is an excellent book by Edward O. Wilson (isbn 0-349-11112-X). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.
The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind.
Analysis and synthesis, he [Goethe] liked to say, should be alternated as naturally as breathing in and breathing out.
Nothing in science - nothing in life, for that matter - makes sense without theory.
Complexity is what interests scientists in the end, not simplicity.
Consilience among the biological sciences is based on a thorough understanding of scale in time and space.
Complexity theory can be defined as the search for algorithms used in nature that display common features across many levels of organisation.
In a system containing perfect internal order, such as a crystal, there can be no further change.
The brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive.
The biologist S. J. Singer has drily expressed the matter thus: I link, therefore I am.
No example of bias-free mental development has yet been discovered.
