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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 does Wilson call sociology?
(a) The study of complex societies.
(b) The study of simple society.
(c) The study of conflict between societies.
(d) The study of society.

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

3. What is the problem with anthropology, in Edmund Wilson's estimation?
(a) It is run by social scientists who attribute everything to genetics.
(b) It is not funded well enough.
(c) It is dominated by scientists who deny anthropology's genetic aspect.
(d) It is divided into two irreconcilable branches, neither of which resolve the question of diversity.

4. What did economists do during the Marginalist Era in economics?
(a) They described production as the result of supply and demand.
(b) They used statistics to model mass behaviors.
(c) They used science to analyze motives and trends in the mass.
(d) They examined social behaviors as individual activities.

5. What is the social cost of violating the incest taboo?
(a) Legal punishment.
(b) Unfit offspring.
(c) Disenfranchisement.
(d) Failure to adapt and survive.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Edmund Wilson say wars are products of?

2. What role does Wilson ascribe to human nature?

3. How does Transcendentalism justify war, in Edmund Wilson's account?

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

5. How does the empiricist view ethical reasoning?

Short Essay Questions

1. In what way are epi-genetic rules cross-cultural?

2. What is the purpose of the social sciences, and how does Wilson distinguish the social sciences from the physical social sciences?

3. What threats to contemporary culture does Wilson describe, and how is consilience useful in answering them?

4. How does postmodern art resist consilience, in E.O. Wilson's account?

5. What does Wilson say is the relationship between human genetics and the development of culture?

6. What are the two branches of anthropology Wilson describes, and what question does he say they both fail to answer?

7. How do social factors influence genetic distribution?

8. What social science does Wilson credit with coming closest to consilience?

9. What ethical perspective does Wilson call the Transcendental view?

10. Where does ethics come from, in E.O. Wilson's account?

(see the answer keys)

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