Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies

by Edward O. Wilson

Overview

Forming a twenty-first-century statement on Darwinian evolution, one shorn of “religious and political dogma,” Edward O. Wilson offers a bold work of scientific thought and synthesis.

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, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least seventeen—among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge- dwelling shrimp—have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.

Whether writing about midges who “dance about like acrobats” or schools of anchovies who protectively huddle “to appear like a gigantic fish,” or proposing that human society owes a debt of gratitude to “postmenopausal grandmothers” and “childless homosexuals,” Genesis is a pithy yet path-breaking work of evolutionary theory, braiding twenty-first-century scientific theory with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which Wilson is known.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631495540
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/19/2019
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	1,061,359
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021) was the author of more than thirty books, including Anthill, Letters to a Young Scientist, and The Conquest of Nature. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Wilson was a professor emeritus at Harvard University and lived with his wife in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Prologue 9

Chapter 1 The Search for Genesis 15

Chapter 2 The Great Transitions of Evolution 29

Chapter 3 The Great Transitions Dilemma and How it was Solved 41

Chapter 4 Tracking Social Evolution through the Ages 49

Chapter 5 The Final Steps to Eusociality 61

Chapter 6 Group Selection 79

Chapter 7 The Human Story 105

References and Further Reading 127

Acknowledgments 141

Index 143

Editorial Reviews

Wilson's latest book…is framed as an exploration of humanity's social origins, a subject more traditionally the domain of philosophy and religion than of biological science…[Genesis] bursts to life with his observations of nature, from fire ants and social spiders to starlings.

The New York Times Book Review - Aarathi Prasad

11/12/2018
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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Arresting.... Deeply informative and provocative."

Ray Olson

"Genesis is a beautifully clear account of a question that has lain unsolved at the core of biology ever since Darwin: how can natural selection produce individuals so altruistic that, rather than breeding themselves, they help others to do so?"

Richard Wrangham

"In his characteristically clear, succinct, and elegant prose, one of our grand masters of synthesis, Edward O. Wilson, explains here no less than the origin of human society."

Richard Rhodes

"Endlessly fascinating, Edward O. Wilson - in the tradition of Darwin - plumbs the depths of human evolution in a most readable fashion without sacrificing scholarly rigor."

Michael Ruse