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. [Read more]