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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How did Wilson react against the religion he inherited?
(a) He embraced it but insisted on the ability to hold exclusive beliefs.
(b) He maintained his faith in spite of his scientific research.
(c) He tried to reconcile his science with his faith.
(d) He rejected literal interpretation of the Bible.

2. What does Wilson say that humans are incapable of seeing?
(a) Change over time.
(b) The world in its true state.
(c) The history of things.
(d) The state of grace.

3. How does Wilson characterize the modern definition of dreams?
(a) Mystic connections to real events outside the body.
(b) Reconstitution of daily experiences in surreal visions.
(c) Visions charged by emotion and reorganized by information in memory.
(d) Psychic returns to the scenes of primal injuries.

4. How many cells comprise the brain?
(a) 100 million.
(b) No one knows.
(c) 100 billion.
(d) 1 trillion.

5. When did the Enlightenment end, in Wilson's account?
(a) 1776.
(b) 1742.
(c) 1794.
(d) 1789.

6. How can science help us, in Wilson's account?
(a) Science can show us how our impressions are created by our feelings.
(b) Science can give us better stories to tell about psychological nature.
(c) Science can reveal the extent of human powerlessness.
(d) Science can expand the limits of what we can see.

7. What idea of Locke's survived the Enlightenment into Romanticism?
(a) The idea of natural rights.
(b) The idea of transcendent experiences.
(c) The idea of inevitable progress.
(d) The idea mystical states.

8. What two fields did Wilson connect in his theory of unified learning?
(a) Philosophy and evolution.
(b) Evolution and genetics.
(c) Classification and evolution.
(d) Epistemology and religion.

9. In Wilson's account, why did the French Revolution fail?
(a) Because of the excesses of tyrants and terrorists.
(b) Because of international fear of the spread of revolution.
(c) Because of the intellectual opposition to the tyranny of the revolution.
(d) Because the efficiency of the military in the Reign of Terror allowed Napoleon's rise.

10. What do the natural science stimulate, in Wilson's account?
(a) Industry.
(b) Radicalism.
(c) Other sciences.
(d) Religious controversy.

11. What methods did Descartes use in his work?
(a) Experiential learning and induction.
(b) Induction and synthesis.
(c) Deduction and analysis.
(d) Hypothesis and experimentation.

12. What would need to be true before we could establish the goals and progress of evolutionary processes, in Wilson's account?
(a) We would have to know the future of our race.
(b) We would have to have tools that would let us predict how random acts would play out.
(c) We would need to know that evolution tended toward increase complexity.
(d) The human race would have to have been obliterated like the dinosaurs.

13. What can biological research do for complexity theory, in Wilson's account?
(a) Demonstrate how the cell is a unified organism.
(b) Demonstrate how many variables influence a cell's functioning.
(c) Demonstrate how layers of complexity interact.
(d) Demonstrate how the cell has adapted to the numerous variables that influence its functions.

14. What event marks the end of the Enlightenment, in Wilson's account?
(a) The French Revolution.
(b) The American Revolution.
(c) The birth of Wordsworth.
(d) The death of de Sade.

15. How are scientific theories constructed and used within the scientific community, in Wilson's account?
(a) They sketch but never define natural phenomena.
(b) They rely on intuition as much as observable results.
(c) They can be discarded if disproved.
(d) They are made to define eternal laws.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Wilson credit animals with being able to see?

2. What does Wilson say was the consequence of Robespierre's employment of the concept of the general will?

3. What accomplishment does Wilson say Einstein strove for in his work?

4. That scientific tools does Wilson credit with driving the age of scientific expansion?

5. What interpret does Wilson give the myth of Icarus?

(see the answer keys)

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