Science & Tech Quote by E. O. Wilson

Wilson’s line is a calm flex dressed up as moderation. “By any reasonable measure” isn’t just a qualifier; it’s a challenge. He’s daring the reader to name a metric that doesn’t point, sooner or later, to modern science’s record: longer lives, fewer famines, vaccines, sanitation, electricity, computation. The phrase smuggles in a standard of judgment that privileges outcomes over metaphysics, measurable gains over consoling stories. Reasonable, here, means empirical. If you disagree, you’re not merely wrong; you’re being unreasonable.

The target is larger than the Enlightenment’s reputational rehab. Wilson is writing against a late-20th-century mood that treats Enlightenment confidence as naive, even dangerous: the suspicion that “progress” is just imperial swagger, that science is another ideology, that rationality is a mask for power. He doesn’t deny science’s complicities or failures, but he refuses to grant cultural critics the last word. The subtext is a rebuke to fashionable relativism: you can critique science all you want, but you’re doing it on a platform built by the very enterprise you’re dismissing.

It also reflects Wilson’s lifelong project of “consilience,” his belief that the sciences can stitch together what the humanities and social sciences leave fragmented. By invoking Enlightenment “faith,” he acknowledges science has a quasi-moral dimension: not blind belief, but a bet on method. The sentence works because it’s strategically unromantic. No grand hymn to reason, just a ledger. And the ledger, Wilson insists, balances.