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. You might wince at the smugness of that “tiny minority of the world’s population,” you might wonder why he’s so worked up about godless communism,¹ and you might sniff out an allegiance to evolutionary psychology in the phrase “guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning,” but you believe in science, don’t you?

The problem is that “scientific humanism” as a “world view” is neither scientific nor humanist. As soon as the facts about the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens are put forth as a source of values that would rival “God-centred religion and atheistic communism” they stop being scientific. (Say what you will about the permeability of facts and values, but some distinction between them is necessary for anyone who accepts the epistemological priority of science.)

What’s more, the particular science that Wilson is concerned with here—evolutionary biology—is anti-humanist by definition.² To assert a humanism you have to claim that there’s something special about humanity, something that is not merely a contingent fact of our evolutionary history (like language or “unprecedented intelligence”). Evolutionary biology has no room for such privileges. Humans may be different from zebra fish, but that difference is no more significant than the difference between zebra fish and bonobos.

That said, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with anti-humanism except for the PR-unfriendly name. It’s a serious philosophical position, and one that just might be on the right side of things. But it would be nice to see people like Wilson (and Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker) start to talk about science and its implications with some minimum degree of philosophical awareness,³ especially if they’re going to wander off their biological preserves and make claims like this:

The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

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Notes:

1/ The answer, I’m sure, has to do with Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which names Marxists, and academic Marxists in particular, as one of the groups most susceptible to the “myth of the Blank Slate.”

2/ The most common place to spot the anti-humanism of scientistic world views is in talk about the humility of science. According to the founding myth of modern science, it was only a humanist pride that kept people from recognizing the truth of a Copernicus or a Darwin. Here’s Wilson’s version:

In all of the history of science, only one other disparity of comparable magnitude to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth, and therefore humanity, is not the centre of the universe, and the universe is not a closed spherical bubble.

It’s a matter of some annoyance that this account ignores or neglects the fact that for the Aristotelians who resisted the Copernican discovery, being at the center of the universe was a bad thing. This is why Dante put Satan at the center-point of the Earth, as far as cosmically possible from God. In Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems it is Salviati, the Copernican, who defends the nobility of the Earth, while Simplicio, the Aristotelian, accuses him of supposing that Earth, “this sink of all corruptible material,” is located “among bodies as pure as Venus and Mars.”

3/ Yes, this complaint is a common one and no, it’s not less necessary for being so.