, if, as is said, he was the first to write down the thought that all matter has one essence. In the case of Thales, this was water. I remember though that the bible, in the phrase “dust to dust”, carried a similar view. Anyway, this notion may be worked into the idea that everything we see now has worked its way up from some primordial substance, and that we can eventually understand how this was done, leaving God out of it.

2. The Great Branches of Learning

One quotation from this chapter sums it up.

“Most of the issues that vex humanity daily – ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most persistently before us – cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need.”

As said above, I start from exactly the same scientific position as Wilson – essentially that everything that has happened, and will happen, can be traced ultimately to physics – but I read the passage quoted above with absolutely zero conviction. I know most about physics (a natural science) and economics (a social “science”). At a low level, I am in a position to practise consilience. But although I know that physics and economics are “ultimately connected”, unlike Wilson I perceive the connection as being so remote as to be totally beyond human capacity. If our world leader, George W Bush, was an expert in every academic discipline that exists, instead of being, or assuming the appearance of being, a know-nothing, it would in my view make little difference.

Note that Wilson implies that these “issues” can be “solved” if consilience is accepted. That shows the chasm between Wilson and reality. He thinks that abortion is an “issue” that can be “solved”. In reality, insofar as it is an issue, it can only be “dealt with”, and maybe a principled know-nothing like Bush can deal with it as well as anyone.

Note also that Wilson nowhere explains how consilience would achieve any specific goal. He states and runs – a characteristic of much rhetoric.

3. The Enlightenment

This chapter is, I suppose, a perfectly reasonable gallop through the history of ideas. It starts by saying that the Enlightenment “astonishingly failed”. I really cannot understand how anyone can use such crisp language, as if one was talking about a specific event, like an attempt to climb a mountain. Equally, I would wonder what was meant if someone said that the Enlightenment succeeded. It happened, and its consequences are still very much with us. Wilson wanders around Francis Bacon, Newton and Condorcet. For him, the Enlightenment seems to fail at, or maybe because of, the French revolution, and was succeeded by Romantic notions exemplified by Wordsworth and Hegel, and eventually by post-modernism. Well, maybe something like that is conveyed by academic histories, but for me, the line from Bacon to Rutherford went unswervingly on, and is still going, as is over-exemplified by Wilson himself, with his faith in physics, chemistry and biology. Needless to say, consilience makes no appearance here.

4. The Natural Sciences

Wilson says that science is characterised by five things:

1 repeatability
2 economy
3 mensuration
4 heuristics
5 consilience

Well, all I can say is that this is a very poor list. Darwin’s theory satisfies none of these conditions. I would indeed be hard put to it to recognise any of those five things as being essential for science. Fortunately, we all know what science is, that is, we know how to train for it, and how to do it, once trained. Just as a plumber learns by being apprenticed to a plumber, so a scientist learns by being apprenticed to scientists. Philosophers of science, like Popper, are wonderful, but they are not scientists, and no scientist gives tuppence whether Popper is right or wrong. But he sounds OK, which is more than can be said for Wilson’s list.

Wilson himself, later, points out that “many accomplished scientists are narrow, foolish people, many wise scholars are considered weak scientists”. Exactly.

Essentially, this chapter contains nothing. The only mention of consilience (I think) is the one above, and it is totally irrelevant there, unless possibly in Whewell’s original sense which Wilson has ignored throughout.

5. Ariadne’s Thread

Ariadne’s thread, apparently, led Theseus out of the Cretan labyrinth. Later, Wilson uses the phrase “Borgesian maze”, the adjectival tendency I referred to above. I have no idea what Borgesian means, not does the OED, not does the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Presumably Wilson did, but why insert a high-sounding word which one knows in advance will convey no meaning except high-soundingness?

A primitive Peruvian painter is introduced, and we are told that “his paintings are a test case of consilience, an arresting fragment of culture that might be explained and thereby given added meaning at the next, biological level down in complexity from artistic inspiration”. This is an example both of Wilson’s “exalted brilliance” and of his capacity for drivel. It also illustrates how the word “consilience” is bandied about in a way which conveys nothing, not even in this case “inter-disciplinary collaboration”, let alone anything to do with Whewell’s induction. How is the painting a test case for consilience? Nothing that follows (and it goes on for pages about dreams and serpents) gives the result of this test. We must presume, perhaps, that consilience passes it.

The final paragraphs rise to delirious dreams of progress, ending with a vision of (I think) the production of life from the basic chemical elements:

“At some point deep and powerful principles of complexity may well emerge from the large ensemble of simulations. They will reveal the algorithms conserved across many levels of organisation up to the most complex systems conceivable. These systems will be self-assembled, sustainable, and constantly changing yet perfectly reproducing. In other words, they will be living organisms.”

