Summary
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.
Author Notes
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.
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The acclaimed naturalist delivers a pithy summary of evidence for Darwinian evolution of human behavior.The truth of human physical evolution, although denied by many laymen, hasn't troubled scientists since the 19th century. Behavioral evolution acquired a bad reputation when social Darwinists taught that being rich or powerful showed superior fitness (Darwin disagreed). In the 1960s, Wilson (Emeritus, Evolutionary Biology/Harvard Univ.; The Origins of Creativity, 2017, etc.) became a world expert on ants, a social insect, but he broadened his sights to include social evolution in general. In 1975, he published Sociobiology (1975), which provoked a firestorm; however, once accusations of fascism died down, biologists decided that he was onto something significant. The subject is only mildly controversial today, and Wilson, a skilled writer who accessibly addresses lay audiences, explains that simple cooperation exists throughout biological systems as far back as bacteria, and plenty of advanced species show a modest degree of division of labor. Extremely fewperhaps 2 percenthave reached the highest level of "eusociality," a rare condition that "has conferred ecological dominance on land by some of the species that possess it, particularly the ants, termites, and humans." The author proceeds to deliver a magisterial history of social evolution, from clouds of midges or sparrows to the grotesqueries of ant colonies to the perhaps parallel features of human society in which childless elements (grandparents, maiden aunts, young siblings, priests, nuns, etc.) seem to participate in nurturing the next generation. Altruism turns out to be a powerful evolutionary tool when employed on a broad scale. A selfish individual prospers compared to his neighbors, but a group that cooperates always outcompetes one with selfish members.A lucid, concise overview of human evolution that mentions tools and brain power in passing but focuses on the true source of our pre-eminence: the ability to work together. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Tens of thousands of extant animal species display among them almost every conceivable level of evolving social complexity, says Wilson (The Origins of Creativity, 2017), often called the father of sociobiology. A much smaller number, most of them ants, termites, bees, and wasps, but including a shrimp and the recently renowned mole rat, live in societies consisting of reproductive and nonreproductive castes. How this form of organization came about is the subject of this little book, which first discusses the six great transitions of evolution, of which the fifth is the origin of societies and the last the origin of language, and then traces general social evolution to the brink of eusociality, the highest state of insect evolution. Crucial to the broadest readership Genesis may attract is Wilson's arresting belief that more germane insight will attend the study of insect eusociality, for a plausible case can be made for eusociality in human beings. He adduces homosexuals and monastics as possible expressions of a eusocial nonreproductive caste among humans. Like virtually every one of Wilson's books, deeply informative and provocative.--Ray Olson Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Wilson's latest book, "Genesis," is framed as an exploration of humanity's social origins, a subject more traditionally the domain of philosophy and religion than of biological science. Though it is tempting to look at our close cousins the great apes - who, as Wilson notes, conduct humanlike campaigns of border raids and annex enemy territory, "usually by violent means" - this book draws on observations of a range of animals, a strategy scientists have used to reconstruct the steps that lead many species to form social arrangements based on altruism and cooperation. In addition to humans, 17 animals are now known to organize themselves in this way, and Wilson invokes these different species to paint a thorough yet succinct picture of the great evolutionary "transitions" that have shaped our own social world. Wilson, among our most eminent biologists, gets technical at times, frequently citing mathematical models and "multivariate linear regressions." But the book bursts to life with his observations of nature, from fire ants and social spiders to starlings. In the suburban neighborhoods of New England, he writes, flocks of starlings leave their roosts, "working as a feathered thousand-eyed Argus," and turning "into a single sprawling sentinel.... Within seconds the entire assembly may take off and swirl high in unison, soon to land elsewhere in a different array." Wilson deploys these stories to illustrate the implicit knowledge many animal societies embody: that there is safety, and efficiency, in numbers. More broadly, his narrative suggests a mechanism for advanced social organization: basic changes in the genetic code. As a result of such changes, humans have evolved larger brains, higher intelligence and - advantageous for survival - a tendency for more complex coalition- and alliance-building than our closest ape relatives. The increasing group sizes and longer social interactions - from "one hour a day to two hours in the earliest species of Homo, thence four to five hours in modern humanity" - in turn reinforce the parallel evolution of the genes we inherit and the culture we pass down. Wilson's analysis is worth heeding. "Within groups," he notes, "selfish individuals win against altruists, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals." AARATHI PRASAD has a doctorate in geneticsfrom Imperial College London and is the author of "In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine."
Library Journal Review
Eminent biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson (emeritus, Harvard Univ.; Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life) revisits a subject he's been studying for decades: the biological origin and evolution of social behavior. Focusing here on eusociality (the ultracooperative and altruistic form of social organization found in ant, bee, wasp, and termite colonies), the author describes the physical and behavioral adaptations that enabled individual organisms to form a eusocial colony and explains why only a few species among the millions on Earth have achieved it. Arguing that humans are eusocial as well, Wilson offers a scenario for how eusociality might have evolved among small groups of early humans "nesting" around a campsite. Wilson is widely recognized as an expert on insect societies, but some of his ideas are controversial and have raised the hackles of evolutionary and population biologists. Surprisingly, he makes scant reference to his critics. VERDICT A challenging read best suited for specialists in the fields of evolutionary biology and sociobiology. Popular science readers should turn to the author's more accessible work on the same topic: The Social Conquest of Earth.-Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
