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

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. How does postmodern influence portray existence?
(a) As individual.
(b) As interdependent.
(c) As communal.
(d) As chaotic.

3. What are social scientists lacking, according to Wilson?
(a) Relationships with the humanities.
(b) Funding.
(c) Unity and vision.
(d) Purpose and drive.

4. What do the arts do that makes them different from the sciences, in Edmund Wilson's account?
(a) Implicate qualities, instead of defining them.
(b) Generate sensations, instead of measuring them.
(c) Register sensations, instead of generating them.
(d) Prophesying laws, instead of revealing them.

5. How many disorders are caused by genes?
(a) 1,200.
(b) 120,000.
(c) 120.
(d) 12,000.

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

7. How does Wilson describe the difference between gifted and less-gifted artists' brains?
(a) Less-gifted artists have smaller capacity for empathy.
(b) Gifted artists use a larger are of their brains.
(c) Gifted artists have more connections between brain areas.
(d) Gifted artists have a larger language center.

8. Where does Edmund Wilson say consilience is beneficial?
(a) In biology and ethics.
(b) In all areas of learning.
(c) In humanities and natural sciences.
(d) In history and technology.

9. What does Edmund Wilson say is the purpose of the social science?
(a) To reveal the hidden meanings in people's actions.
(b) To demonstrate how to conquer other cultures.
(c) To Keep suppressed cultures alive.
(d) To provide a way to control the future.

10. What does Edmund Wilson say the arts ultimately create?
(a) Rituals and consistency.
(b) Consilience.
(c) Science.
(d) Religion.

11. What is gene-culture evolution?
(a) Development of individuals and races within evolving cultures.
(b) Evolution of the genes that change a species' culture.
(c) Changes in human culture that are driven by genetic changes.
(d) Enrichment of the environment within which genes are altered.

12. What do modern technologies give humans the ability to choose?
(a) The shape of their children's heads.
(b) The color of children's skin.
(c) The genetic superiority of a race.
(d) The direction of human evolution.

13. Where does postmodernism fail to accord with science, in Edmund Wilson's account?
(a) In describing the brain as chaotic.
(b) In rooting creativity in social behavior.
(c) In refusing to accept statistical modeling of individual behavior.
(d) In describing the arts as strictly cultural.

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

15. What is the problem with sociology, in Edmund Wilson's estimation?
(a) It is founded in statistics.
(b) It is grounded in badly-understood genetic science.
(c) It relies on untrustworthy models for its measurements.
(d) It avoids analysis.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who does Wilson offer as evidence of thinkers affected by the concept of natural rights?

2. Where do tangible phenomena evolve, according to consilience?

3. What do the arts need science for?

4. What does Wilson offer as evidence of cross-cultural epi-genetic rules?

5. What do cultures use from the mind, in Wilson's account?

(see the answer keys)

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