Note that this passage uses yet another common trick of rhetoricians. The first sentence says “may well”. But everything that follows is “will”. For such authors, "pigs may fly" may be re-expressed as "pigs will fly". As noted above, this reckless gung-ho rhetoric sits very oddly with the “conservative” fears in his final Armageddon passages of the book.

And where does Ariadne’s thread come in? It was lost after the initial paragraphs, but is presumably the thread which leads from the Peruvian painter down through nerves and cells, to molecules and atoms.

6. The Mind

The entries for “consilience” in the index of the book point to nothing in this chapter. Nevertheless, it get a mention of sorts in the fourth line of the chapter, a mention typical of the meaninglessness of the term in Wilson’s re-invention of it, and indeed of his largely vacuous rhetorical style:

“The mind is supremely important to the consilience program for a reason both elementary and disturbingly profound: Everything that we know and can ever know about existence is created there”.

It is scarcely possible to conceive of an announcement more empty of content and more brimming with mindless hype than this one. “Supremely important … and disturbingly profound” indeed? If one said “everything we see is seen by the eyes”, would this be supremely important and disturbingly profound? To say that the mind is important, is like saying that breathing is important, or that being alive is important.

Later we read that “the brain’s true meaning is hidden in its microscopic detail”. What does “true” mean here, and what is the meaning of “meaning”. If one was to say that a spider’s true meaning was hidden in its microscopic detail, would it convey anything?

Later still:

“During my career I have been privileged to witness close at hand the heroic periods of molecular biology, plate tectonics in geology, and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Now it is the turn of the brain sciences.”

Unlike my two previous quotations, this one is a matter of opinion and perspective. Somewhere around 1940, the world of science emerged from two or three hundred years of dizzying advance, three names among many being Newton, Darwin and Faraday. Since 1940, virtually no name of comparable status has been noticed, nor have names comparable with the later second-rung “heroes” such as the Wrights, Einstein, Heisenberg and Rutherford. Science is now plodding on anonymously, and plodding either slowly forwards, or maybe backwards, as Wilson’s final chapter glimpses. Who, apart from the professionals involved, can raise any enthusiasm for discoveries about brain cells? Interesting yes, but in time, possibly disastrous. The works of Faraday and Clerk Maxwell are all around us, enriching our lives. The works of brain scientists (and, I would judge, all future scientists) cannot possibly be weighed in the same scale.

A further quotation which qualifies as meaningless waffle is this: “The self is not an ineffable being living apart within the brain. Rather it is the key dramatic character of the scenario”. So far, so much journalistic drivelling. Then follows a totally amazing statement, from the pen of anyone claiming to be a scientist: “It must exist”. How would Wilson suggest checking this emphatic assertion, or even explaining what it means?

Near the end of the chapter, Wilson writes something that I agree with! He says there is no such thing as free will, but, “in organismic time and space [I’m no too sure what this means], in every operational sense that applies to the knowable self, the mind does [his italics] have free will”. A difficult thought, and one which perhaps cannot be expressed in purely scientific terms.

In conclusion, this chapter says little of interest about the mind and nothing about any notion of consilience, even his own, in relation to the mind.

7. From Genes to Culture

Again, the chapter starts by mentioning consilience, perhaps to remind the reader that that is what the book is supposed to be about. And again the mention is just that – a mention:

“The natural sciences have constructed a webwork of causal explanation that runs all the way from quantum physics to the brain sciences and evolutionary biology. There are gaps in this fabric … yet I think it is fair to say that enough is known to justify confidence in the principle of universal rational consilience across all the natural sciences”.

I imagine that most “hard” scientists would find nothing factual to disagree with here. It is the window dressing which is out of place, especially the banner of “consilience”. Every material thing we know of is made of atoms and molecules, so to say that everything in the natural sciences goes back to those things is to say nothing. Even if “there are gaps … in a webwork of causal explanation”, no one doubts that the laws of chemistry and physics apply to the atoms and molecules all the way. Before you can say that this fairly banal fact “justifies confidence in the principle of universal rational consilience”, you would need to know exactly what consilience is, what would make it into a principle, and what would make mere consilience into the “rational and universal” kind. In the absence of any definition in the book, I have suggested above that consilience appears to mean inter-disciplinary collaboration. What would “universal” inter-disciplinary collaboration mean? It sounds like total unification, with everybody learning a little bit of everything and the total abolition of learning structures. Absurd, of course, but that is what it seems to imply. As for rationality, is anyone anywhere suggesting the merits of irrationality?

Is culture discussed in this chapter? Not that I can see.

After a while, we hear of the “culture unit - the most basic element of all”, which “has been around for thirty years”. And what is this? Well, it has been called variously a “mnemotype, idea, idene, meme, sociogene, concept, culturgen, and culture type”. A “more focussed definition” of the “culture unit” was apparently provided by Wilson himself, and a colleague in 1981, namely, “the same as the node of semantic memory and its correlates in brain activity”, although he concedes that this is “likely to give way to more sophisticated and complex taxonomies”. He realises that “the assignment of the unit of culture to neuroscience might seem at first an attempt to short-circuit semiotics, the formal study of all forms of communication”, but that is not so – he wants “consilience” between semiotics and biology, “to enrich, not replace, semiotics”. Clear?

