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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is consilience?
(a) An agreed approach to different subjects.
(b) A proposal for reorganizing departments of knowledge.
(c) A historical basis for unifying fields of study.
(d) An underlying pattern that tends toward unification.

2. What has research on the mind had to focus on?
(a) The soul.
(b) Behavior.
(c) The spirit.
(d) The working brain.

3. What is Wilson ultimately interested in producing with consilience?
(a) Order.
(b) Opportunity.
(c) Efficiency.
(d) Freedom.

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

5. How does Wilson describe ant colonies?
(a) As interdependent systems.
(b) As a kind of controlled chaos.
(c) As the sum of their constituent ants.
(d) As superorganisms.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What does Wilson say he was searching for as a young man?

3. Where do the images of snakes in dreams likely come from, in Wilson's account?

4. What political movement did Condorcet inspire?

5. How does Wilson explain the ideal scientist's work ethic?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is reductionism, and what makes it useful for science?

2. How is Wilson's theory a consequence of evolutionary theory?

3. What does consilience provide as an educational policy?

4. How does Wilson offer ants as a metaphor for consilience?

5. In what way does Wilson distinguish between evolutionary progress and consilience?

6. How do anatomical limitations affect our science, in Wilson's account?

7. How is knowledge accepted as settled, or final?

8. How does the modern theory of dreams explain something like the presence and significance of snakes in dreams, in Wilson's account?

9. Why is consilience especially important in studying the mind?

10. What does the term "consilience" mean?

(see the answer keys)

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