Editing Consilience (section)

==Edward O. Wilson==
Although the concept of consilience in Whewell's sense was widely discussed by philosophers of science, the term was unfamiliar to the broader public until the end of the 20th century, when it was revived in ''[[Consilience (book)|Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge]],'' a 1998 book by the author and biologist [[Edward Osborne Wilson|E. O. Wilson]], as an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between the sciences and the humanities that was the subject of [[C. P. Snow]]'s ''[[The Two Cultures|The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution]]'' (1959).<ref name="Wilson" />  Wilson believed that "the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them" with the result that science and the scientific method, from within this fusion, would not only explain the physical phenomenon but also provide moral guidance and be the ultimate source of all truths.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Horgan|first=John|title=Science Should Not Try to Absorb Religion and Other Ways of Knowing|url=https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-should-not-try-to-absorb-religion-and-other-ways-of-knowing/|access-date=1 July 2021|website=Scientific American|language=en}}</ref>

Wilson held that with the rise of the [[modern science]]s, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. He asserted that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understand the details, to lend to all inquirers "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." An important point made by Wilson is that hereditary human nature and evolution itself profoundly affect the evolution of culture, in essence, a sociobiological concept. Wilson's concept is a much broader notion of consilience than that of Whewell, who was merely pointing out that generalizations invented to account for one set of phenomena often account for others as well.<ref name="Wilson" />

A parallel view lies in the term [[universology]], which literally means "the science of the universe." Universology was first promoted for the study of the interconnecting principles and truths of all domains of knowledge by [[Stephen Pearl Andrews]], a 19th-century utopian futurist and anarchist.<ref name="Wilson" />