Consilience

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In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) refers to the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" to strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence are very strong on their own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus.

The principle is based on the unity of knowledge; measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer. For example, it should not matter whether one measures the distance between the Great Pyramids of Giza by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a meter stick - in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same. For the same reason, different dating methods in geochronology should concur, a result in chemistry should not contradict a result in geology, etc.

The word consilience was originally coined as the phrase "consilience of inductions" by William Whewell ("consilience" refers to a "jumping together" of knowledge).

Description

Consilience requires the use of independent methods of measurement, meaning that the methods have few shared characteristics. That is, the mechanism by which the measurement is made is different; each method is dependent on an unrelated natural phenomenon. For example, the accuracy of laser rangefinding measurements is based on the scientific understanding of lasers, while satellite pictures and meter sticks rely on different phenomena. Because the methods are independent, when one of several methods is in error, it is very unlikely to be in error in the same way as any of the other methods, and a difference between the measurements will be observed. If the scientific understanding of the properties of lasers were inaccurate, then the laser measurement would be inaccurate but the others would not.

As a result, when several different methods agree, this is strong evidence that none of the methods are in error and the conclusion is correct. This is because of a greatly reduced likelihood of errors: for a consensus estimate from multiple measurements to be wrong, the errors would have to be similar for all samples and all methods of measurement, which is extremely unlikely. Random errors will tend to cancel out as more measurements are made, due to regression to the mean; systematic errors will be detected by differences between the measurements (and will also tend to cancel out since the direction of the error will still be random). This is how scientific theories reach high confidence – over time, they build up a large degree of evidence which converges on the same conclusion.

When results from different strong methods do appear to conflict, this is treated as a serious problem to be reconciled. For example, in the 19th century, the Sun appeared to be no more than 20 million years old, but the Earth appeared to be no less than 300 million years (resolved by the discovery of nuclear fusion and radioactivity, and the theory of quantum mechanics); or current attempts to resolve theoretical differences between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

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. 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.) The strength of the evidence, considered together as a whole, results in the strong scientific consensus that the theory is correct. In a similar way, evidence about the history of the universe is drawn from astronomy, astrophysics, planetary geology, and physics.

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, 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 emergent properties that in turn are the basis of biology. Psychology is not separate from the study of properties emergent from the interaction of neurons and synapses. 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.

Deviations from consilience

Consilience does not forbid deviations: in fact, since not all experiments are perfect, some deviations from established knowledge are expected. However, when the convergence is strong enough, then new evidence inconsistent with the previous conclusion is not usually enough to outweigh that convergence. Without an equally strong convergence on the new result, the weight of evidence will still favor the established result. This means that the new evidence is most likely to be wrong.

Science denialism (for example, AIDS denialism) is often based on a misunderstanding of this property of consilience. A denier may promote small gaps not yet accounted for by the consilient evidence, or small amounts of evidence contradicting a conclusion without accounting for the pre-existing strength resulting from consilience. More generally, to insist that all evidence converge precisely with no deviations would be naïve falsificationism, equivalent to considering a single contrary result to falsify a theory when another explanation, such as equipment malfunction or misinterpretation of results, is much more likely.

Edward O Wilson

The word had remained shelved until the end of the 20th century, when it was vividly revived in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book by the humanist biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the culture gap between the sciences and the humanities that was the subject of C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959. Wilson's assertion was that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understanding 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." This is the essence of consilience. And in this way consilience is very similar to reductionism.

A parallel view lies in the term universology, which literally means "the science of the universe." Universology was first advocated 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.

Quotes

"To ask if consilience can be gained in the innermost domains of the circles, such that sound judgment will flow easily from one discipline to another, is equivalent to asking whether, in the gathering of disciplines, specialists can ever reach agreement on a common body of abstract principles and evidentiary proof. I think they can. Trust in consilience is the foundation of the natural sciences. For the material world at least, the momentum is overwhelmingly toward conceptual unity. Disciplinary boundaries within the natural sciences are disappearing, to be replaced by shifting hybrid domains in which consilience is implicit. These domains reach across many levels of complexity, from chemical physics and physical chemistry to molecular genetics, chemical ecology, and ecological genetics. None of the new specialities is considered more than a focus of research. Each is an industry of fresh ideas and advancing technology. Given that human action comprises events of physical causation, why should the social sciences and humanities be impervious to consilience with the natural sciences? And how can they fail to benefit from that alliance? It is not enough to say that human action is historical, and that history is an unfolding of unique events. Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history, whether in the stars or organic diversity. Astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology are examples of primarily historical disciplines linked by consilience to the rest of the natural sciences."

"Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare? Every public intellectual and political leader should be able to answer that as well. Already half the legislation coming before the United States Congress contains important scientific and technological components. Most of the issues that vex humanity daily - ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most consistently before us - cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the 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. Yet the vast majority of our political leaders are trained exclusively in the social sciences and humanties, and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences. The same is true for the public intellectuals, the columnists, the media interrogators, andn think-tank gurus. The best of their analyses are careful and responsible, and sometimes correct, but the substantive base of their wisdom is fragmented and lopsided."

"The mind is not like a wax tablet. On a tablet you cannot write the new till you rub out the old; on the mind you cannot rub out the old except by writing in the new. Beware of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall. They are the real distorting prisms of human nature. Among them, idols of the tribe assume more order than exists in chaotic nature; those of the imprisoning cave, the idiosyncrasies of individual belief and passion; of the market place, the power of mere words to induce belief in non-existent things; and of the theater, unquestioning acceptance of philosophical beliefs and misleading demonstration. Stay clear of these idols, observe the world around you as it truly is, and reflect on the best means of transmitting reality as you have experienced it; put into it every fiber of your being."

"Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubts its existence. Inside our heads is a reconstitution of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts. Input and self-asembly, rather than an independent entity in the brain - the "ghost in the machine," in the philosopher Gilbert Ryle's famous derogation - constitute the mind. The alignment of outer existence with its inner representation has been distorted by the idiosyncrasies of human evolution, as I noted earlier. That is, natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment. The effort to do so has only begun. No one should suppose that objective truth is impossible to attain, even when the most committed philosophers urge us to acknowledge that incapacity. In particularly it is too early for scientists, the foot soldiers of epistemology, to yield ground so vital to their mission."

"On the surface it would seem, and was so reported by the media, that the Rwandan catastrophe was ethnic rivalry run amok. That is true only in part. There was a deeper cause, rooted in environment and demography. Between 1950 and 1994 the population of Rwanda, favored by better health care and temporarily improved food supply, more than tripled, from 2.5 million to 8.5 million. In 1992 the country had the highest growth rate in the world, an average of 8 children for woman. Parturition began early, and generation times were short. But although total food production increased dramatically during this period, it was soon overbalanced by population growth. The average farm size dwindled, as plots were divided from one generation to the next. Per capita grain production fell by half from 1960 to the early 1990s. Water was so overdrawn that hydrologists declared Rwanda one of the world's twenty-seven water-scarce countries. The teenage soldiers of the Hutu and Tutsi then set out to solve the population problem in the most direct possible way. Rwanda is a microcosm of the world. War and civil strife have many causes, most not related directly to environmental stress. But in general, overpopulation and the consequent dwindling of available resources are tinder that people pile up around themselves. The mounting anxiety and hardship are translated into enmity, and enmity into moral aggression. Scapegoats are identified, sometimes other political or ethic groups, sometimes neighboring tribes. The tinder continues to grow, awaiting the odd assassination, territorial incursion, atrocity, or other provocative incident to set it off. Rwanda is the most populated country in Africa. Burundi, its war torn neighbor, is second. Haiti and El Savador, two of the chronically most troubled nations of the Western Hemisphere, are also among the most densely populated, exceeded only by five tiny island countries of the Caribbean. They are also arguable the most environmentally degraded."

"If the natural sciences can be successfully united with the social sciences and humanities, the liberal arts in higher education will be revitalized. Even the attempt to accomplish that much is a worthwhile goal. Profession-bent students should be helped to understand that in the twenty-first century the world will not be run by those possess mere information alone. Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."

"The smart money in eschatology is on Blaise Pascal's wager: Live well but accept the faith. If there is an afterlife, the seventeen-century French philosopher reasoned, the believer has a ticket to paradise and the best of both worlds, "If I lost," Pascal wrote, "I would have lost little; if I won I would have gained eternal life." Now think like an empiricist for a moment. Consider the wisdom of turning the wager around as follows: If fear and hope and reason dictate that you must accept the faith, do so, but treat this world as if there is none other."

"The complementary instincts of moraliy and tribalism are easily manipulated. Civilization has made them more so. Only ten thousand years ago, a tick in geological time, when the agricultural revolution begain the Middle East, in China, and in Mesoamerica, populations increased in density tenfold over those of hunter-gatherer societies. Families settled on small plots of land, villages proliferated, and labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers. The rising agricultural societies, egalitarian at first, became hierarchical. As chiefdoms and then states thrived on agricultural surpluses, hereditary rulers and priestly castes took power. The old ethical codes were transformed into coercive regulations, always to the advantage to the ruling classes. About this time the idea of law-giving gods originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority, once again - no surprise - to the favor of the rulers."

See also

• Coherentism in the philosophy of science
• Holism
• Integral thought, a quite different approach to the unification of various areas of study
• Reductionism
• Scientific method
• Syncretism
• Tree of Knowledge System
• Unified Science