Scientific sloppiness is shown by a paragraph in which it is stated that the fact that one twin may be schizophrenic and the other not, in spite of having “exactly the same genes”, shows that “subtle differences in environment can also distort the classic patterns of Mendelian inheritance”. Might it not just possibly be that Wilson and his colleagues have yet to discover that something other than genes and environment is involved, or maybe that the genes are not as exactly identical as he thinks? A few words further on, he is imagining that, as such studies proceed, “a clearer picture of human nature will emerge”. To this reader, a huge dose of modesty is called for here, but there is no sign of that.

Wilson believes in the “dual origin of civilisation in the Old and New Worlds, evolved in mutual isolation yet remarkably convergent in broad detail … starting from the same base as stone-age primitives”. This, he thinks, is “evidence of human cultural universals”. Obviously, I have no close knowledge of the archaeological data, but it seems that such knowledge is not needed to appreciate that there is something wrong somewhere in this story. Wilson is agreed that homo sapiens made an appearance maybe 400,000 years ago, and has remained more or less unchanged since. To take this figure as exact just to make the point, this would mean that homo sapiens roamed parts of the earth for 390,000 years, before developing the notion of agriculture, and hence the possibility of civilisation, only 10,000 or so years ago. Clearly, the fact that it took so long, but once started developed so quickly, makes it virtually certain that agriculture, and hence civilisation, is not a cultural universal, as Wilson thinks, but is due to some external event or circumstance which triggered the development. Now, maybe that external event was something which shone its ray simultaneously in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, in central America, and in China. If so, the nature of this ray should be explained. Otherwise, it seems certain that this triggering event evolved in one place with one group of people, and then it spread by the resulting spurt in reproductive rate in the way described by Colin Renfrew. Presumably, the archaeological evidence for this is lacking, or even negative, but if so, so much the worse for the archaeological evidence. More is needed. The point here is that Wilson could be right, but he is surely wrong and betrays over-confidence in presenting his story as if it must be right.

Again, I have to point out that Wilson’s main point, that “human nature” is in our genes, does not in my view need to be argued. Most people will have noticed that dogs of all sorts tend to behave like dogs, i.e., they all have “dog nature”, dog genes if you like, in common. People have noticed the same for human beings. Yet Wilson returns repeatedly to the defence of this banal point. He seems to want to insist, further, that the world will be wonderful when we know the “epigenetic rules” which lie between the genes and the manifestations of human nature. First, he does not seem to realise that we can never get there. The matter is just too complex. But second, he fails to explain what benefit we will obtain by knowing some of these rules. I cannot imagine any. More likely the reverse, as his final chapter goes some way to acknowledge. I am not saying that the scientists should stop plodding on – after all, plodding on is a part of human nature. But let’s not kid ourselves that it will lead to universal happiness.

In conclusion, this chapter says no more than that cultures are shaped by human nature which is synonymous with saying, shaped by our genes. That is all, but 44 pages of exalted brilliance are needed to say it.

8. The Fitness of Human Nature

Wilson insists that human nature is not the genes, which is like insisting that a house is not the bricks. The ordinary person without the benefit of science might say that human nature is defined by common behaviour patterns observable in all races, and is therefore something born within all of us, just as a dog is condemned to act like a dog. This is not enough for Wilson. For him, at the beginning of this chapter, “human nature is an elusive concept”. Why is it elusive for him when it is a relatively clear concept in normal speech? “Because”, he says, “our understanding of the epigenetic rules composing it is elementary.” I think he means by this that he will not be happy until he knows what combination of genes is responsible for us all smiling in the same way, or what genetic manipulation could be shown to put a stop to smiling.

The last “summary” paragraphs of this chapter deal only with incest taboos. He leans to the belief that this facet of “human nature” is governed by its positive contribution to human survival, and hence that all facets of human nature may originate in the same Darwinian way. Who is arguing with him? He cites Freud as giving an opposing view, but what credit does Freud have as a scientist? One wonders if what is really behind my difficulty with this book is that Wilson is a citizen of a country, a large fraction of whose population has not accepted Darwin, whereas my impression is that in Europe, Darwin is treated as a given. Wilson seems to be addressing that US readership.

9. The Social Sciences

The remaining chapters deal with the social sciences, art and religion, so of course, the main, and in my view absurd, battle for consilience, i.e., persuading academics in those disciplines to become scientists, is really joined here. From here on, there are endlessly fluent and exalted paragraphs which never actually come to grips with any argument as to what end would be gained if this consilience somehow became a reality. Wilson actually ends the book with a chapter entitled “To What End”, and so I dealt with that chapter first (above). The material in that chapter has so little bearing on the title of the chapter, or indeed of the book, that the notion occurs that perhaps Wilson wrote the book initially as a long and passionate record of a thought-stream, and then cut it up into chapters, throwing titles at them, and finally threw a title at the book.

