Dear Pod,
One person can learn and experience only so much. If each of us had to go out and learn as much as we could about the world and how it worked and how we fit into it, then none of us would get very far in life. Thankfully, we are pretty good at sharing knowledge with each other.
When it comes to the natural world and human behavior, we do science. It's been awesomely effective at describing in increasing detail how things work in ever greater isolation from the rest of the world. But as scientists learn more and more about their particular subjects, they begin to lose perspective for the bigger picture. There is little to tie together their disparate insights into a unified whole.
Consilience is the idea that this extensive base of knowledge we've developed about the human condition and the rest of the world through scientific inquiry should be unified in a way that explains who we are, where we've come from, and suggest where we're going based on different choices that we make.
I would be immeasurably proud as a father if you helped us all grasp more of the meaning there is in life by making some contribution to this, the work of many earnest monkeys.
