Nearly half a century ago Sir C. P. Snow lamented that there was a deep chasm between science and the humanities. Truth moves in ways that do not respect the strict borders drawn by us to divide the branches of learning, because the divisions of learning do not exist in nature. Academic disciplines were created by man for the sake of convenience in chasing the traces of truth under different circumstances. Truth crosses over the borders of academic disciplines, at times in straight lines or at other times drawing gentle curves, while we are confined inside the boundaries of different branches of learning created by ourselves to struggle with a fraction of truth all our lifetimes. Now, the time has come for us to cross the interdisciplinary borders freely and bravely to follow the trajectory of the truth. It is the time that we omitted the cumbersome process of passport checking every time we cross the academic borders.

In 2005 I published my translation of the Harvard University evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson's acclaimed book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1988). Consilience is a concept introduced by the 19th-century British philosopher William Whewell (1794-1866) in his book, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). It was then shelved for one and a half century before being resurrected by Wilson. I put it in a vessel called "tongsub." In a word, consilience, or tongsub, means deriving a common system of explanation for the facts and the theories based on the facts bound together through traversing different branches of learning.

Wilson borrowed the term ‘consilience’ from Whewell, but did not adopt his holistic view. Rather, Wilson proposed consilience based on scientific reductionism. He argued that everything in life can be deduced to the level of physics and explained by physical laws. If there are things that are not fully explained by current theories of physics, it is not because they cannot be explainable by physics but because we have not found appropriate physical laws.

As a biologist myself, I am not completely sold to Wilson’s reductionist consilience. Wilson identifies two most complex systems in nature to be the human brain and natural ecosystem. In order to understand these systems we need to look at both the part and the whole. Wilson also declares that the greatest task of human mind was, and still is, the union of natural sciences and the humanities. I think that the 21st century will be the century we finally achieve this union. A successful union of the humanities and natural sciences will eventually lead to the consilience of all disciplines of learning. That is why I propose a new and interactive consilience.