Economics is a social science, and I know a little about the subject, so I will begin with Wilson’s treatment of that. He starts off by saying that, “it is at the cutting edge of the social sciences”. A page later, he says, “although economics, in my opinion, is headed in the right direction, and provides the wedge behind which social theory will wisely follow, it is still mostly irrelevant”. So, two and a half centuries after Adam Smith, the subject in his view is going in the right direction, but has got nowhere! He is of course wrong about the rightness of the direction. He is absolutely right about economics having got nowhere. The mind-blowing aspect is that he thinks he can provide a cure!

Adam Smith published his wonderful book in 1776. He was a moral philosopher. By the time Marshall came along with another great book published in 1890, oddballs like Edgeworth were beginning to dabble in mathematical equations. Marshall, although he was a mathematician by training, kept mathematics out of his main text, confining it to an appendix and footnotes. Keynes too kept away from mathematics. The rot set in seriously with Hicks and his IS-LM diagram which he himself late in life admitted was incomprehensible, and with Samuelson and his Nobel Prize-winning work in 1947, in which he wrote down the differential against time of “demand”, a quantity whose value cannot be measured, let alone differentiated. Keynes and Friedman have come and gone achieving nothing permanent.

What is wrong? It is simply that modern macro-economics has swallowed whole the Wilson delusion that economists, dealing with something as complex as the behaviour of billions of people, can, given enough time and a few two-dimensional diagrams with no numbers on the axes, achieve what Newton achieved when dealing with a few planets sailing unimpeded through a vacuum. It is a failure to see that physics and chemistry are dealing with simple matters, to realise that the wonderful feat of imagination which is Schrödinger’s wave equation can only be done with simple things like electrons. Academics in history or literature at least ply their trade with the understanding all round that they are telling a story, i.e., performing for an audience, putting forward theories which will be tested not by tests of truth or falsity, but by whether they survive in successive generations of audiences. Social sciences in general have more factual content, but, unlike economists, have not yet deluded themselves with mathematical models. This scientifically unsatisfactory position is bound to continue. It will not be changed by incorporating more science than is useful in specific situations, such as, for example, the dating of historic objects. Just as it is meaningless to ask whether Nobel Laureates in literature represent a progress in time, so in reality those in economics have made no progress in time, but the delusion that they have, or should have, persists. The delusion is fostered by economists (who both award and receive the prizes, and who after all have jobs and careers to protect), and is believed by all non-economists since interest is low, and economists do no obvious harm.

The following quotation qualifies as terrible drivel:

“If the union can be achieved, the social sciences will span a wider scale of time and space and harvest an abundance of new ideas. Union is the best way for the social sciences to gain in predictive power.”

This sounds like a pie-in-the-sky political speech. Nowhere does he indicate just how “union can be achieved”. It almost seems as if every social scientist would need four lifetimes to master six or seven different subjects. As for predictive power, he has already indicated that he is aware of the current going-nowhere situation in economics, which he also credits with being at the “cutting edge of the social sciences”. A (presumably retired) economist, Clower, is on record as writing, "three , months, six months, a year ahead - we cannot forecast worth a damn except by extrapolation." (Everyone knows this, but it helps to be able to cite an economist.)

10. The Arts and Their Interpretation

Consider the following quotation:

“By intuition alone, and a sensibility that does not submit easily to formulas, artists and writers know how to evoke emotional and aesthetic response.”

By virtue of being human, we all know how to evoke emotional and aesthetic response. Wilson seems not to be aware of, or at least to feel the need to express, the obvious fact that people called “artists” and “writers” have existed only for a few centuries, and for those few centuries, have been known until quite recently only to an elite. For the huge majority of people in space and time, art existed only in singing, dancing, perhaps story-telling, and ways of arranging hair and dress, and everybody did these things, with some emerging on occasion as being a bit better at it than others. Almost in every utterance and act, we evoke (in greater or less degree) emotional and aesthetic response.

At birth, no one is destined to be an “artist” or “writer”. It is a title awarded after the event. We all speak, write, sing, and draw, and those who emerge from a Darwinian process of selection, the arbiters being the audiences or readerships, are referred to by these titles. We can all dance, but some emerge, for a time, as “dancers”.

Since the above amounts to saying that artists and writers are just selected products of universal “human nature”, and Wilson believes the same, what is the point of my comment? Simply that what I have written owes nothing to science, Darwin (in spite of my mention of Darwinian), biology, psychology, genes, or epigenetic rules. It is just an ordinary conversational comment, a flat expression of a flat observation akin to the one that dogs tend to behave like dogs. The fact that dogs behave like dogs submits no more easily to formulas as the intuition and sensibility of artists and writers.

For Wilson, on the other hand, the quotation above is the opening towards many pages, with occasionally the odd name like Milton and Mondrian being slipped in (there is no sustained discussion of any actual work of art), which lead in the end nowhere. In the midst of this, we are told that:

“the biological origin of the arts is a working hypothesis dependent on the reality of the epigenetic rules and the archetypes they generate. It has been constructed in the spirit of the natural sciences, and as such is meant to be testable, vulnerable and consilient with the rest of biology”.

This is simply empty of content. It says absolutely nothing. If I were to say, “all living material on this planet, and all the behaviours of all categories of that living material, is of biological origin”, it would recognised instantly as a tautology, since by arbitrary definition “biology” relates to all aspects of living material. And if I were to add, “this is my working hypothesis”, it would be akin to saying, “I have a working hypothesis that a stone is a thing like a stone”.

The chapter ends with an account of “the hunter-gatherers of the central Kalahari”. In this, there is no perceptible connection with either art or consilience.

11. Ethics and Religion

Wilson seems to assume that ethics are essentially human, and thereafter, that the tension is between transcendentalists and empiricists .

Insofar as ethics is concerned with good behaviour, it has to be noticed that all animals are for the most part well behaved, at least towards their own species, and particularly to their offspring. And, going beyond mere folk-observation, it is evident that there are good Darwinian reasons for this.

As for transcendentalists and empiricists, we are all both at the same time. We all tend to spend some time looking at the stars, the sky, the heavens, trying at times to figure out if god is there, and we all turn most of the time to working out empirical rules for frying an egg, or whatever. It all goes back to “human nature” again, or to the genes and epigenetic rules, if you like. Whatever Descartes might have liked to call himself, he was, after all, just another animal, or more to the point, another human person. It occurs to me as I write, that Newton was the greatest of all empiricists, while in his spare time, a dyed-in-the-wool transcendentalist.

Following from that, given that I share with Wilson his basic materialism, it becomes clear that where I differ from him is that he wants, apparently, to lasso with endless words (or Ariadne’s threads) all human thought into the materialist corral, to poeticise and romanticise materialism (and/or vice versa), whereas I want to leave materialist banalities outside the door when I sit in a darkened space listening to Parsifal. I do not want to know the “epigenetic rules” which connect my genes to my appreciation of voices and trumpets, nor can I even imagine how the rules could ever be arrived at, except in terms of interesting but irrelevant findings about what nodes are fired in the brain. There will never, and can never, be an ultimate explanation. It is not that it isn’t there, it is just too profound and complex for us ever to get there. After all, our genes have condemned us for ever to being unable to see beyond a certain point, as today’s physicists, who work in the simplest field of all, are only too well aware.

Wilson presents two “speeches” advocating transcendentalism and empiricism. I find myself lining up with Hooke, who is cited in support in the transcendentalist speech:

“(The Royal Society should) improve the knowledge of natural things and all useful arts, manufactures, mechanic practices, engines, and inventions by experiments – not meddling with divinity, metaphysics, morals, politics, rhetoric [E O Wilson please note], or logic”.

Of course, an empiricist can and should meddle with this list of forbidden things, but, for example, if he meddles in the materialist background of morals, he should not mistake his activity for that of a moralist, not should he kid himself or others that any “epigenetic rule” that emerges has anything to do with ethics or morals in the commonly understood sense.

Wilson evidently does not agree, witness the following alarming passage:

“Both ethics and political science lack a foundation of verifiable knowledge of human nature sufficient to produce cause-and-effect predictions and sound judgements based on them. Surely it will be prudent to pay closer attention to the deep springs of ethical behaviour. The greatest void in knowledge in such a venture is the biology of the moral sentiments. In time this subject can be understood, I believe, by paying attention to the following topics.” [Four “topics” follow, with three or four lines of text each.]

Every phrase of this quotation:

- verifiable knowledge of human nature
- cause-and-effect predictions
- prudent to pay closer attention
- the deep springs of ethical behaviour
- the biology of the moral sentiments
- in time this subject can be understood
- by paying attention
- the following [four] topics

qualifies for almost any dismissive description.

Predictions? When nobody in any field outside of the hard sciences can predict anything? Weather prediction is pure physics, or at least involves only the molecules of air and heat and the objects of the terrain. It has recently improved enormously, but is by no means totally reliable. Bring in a human element, and reliable prediction becomes almost inconceivable.
The biology of the moral sentiments? Beyond comment.
Just pay attention to these four topics? Unbelievable.
A few lines later, he is saying, “the process, however, can be predicted with assurance”. Words fail me.

He then passes from ethics to religion.

