Edward Wilson, one of the world's foremost science writers and a leading researcher in his own right, thinks there is. Wilson calls such unity consilience - the theory that all of nature is organized by simple universal laws of physics to which all other laws and principles can be reduced. Every thread on the loom, from atoms to ecosystems, from quantum mechanics to Shakespeare, can be traced back to these master blueprints of the material world. So far it is just a theory. On his home turf of the natural sciences Wilson has the easiest case to make, but he has no intention of stopping there.
Human history can be a natural science too, and so can the rest of the humanities.
All that is needed is an agreement among academic disciplines on a common body of abstract principles and evidentiary proof. The wider Wilson spreads his net, and it gets pretty wide, the patchier the argument starts to look. There are many valid generalizations made about the arts, but the devil is in the epigenetic details. Obviously we have a way to go. The book takes special aim at economics, and performs the practical function of reminding us that it is not really a science at all.