Editing Consilience (section)

==Significance==
Because of consilience, the [[strength of evidence]] for any particular conclusion is related to how many independent methods are supporting the conclusion, as well as how different these methods are. Those techniques with the fewest (or no) shared characteristics provide the strongest consilience and result in the strongest conclusions. This also means that confidence is usually strongest when considering evidence from different fields because the techniques are usually very different.

For example, the theory of [[evolution]] is supported by a convergence of evidence from [[genetics]], [[molecular biology]], [[paleontology]], geology, [[biogeography]], [[comparative anatomy]], [[comparative physiology]], and many other fields.<ref name="SciAm">''Scientific American'', March 2005. "The Fossil Fallacy." [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-fossil-fallacy Link.]</ref> In fact, the evidence within each of these fields is itself a convergence providing evidence for the theory. As a result, to disprove evolution, most or all of these independent lines of evidence would have to be found to be in error.<ref name="Shermer" /> The strength of the evidence, considered together as a whole, results in the strong scientific consensus that the theory is correct.<ref name="SciAm"/> In a similar way, evidence about the [[history of the universe]] is drawn from astronomy, astrophysics, planetary geology, and physics.<ref name="Shermer" />

Finding similar conclusions from multiple independent methods is also evidence for the reliability of the methods themselves, because consilience eliminates the possibility of all potential errors that do not affect all the methods equally. This is also used for the validation of new techniques through comparison with the consilient ones. If only partial consilience is observed, this allows for the detection of errors in methodology; any weaknesses in one technique can be compensated for by the strengths of the others. Alternatively, if using more than one or two techniques for every experiment is infeasible, some of the benefits of consilience may still be obtained if it is well-established that these techniques usually give the same result.

Consilience is important across all of science, including the social sciences,<ref>For example, in linguistics: see ''Converging Evidence: Methodological and theoretical issues for linguistic research, edited by Doris Schonefeld.'' [https://books.google.com/books?id=nGKT-2VwO0UC&dq=Converging+Evidence&pg=PT92 Link.]</ref> and is often used as an argument for [[scientific realism]] by philosophers of science. Each branch of science studies a subset of reality that depends on factors studied in other branches. [[Atomic physics]] underlies the workings of [[chemistry]], which studies [[emergence|emergent]] properties that in turn are the basis of [[biology]]. [[Psychology]] is not separate from the study of properties emergent from the interaction of [[neuron]]s and [[synapse]]s. Sociology, economics, and [[anthropology]] are each, in turn, studies of properties emergent from the interaction of countless individual humans. The concept that all the different areas of research are studying one real, existing universe is an apparent explanation of why scientific knowledge determined in one field of inquiry has often helped in understanding other fields.