Darwin's Bridge

Uniting the Humanities and Sciences

Edited by Joseph Carroll, Dan P. McAdams, and Edward O. Wilson

Collects the most advanced work in the consilience movement
Demonstrates how far science has gone toward unifying knowledge about the human species, and what still needs to be done
Each chapter takes a different disciplinary approach to the question of "human nature"
Features expert perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, the humanities, social sciences, and more

Darwin's Bridge

Uniting the Humanities and Sciences

Edited by Joseph Carroll, Dan P. McAdams, and Edward O. Wilson

Description

Darwin's Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences explores the meaning of consilience and considers the unity of human evolution, human nature, social dynamics, art, and narrative. The term "consilience" in its modern usage was first established by co-editor Edward O. Wilson in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Wilson's original thesis had two parts: that nature forms a unitary order of causal forces, hierarchically organized, and that scientific knowledge, because it delineates nature, also forms a unitary order, providing a unity of knowledge across a variety of fields. Bringing together cutting-edge scientists and scholars across this range, this volume gives an expert account of consilience and makes it possible to see how far we have come toward unifying knowledge about the human species, what major issues are still in contention, and which areas of research are most likely to produce further progress.

The essays in Darwin's Bridge raise and give substantial answers to questions such as: What is the precise trajectory of human evolution? What were the main factors driving the evolution of the human brain and human motivational system? How closely does life among contemporary hunter-gatherers mirror conditions of ancestral life? In what ways have genes and culture co-evolved, reciprocally influencing one another? How does selection at the level of individuals interact with selection among groups? How complete and adequate are our current models of human nature? How well do these models integrate ideas about human universals, individual identity, and specific cultures? How well can we now delineate the causal chains leading from elementary principles of evolutionary biology to specifically human forms of social organization, individual identity, and imaginative culture? Are human proclivities to make and consume works of art by-products of adaptations, or are they themselves adaptations? Can evolutionary thinking guide us in giving close analytic and explanatory attention to individual works of art?

Darwin's Bridge

Uniting the Humanities and Sciences

Edited by Joseph Carroll, Dan P. McAdams, and Edward O. Wilson

Foreword by Alice Dreger
Introduction: Joseph Carroll
Part I. Transforming Our Vision of the Human Story
Chapter 1. Edward O. Wilson, "The Meaning of Human Existence"
Part II. The Evolution of Human Sociality
Chapter 2. Christopher Boehm, "Bullies: Redefining the Human Free-Rider Problem"
Chapter 3. Herbert Gintis, "The Structure and Evolution of Morality: Public and Private Persona"
Chapter 4. Henry Harpending & Nathan Harris, "Human Kinship as a Green Beard"
Chapter 5. Michael Rose, "Darwinian Evolution of Free Will and Spiritual Experience"
Part III. Ancient Markings
Chapter 6. John Hawks, "Neandertal Humanities"
Chapter 7. Ellen Dissanayake, "Mark-Making as a Human Behavior"
Part IV. Integrative Psychology
Chapter 8. Barbara Oakley, "Consilience through the Integration of Engineering and Social Science"
Chapter 9. Dan P. McAdams, "From Actor to Agent to Author: Human Evolution and the Development of Personality"
Part V. A Biocultural Perspective on Literature
Chapter 10. Catherine Salmon, "What Do Romance Novels, Pro-Wrestling, and Mack Bolan Have in Common? Consilience and the Pop Culture of Storytelling"
Chapter 11. Mathias Clasen, "Terrifying Monsters, Malevolent Ghosts, and Evolved Danger-Management Architecture: A Consilient Approach to Horror Fiction"
Chapter 12. Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John Johnson, & Daniel Kruger, "Agonistic Structure in Canonical British Novels of the Nineteenth Century"
Chapter 13. Brian Boyd, "Experiments with Experience: Consilient Multilevel Explanations of Art and Literature"
Part VI. A Challenge
Chapter 14. Massimo Pigliucci, "The Limits of Consilience and the Problem of Scientism"
Afterwords
David Sloan Wilson
Jonathan Gottschall

Darwin's Bridge

Uniting the Humanities and Sciences

Edited by Joseph Carroll, Dan P. McAdams, and Edward O. Wilson

Author Information

Edited by Joseph Carroll, Curators' Professor, University of Missouri-St. Louis, Edited by Dan P. McAdams, Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Psychology Department, Northwestern University, and Edited by Edward O. Wilson, Honorary Curator in Entomology and University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

Joseph Carroll is Curators' Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His books include Evolution and Literary Theory, Literary Darwinism, Reading Human Nature, and (co-authored) Graphing Jane Austen. He produced an edition of Darwin's Origin of Species. He is the leading figure in the movement known as "literary Darwinism," that is, the effort to integrate evolutionary social science and literary scholarship.

Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University. His research focuses on personality development across the human life course. Most recently, he is the author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By and George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream: A Psychological Portrait. Edward O. Wilson is Honorary Curator in Entomology and University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University. He has received more than 100 awards for his research and writing, including the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize and two Pulitzer Prizes in non-fiction. He is considered one of the world's foremost biologists and naturalists today.

Contributors:

Christopher Boehm
Department of Biological Sciences and Anthropology
Goodall Research Center
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Brian Boyd
English, Drama, and Writing Studies
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand

Joseph Carroll
Department of English
University of Missouri-St. Louis
St. Louis, MO, USA

Mathias Clasen
Department of English
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

Ellen Dissanayake />School of Music
University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA

Alice Dreger
Department of Medical Humanities and Bioethics
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL, USA

Herbert Gintis
Santa Fe Institute
Santa Fe, NM, USA

Jonathan Gottschall
Department of English
Washington & Jefferson College
Washington, PA, USA

Henry Harpending
Department of Anthropology
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT, USA

John Hawks
Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI, USA

John A. Johnson
Department of Psychology
The Pennsylvania State University
State College, PA, USA

Daniel J. Kruger
Department of Health Behavior & Health Education
University of Michigan School of Public Health
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Dan P. McAdams
Department of Psychology
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL, USA

Barbara Oakley
Department of Engineering
Oakland University
Rochester, MI, USA

Massimo Pigliucci
Department of Philosophy
The City College of New York
New York, NY, USA

Michael R. Rose
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA, USA

Catherine Salmon
Department of Psychology
University of Redlands
Redlands, CA, USA

David Sloan Wilson
Department of Biological Sciences and Anthropology
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY, USA

Edward O. Wilson
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, USA