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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through To What End?.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is consilience?
(a) A historical basis for unifying fields of study.
(b) An underlying pattern that tends toward unification.
(c) An agreed approach to different subjects.
(d) A proposal for reorganizing departments of knowledge.

2. What kind of progress does Wilson see in the history of life on earth?
(a) He sees a punctuated equilibrium.
(b) He sees a tendency toward adaptation to environment.
(c) He sees the role of blind chance marring the evolutionary record.
(d) He sees a tendency toward complexity.

3. What does natural consilience connect?
(a) Time and change.
(b) Language and genetics.
(c) Heredity and culture.
(d) Language and culture.

4. What political movement did Condorcet inspire?
(a) The abolition of slavery in the New World.
(b) The French Revolution.
(c) The American Revolution.
(d) The abolition of slavery in French colonies.

5. What did all Enlightenment thinkers have in common, according to Wilson?
(a) Literary methods.
(b) Scientific methods.
(c) Faith in God.
(d) A sense of historical purpose.

Short Answer Questions

1. What philosophical assumption underlay the notion that evolution followed simple laws?

2. Which ocean is still experiencing increasing yields?

3. What did the idea of intellectual unity foster in the Enlightenment?

4. What is the problem with anthropology, in Edmund Wilson's estimation?

5. How many billion people live in absolute poverty, at the time of Wilson's writing?

(see the answer key)

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