Maybe because of his Southern Baptist background, or because of his US readership, Wilson loses some of his gung-ho rhetoric in dealing with religion. Instead of predicting that it will be put away in a scientific box, he concludes, “Religion will possess strength to the extent that it codifies and puts into enduring, poetic form the highest values of humanity consistent with empirical knowledge”, although he does state his belief that the end result will be “the secularisation of the human epic and of religion itself”.

12. To What End?

My comments on Wilson's last chapter are given above.

My Conclusion

This book is a notably unscientific plea for science to take over the so-called social sciences, from economics to psychology, and extend even further into art and religion. The text rambles on with exalted brilliance, according to one reviewer, over this whole field, but the brilliance sheds no new light, and fails to explain exactly what consilience is, how it might be achieved, and what benefit would result if any of these subjects (for example, art) was related back to genes, biology, chemistry and finally physics. It is not mentioned that such a connection is in any case a pipedream.

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Links to other papers

WITTGENSTEIN & RUSSELL - GIANT PYGMIES
Reading notes on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Abstract:
    Wittgenstein and Russell both in their different ways showed that they believed that ultimately, there were better things to do with one’s life than study or talk about philosophy. Both were remarkable men. The words of both appear in the English translation of the Tractatus, Russell’s in his introduction to Wittgenstein’s book. This note comments on these words, almost one at a time. The lack of clarity, logic and coherence of both authors raises the puzzling question – in what does greatness lie? Is it in personality, debating skill, membership of a mutually admiring elite? This note discovers nothing of interest or importance in anything actually written between the covers of this book. The note is essentially reading notes, as was my note on Keynes’ General Theory. I recall that when Keynes’ friend and rival, Pigou, vigorously attacked Keynes immediately the General Theory was published, he wrote that, “since a detailed running commentary would be both tedious and un-illuminating, I shall not adopt that method”. The notes below follow precisely this tedious route. The truth cannot always be entertaining. Pigou chose to challenge Keynes on the latter’s home ground, as a debater, a predictably hopeless task. For Wittgenstein, as for Keynes, I might argue that his work can be examined only by dismantling his rhetoric line by line to lay bare its lack of discipline, of coherence, of logical development, and of content.
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A LOGICAL VACUUM
- Reading notes on Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

Abstract:
When Pigou vigorously attacked Keynes immediately the General Theory was published, he wrote that, “since a detailed running commentary would be both tedious and un-illuminating, I shall not adopt that method”. These reading notes follow precisely this tedious route. The truth cannot always be entertaining. Keynes was one of the most fluent and plausible rhetoricians of his age, and it could be argued that his work can be examined only by dismantling his rhetoric line by line to expose the total logical vacuum which in cold objective fact the General Theory is.

Keynes’ book was seemingly written at speed, contains no bibliography, virtually no mention of factual data, little evidence, pseudo-algebra only for appearances, no attempt at anything which could be called scientific method. His acknowledged greatness lay in his cleverness, and his great skill as a debater, negotiator, journalist, and politician, not at all in his ability or interest in searching out the truth. His “theory” is presented in terms of mechanistic cause-and-effect models of economic society, but quite demonstrably, these models are based on nothing but the repetitious re-statement of Keynes’s prior and evidence-free conviction that the cure for unemployment and recession is to stimulate spending, any spending, useful or useless, either by individuals or by governments. Keynes used every rhetorical trick imaginable to hide the empty centre of his work, from “as I shall show … ” onwards. His mainstay, as Pigou remarked, was a deliberate lack of precision and clarity. The great sociological mystery is - how did this transparently fact-free “theory” sweep everything before it?
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THE OFFICE OF NATIONAL STATISTICS (ONS) AND THE "DECLINE" OF UK MANUFACTURING

Abstract:
We all, including economics professors, statisticians and journalists, know just by looking around that our comfort and prosperity is determined by the plethora of objects produced by technical innovations over the millennia, centuries and decades. The earnings of billionaire investment managers may come from their “services”, but their prosperity is manifest in their possession of, or ability to buy, things which have been grown, cooked, mined, constructed, or manufactured. However, by some quirk of social psychology, those economics professors, statisticians and journalists (and no doubt bankers too) apparently believe, simultaneously, that things are not “important”. Agriculture has already been written off as “contributing only 2% of the economy”, and manufacturing is “declining” towards the same invisibility. Recently headlines appeared in the Financial Times and the Daily Mail that “business and financial services eclipse manufacturing” and “the City is supreme as factories fade away”. What was the source of those preposterous views? None other that our Office of National Statistics, whose own press release had been headlined in a similar way. As usual there was no response from any quarter, not even from the CBI Manufacturing Council, to point out that the ONS data had absolutely nothing to do with the only aspect of manufacturing that matters for national prosperity, namely physical output. This note suggests that the ONS should put its house in order. We need not only facts, but a balanced presentation, without attention-seeking headlines.
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IS LOW INFLATION AN IMPORTANT CONDITION FOR HIGH GROWTH?

