It appears that E.O. Wilson has given up on consilience:

So, will sci­ence and reli­gion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fun­da­men­tals into mutu­ally exclu­sive domains? A great many well-​meaning schol­ars believe that such rap­proche­ment is both pos­si­ble and desir­able. A few dis­agree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same posi­tion. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biol­ogy. The inex­orable growth of this sci­ence con­tin­ues to widen, not to close, the tec­tonic gap between sci­ence and faith­based religion.

In place of reli­gion, Wilson puts forth some­thing he calls “scientific humanism”:

Both of these world views, God-​centred reli­gion and athe­is­tic com­mu­nism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more rad­i­cal world view, sci­en­tific human­ism. Still held by only a tiny minor­ity of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, it con­sid­ers human­ity to be a bio­log­i­cal species that evolved over mil­lions of years in a bio­log­i­cal world, acquir­ing unprece­dented intel­li­gence yet still guided by com­plex inher­ited emo­tions and biased chan­nels of learn­ing. Human nature exists, and it was self-​assembled. Having arisen by evo­lu­tion during the far sim­pler con­di­tions in which human­ity lived during more than 99 per cent of its exis­tence, it forms the behav­ioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called “the indeli­ble stamp of [our] lowly origin”.

On its face, noth­ing could be more unob­jec­tion­able.

The Guardian reports today that J. Craig Venter, runner-​up in the race to map the genome, has “built a syn­thetic chro­mo­some out of lab­o­ra­tory chem­i­cals and is poised to announce the cre­ation of the first new arti­fi­cial life form on Earth.”

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, Venter and his team have built from scratch a chro­mo­some of 381 genes for a new bac­terium they’re call­ing Mycoplasma lab­o­ra­to­rium. With tech­niques invented by Venter’s team, they’re able to insert the chro­mo­some into living bac­te­ria and encour­age it to take over for the host’s DNA. In this way, a bac­terium based entirely on Venter’s syn­thetic genome may be born. He has already filed a patent for the new organism.

With char­ac­ter­is­tic immod­esty Venter calls the step “a very impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal step in the his­tory of our species.” “We are deal­ing in big ideas,” he said, “We are trying to create a new value system for life.”

Venter’s rhetoric is pitched to land him back in the only place he’s ever really happy: center stage in the media spot­light. And if the Guardian arti­cle is any indication—the sub­head for the arti­cle reads “Breakthrough could combat global warming”—the world’s media stands ready to help.

Buried under a head­line that rivals one in yesterday’s NYT for incom­pre­hen­si­bil­ity is an arti­cle by Nicholas Wade that struck me as inter­est­ing for all the wrong reasons.

Wade presents the work of Gre­gory Clark, an econ­o­mist whose research focuses on the changes that occurred in human pop­u­la­tions before, during, and after the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is that genetic, and not merely cul­tural, changes are ulti­mately respon­si­ble for the increase in pro­duc­tion that allowed Euro­pean soci­eties to escape the so-​called “Malthusian trap.”

Clark’s book isn’t out yet, but Wade’s long arti­cle gives one good rea­sons to sus­pect that Clark’s hypoth­e­sis is at least untestable, if not wrong. (Most of the econ­o­mists quoted in Wade’s arti­cle praise Clark’s data gath­er­ing but are skep­ti­cal of his genetic claims.) But as a new episode in the long flir­ta­tion eco­nom­ics has kept up with biol­ogy, it’s worth paying atten­tion to.