Consilience

Consilience names the convergence of evidence across disciplines — when the geologist's dating of rock strata confirms the biologist's phylogenetic tree confirms the geneticist's molecular clock, three independent bodies of evidence agreeing without knowing they agree. Wilson borrowed the word from William Whewell's 1840 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and elevated it into a life's program: the reunification of knowledge that three centuries of productive specialization had shattered. The most powerful confirmations of truth, Whewell saw and Wilson amplified, come not from within a discipline but from between disciplines. A theory that explains its own domain is plausible; a theory that explains multiple domains, each with its own methods, approaches the kind of certainty human knowledge is capable of achieving.