Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“The book bursts to life with [Wilson’s] observations of nature, from fire ants and social spiders to starlings.”—Aarathi Prasad, New York Times Book Review
An “endlessly fascinating” (Michael Ruse) work of scientific thought and synthesis, Genesis is Edward O. Wilson’s twenty-first-century statement on Darwinian evolution. Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Wilson demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. At least seventeen of these species—among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp—have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation. Braiding twenty-first- century scientific theory with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which Wilson is beloved, Genesis is “a magisterial history of social evolution, from clouds of midges or sparrows to the grotesqueries of ant colonies” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson (On Human Nature), a Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard evolutionary biologist, addresses what he calls the six "great transitions of evolution" that led to human society in this ambitious treatise, his 32nd book. He argues that these transitions (the beginnings of, respectively, life, complex cells, sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, societies, and language) have one important factor in common: "In each..., altruism at a lower level of biological organization is needed to reach the one above." While he does an impressive job in this short text of making the nature of the transitions clear, his explanation of group selection, in which evolution acts on a whole group rather than on individuals, and in particular the concept of eusociality ("the organization of a group into reproductive and non-reproductive castes"), is far too cursory to be fully understandable to the general reader. Wilson is at his most controversial when arguing that human societies are eusocial by nature, by citing, among other points, the high "frequency of homosexuality-propensity genes in human populations." He concludes that humans have been shaped largely through altruism and cooperation, leaving readers with a message that is optimistic and worthy of discussion even as it remains debatable.
Customer Reviews
Left Me Wanting
I was looking forward to a thorough exploration of the subject but at less than 100 pages this brief text left me wanting. Rather than a book, this material seems more appropriate to a quarter’s worth of freshman lectures.