Consilience is reconstitution. At first glance the idea of reductionism applied to human behavior was repellent to me. But through his ability to analyze and resynthesize information in defense of his theory, he has convinced me. He is very much a humanist, not only well educated in the arts and sciences but believes that arts and sciences are closely linked. Science, says Wilson, is the way we communicate information.
Art is our way of communicating emotion.
We need both reason and emotion, he says. Science analyzes, the humanities reconstitutes. How much more superior the reconstitution if it is based on a thorough knowledge of the organism's constituent parts. It does not diminish Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to study the individual notes, and it is those individual notes recorded and recopied that enable us generation after generation to experience the whole of the music. We will never control cancer until we understand how cells function and interact.