View a FREE sample

This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through The Fitness of Human Nature.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Wilson characterize the relationship between ecology and ethics?
(a) By studying how people assign values, we find that ecology has always had an ethical scale of value.
(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) Without tangible laws of ethics, ecology is always an approximate science, ethically.

2. What does Wilson mean by the Ionian Enchantment'?
(a) Belief in a historical process.
(b) Belief in the multiplicity of forms.
(c) Belief in a transcendent spirit.
(d) Belief in the unity of species.

3. When does sleep occur, in molecular terms?
(a) When REM begins.
(b) When tryptophan is released in the brain.
(c) When certain chemicals decrease in the brain.
(d) When serotonin is released in the brain.

4. That scientific tools does Wilson credit with driving the age of scientific expansion?
(a) Generators, and the ability to create power.
(b) Vaccines, and the ability to heal.
(c) Hydraulics, and the ability to transfer power.
(d) Optics, and the ability to measure.

5. What accomplishment does Wilson say Einstein strove for in his work?
(a) Unify space, time and motion.
(b) Find the singularity at the beginning of the universe.
(c) Locate the missing mass in the universe.
(d) Express the universe in a mathematical formula.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does consilience work?

2. What idea of Locke's survived the Enlightenment into Romanticism?

3. Why have scientific models of the brain failed to explain consciousness?

4. What does local positivism fail to distinguish between, in Wilson's narration?

5. What does temporal-lobe epilepsy cause?

(see the answer key)

This section contains 362 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample