Edward O. Wilson: What was new about sociobiology — and it finally began to dawn — was that, for better or for worse, right or wrong in its basic presumptions, for the first time,  That will only happen once, and that was another reason why there was so much trouble. The social scientists weren’t prepared for this. They didn’t understand it, or they think they saw fundamental flaws in it. They thought it was unhealthy. They thought it was hegemonic, and a great many of them still feel that way. That is one reason that I wrote my book Consilience, was to try to show how knowledge might be unified, and in a manner that would mean coalition and cooperation and joint exploration of the big remaining gap, rather than translation of the great branches of learning — the other great branches of learning — into scientific language and scientific rules of validation. Many who resisted Consilience resisted Sociobiology for the belief that somehow the scientists who didn’t really know what they were talking about were coming into the social sciences, humanities, and trying to take over in a destructive way. I hope that Consilience might have moderated that response.