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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through From Genes to Culture.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What decision was effectively made in human evolution as the brain found its present size?
(a) Dreams over experiences.
(b) Curiosity over security.
(c) Excess over efficiency.
(d) Intelligence over strength.

2. How does Wilson characterize the relationship between consilience and the material world?
(a) He says that consilience can only be seen through a philosophical lens.
(b) He says it is implicit.
(c) He says it can only be known through language.
(d) He says that consilience is a sublime concept that can never be presented in fact.

3. What is the only way to get a clear picture of the world, in Wilson's account?
(a) To separate humanities from natural science.
(b) To integrate natural science with social sciences and humanities.
(c) To add philosophy and ethics to all natural sciences.
(d) To divorce the natural science from social sciences.

4. How does Wilson characterize the relationship between ecology and ethics?
(a) Without tangible laws of ethics, ecology is always an approximate science, ethically.
(b) By valuing previously unvalued phenomena, ecology develops its own unique ethics.
(c) Without analysis in ecology, there is little basis for making ethical claims.
(d) By studying how people assign values, we find that ecology has always had an ethical scale of value.

5. What does Wilson say declined as people started to live longer in the nineteenth century?
(a) Greed.
(b) War.
(c) Reason and politeness.
(d) Crime and poverty.

Short Answer Questions

1. How has the postmodern fragmentation of knowledge affected consilience, in Wilson's account??

2. What is the difference between primary and secondary emotions?

3. Where does the unification of intellectual work have its benefit, in Wilson's account?

4. What would need to be true before we could establish the goals and progress of evolutionary processes, in Wilson's account?

5. What qualities of mind drove the techno-scientific age?

(see the answer key)

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