ABSTRACT
Western scientists succeeded because they believed that the abstract laws of the various disciplines in some manner interlock. Consilience proved to be the light and way of the natural sciences. The two ideas are expressions of consilience in the following way: Cells and thence organisms, being organized ensembles of molecules, are physicochemical entities, which were assembled not at random but by natural selection. Yet despite the progress of the natural sciences in understanding the natural world, they have remained sequestered from the other great branches of learning. The subdiscipline broadly covering the phenomena in this segment of space-time is evolutionary biology. Evolution by changes in gene frequency is coarse grained: It becomes apparent only when the history of an entire population is watched across generations. The anatomy, physiology, and behavior of organisms are aggregated phenomena of cells and tissues. The development and function of cells and tissues are themselves the aggregate products of highly organized systems of molecules.