Abstract. It seems rash even to raise the question in the title. The universal belief is that the answer is and must be "yes". Yet factual evidence for this belief is curiously lacking, maybe even felt to be unnecessary. This paper takes what is thought to be all the, not very voluminous, post-war factual data which exists and which may bear on the matter, and treats this data in every plausible way to find if any convincing demonstration is possible that low inflation is associated with high long term growth rate in GNP. This includes special attention to Germany, the country which is the popular (and sole) paradigm among UK authorities and commentators. The paper concludes that no such demonstration is possible.
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INFLATION AND GROWTH

Abstract. In a previous paper, the author concluded that there was no evidence that low inflation was associated with improved growth rate. In this note, he examines a paper by R. J. Barro which tends to the opposing view. He suggests that the evidence of this paper in fact reinforces his conclusion.
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GROWTH IS NOT CORRELATED WITH INFLATION

Abstract. In a previous paper, the author concluded that there was no evidence that low inflation was associated with improved growth rate. In a later note, he examined a paper by R. J. Barro which tended to the opposing view, and suggested that the evidence of that paper in fact reinforced his conclusion. In this note he comments on a paper by W. R. J. Alexander, concluding that time series analysis, especially with additional variables as in this paper, is unlikely to be able to contradict cross-section results.
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THE FUNCTION OF THE CENTRAL BANK

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL January 2002 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. The general view of the media, bankers, business and politicians, not noticeably contradicted by academics, is that one of the main functions, or the main function, of the central bank is to analyse the progress of the economy, and then to steer it with skilful judgement towards health and growth, by making decisions to change their base interest rate, with carefully chosen timing, amount and direction. The data presented here show that it is impossible to sustain this notion of skilful time-critical steering, or even that the central bank does in fact lead or determine the short term interest rates available to savers or business. The contrary proposition, that commercial short-term interest rates are in fact observed and followed by the central bank, is mathematically sustainable, and generally in accord with the observed facts.
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CENTRAL BANK INTEREST RATE MONITOR

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL May 2003 Paper in pdf form

Abstract:     Following on from the note entitled “The Function of the Central Bank” (see above), this note brings the data up to date. It will be re-issued at intervals. It will monitor the tendency of short-term interest rates, give the author's judgement on the likely movement of the central bank rate in the UK, US and EU zones, and enable the reader to make his own judgement. An addendum shows that by the normal standards of statistical testing (which by their nature must always fall short of proof), the 3-month bank rate leads the changes announced by the central banks in their base rates.
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THE ABSENCE FROM PUBLIC DISCOURSE OF EVALUATIONS OF GDP BASED ON PURCHASING POWER

Abstract.     Politicians, journalists - commentators on economic matters generally - evolve a sort of quasi-stable rhetoric. They select two or three foreign countries with which they like to compare their own, either as models to be followed, or traps to be avoided. Other countries are rarely or never mentioned. They repeat over and over again mantras such as "we are the fourth largest economy in the world" in the UK, or variants of "the dot.com revolution" or "the new paradigm" in the USA. In arguments in the UK over the replacement of sterling by the Euro, it is almost a daily occurrence to hear growth in the UK contrasted with recession in Eurozone Germany. It appears likely that these stories emerge in part from appraisals of GDP expressed for the purpose of cross-country comparison in a currency unit (the Euro or dollar, say) calculated at the ruling rate of exchange. This calculation can be done instantly. It is "news". The more recent method of using purchasing power is much more complex and its results are published late. They are not "news", and do not affect the established rhetoric. Nevertheless, they are the truth, or as near to that as economic data can be, and often quite strikingly at variance with the current story.
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DE-INDUSTRIALISATION

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL January 1996 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. The notion of de-industrialisation arises from the fact that industrial employment, having risen rapidly, is now in equally rapid decline. This paper presents the view that agriculture and industry together form, and have always formed, a "primary" sector which from the beginning, because of its inherent capacity for productivity gains, has progressively freed labour for non-productive work. The "industrial" revolution was really a "primary sector" (in the above sense) revolution. There is no new phenomenon of de-industrialisation, merely a speeding up of a process of labour-freeing from the primary sector, whose ever decreasing work force produces ever increasing output.
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ABSTRACTIONS, THINGS, WEALTH, AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL April 1998 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. Economic theory is dominated by abstract structures. Underneath, there is no firm foundation. Above, there is a lack of rigorous confrontation with established fact. Basic theoretical concepts have no acknowledged definition. The apparatus of graphs, algebra and technical vocabulary are often vehicles for rhetoric rather than descriptions of truth. In this abstract world, it seems to be accepted without embarrassment that all opinions are possible, while adopting the style of science in delivering each conclusion as if it was a fact. The closest parallel is perhaps with theology, where also each practitioner presents his story as fact, but there are differing stories. This paper illustrates this theme, with particular reference to "deindustrialization".

