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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 field does culture need to be linked with, in order to be explained, according to Wilson?
(a) Language.
(b) Natural sciences.
(c) Economics.
(d) Religion.

2. How do nerve cells in the brain connect?
(a) Through neurons.
(b) Through synapses.
(c) Through axons.
(d) Through dendrites.

3. What does Edmund Wilson say cultures are made of?
(a) Genetic pools.
(b) Linked compositions of myths and symbols.
(c) Groups of language users.
(d) The highest expressions of symbolic language in art.

4. How has the postmodern fragmentation of knowledge affected consilience, in Wilson's account??
(a) It has created the conditions for unification.
(b) It has not been useful.
(c) It has generated unprecedented discussions between disciplines.
(d) It has opened new fields.

5. 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 tangible laws of ethics, ecology is always an approximate science, ethically.
(d) Without analysis in ecology, there is little basis for making ethical claims.

Short Answer Questions

1. When was Condorcet born?

2. What did Enlightenment thinkers tried to link, in Wilson's account?

3. What does Wilson say the standards that measure scientific knowledge should be based on?

4. After considering all the different contexts for ants' communication, how does Wilson describe their form of communication?

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

(see the answer key)

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