It points out that it is tangible things which are the primary measure, literally the sine qua non, of all material, cultural and intellectual progress. Official statistics necessarily aggregate market transactions involving tangibles and intangibles at monetary exchange values. However it is an error, in the sense of being a misperception leading to wrong action, to mistake this equivalencing of things and non-things as more than a necessary procedural fiction. In this system, one opera performance equals, say, 100 lorryloads of gravel, but the logical reality is that gravel is part of the primary inventory, opera and all other intangibles are secondary or consequential. This inversion of the important and the estimable lies behind the paradox of the deindustrialization which is in process and the deagriculturalization which has already run its course in some parts of the world - namely that our entire civilisation rests (and logically and factually must always rest) on the output of this (in employment terms) disappearing sector. Eventually, the sector which ultimately produces all value will appear in the statistics as one which adds zero value in current terms. Fortunately, the real word of affairs shows no sign of acting on this erroneous perception. For those accustomed to see the world in abstractions, misperceptions still seem to obscure the reality.
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DE-INDUSTRIALISATION II

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL July 2001 Paper in pdf form

Abstract: Is industrial production relatively in decline? No, it is not. This note displays the evidence that for the last 40 years, in the 6 largest economies of the world, industrial production has kept pace with total output.
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DE-INDUSTRIALISATION III

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL December 2002 Paper in pdf form

Abstract:     The author of this note takes it as self evident that prosperity and the provision of "things" (buildings, roads, furniture, furnishings, clothes, machines and equipment of all sorts) go together. The way people generally speak and act is in line with this view. If this is so, domestic manufacturing must continually keep pace with gross domestic product, provided that the necessary "things" are not imported from elsewhere. However, many people are persuaded that domestic manufacturing is in terminal decline, and that the lost output is being replaced by imports from the developing world. Almost daily, one may read of manufacturing jobs being "exported" to the Far East. However, it is simply impossible to import goods without a more or less balancing volume of exports, and there is in reality limited scope for exporting a sufficient volume of services. Imports of goods must more or less be balanced by the export of domestically produced goods. How can a widespread perception of decline be reconciled with a reality of growth? The answer is that the "decline" which is perceived is a decline in employment in the industrial sector, but this decline is more than counterbalanced by the rise of productivity, so that the domestic output of goods by and large keeps pace with the growth of GDP. This note summarises the statistical evidence for the accuracy of this view. A substantial footnote discusses the role of journalists and academics in sustaining the perception of the decline of manufacturing.
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ESSAY ON BAYES

WoPEc - Working papers in economics - WUSTL June 1999 Paper in pdf form

Abstract. It has been said, fairly plausibly, that "Bayesian inference is one of the most widely known eponyms in all of science". But unlike common scientific eponyms, it is by no means clear exactly what "Bayesian" means, and what it has to do with Bayes. "Bayesian", and the dozen or so words and phrases which are usually associated with it, seem to be more like unspecific words of the English language, deployed by an author as he wishes, rather than fixed technical terms. The obscurity of the language, relative to the precise meanings associated with, say, Newton's laws or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is matched by the obscurity of the history - the virtually unknown Bayes, the posthumous paper, the impenetrable and incoherent style, the muddled logic, the virtual silence on his work for 200 years, the sudden emergence in the last several decades, not of new knowledge, but of new Bayesian additions to the vocabulary. This note surveys the notions and the history. It concludes that the Bayesian vocabulary is vague and pretentious, and serves no useful purpose.
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Notes on REDMAN, ECONOMICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Abstract:
These are critical notes made while reading Deborah A Redmans's "Economics and the Philosophy of Science". The philosophy is largely that of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos. Redman begins in the style of a neutral reporter, but later shows her impatience with the confusions sown by those eminent people. Hutchison supplies the main sceptical comments. My main comment is that neither Redman, nor the philosophers she quotes, appear to recognise that it is simply impossible to discuss "science" if the unstated assumption is that science is whatever anyone chooses to call science. One has to start with the strikingly observed worldwide unanimity of physicists and chemists within their respective disciplines, and take account of the fall-off of unanimity (that is, the widening scope for disagreement) as one moves through biology, medicine, etc. (that is, as the matters studied become more and more complex). Economists are in the absurd situation of claiming to be scientists, or at least, wanting to appear to be scientific, when the matters they study are simply too complex ever to lead to consensus. The absurdity is demonstrated when, for example, Friedman is cited in this book as claiming that there is no fundamental distinction between economics and the physical sciences. At the other end of the spectrum, historians and philosophers do well to ply their trade without making inappropriate claims of objectivity.
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Franz Grillparzer    DER ARME SPIELMANN   

This is my own translation of a work which appears from the bibliography to have a significant English-speaking audience, but of which there seems to be no readily accessible English version.
English translation

This counter is freely available from John and Ann Lockett's site at www.lockettpots.uklinux.net