I wanted to like this book however its premise is not one that I can agree - which is that human beings are innately destructive. Initially I agreed with the author, then later based on how he aligned human behavior with certain phrases I became hyper alert....it almost sounds like a replica of the ultra-religious "innate sin" that humans carry....and (separate to the book) I am increasingly sensitive to the partnership between green-economy & religious fundamentalism.

I enjoyed reading/learning of the author Wilson's outlining human evolution...especially the deep memory of fields of grass behind a primordial memory of safety/security.

I enjoyed parts of this book very much. I recommend this book to read however if it is too dry for you, then recommend skipping around. It is worth seeing almost like a reference book rather than a cover-to-cover read. ( )

Dry and academic. Lots of ego. Repetive. ( )

Wilson is such a poetic guy that you almost hate to disagree with him based on prose style alone. Seriously, his sentences have the sorts of graceful rhythms that you associate with British authors that have had an expensive classical education, which makes reading him enjoyable even if, as many seem to feel, he's completely wrong. This book is a typically Wilsonian exploration of the human need to find meaning in our lives that's based on biology but aims at culture. He's never liked C. P. Snow's famous division between hard science and "soft studies", so in his introduction, he used Paul Gaugin's famous painting "D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous" ("Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?") as an example of the type of questioning that occupies most philosophy, art, and culture, and, while acknowledging the power of the fruits of these artistic labors, dismissed them as being unable, on their own, to answer those questions. As he's famously said in the past, in one of those imperious statements that tend to polarize readers, most historical philosophy is essentially worthless, being based on "failed models of the brain", and in his view only the techniques of modern science, with their tradition of rigor, empiricism, and dismantling dogma, can deliver even partially true answers to the Big Questions.

The most controversial aspect of the book, from a scientific standpoint, is that after a lifetime of championing kin selection, the current mainstream view of how evolution operates, Wilson has now decided that group selection is the way to go. Essentially he's arguing that eusociality, the collective, collaborative interactions characteristic of humans and ants among very few other species, is the key to understanding ourselves, and that requires understanding where it came from along with a new understanding of evolution. So there are very thought-provoking discussions of humans and ants wrapped in a troubling heresy. In humans, he traced our current dominance to the lucky confluence of a few necessary preadaptations that separate us from our protohuman ancestors and relatives. These are: dwelling on land (even brilliant cetaceans can't develop fire); large body size (tiny creatures just can't get brains large enough for general-purpose intelligence); grasping hands (far superior to claws and fangs for manipulating tools); bipedalism (freeing up our hands to interact with the world more); diet (meat, though hard to hunt, is rich in energy); fire (duh); and division of labor (this is a fascinating link that deserves a book of its own - is Adam Smith-style division of labor itself a source of intelligence, or merely a product of it?).

You may have noticed that very few of those attributes are true of ants; hold that thought. He immediately pivoted towards declaring kin selection a failure and declaring that group selection was a necessary component of a multi-level theory of evolution. I confess that at first I simply didn't understand how he was able to reach that conclusion. As discussed by writers like Richard Dawkins in his excellent The Extended Phenotype, a huge amount of incredibly complicated behavior that reaches all the way up to the level of an organism's interaction with its peers can be explained by the interactions of genes and only genes; there simply is no group-level counterpart of a gene that can be inherited or replicated, and though epigenetic artifacts like memes seem to behave in analogous ways on a "higher" level, they are merely the products of combinations of genes and don't necessarily have a "real" existence independent of the individuals that create them. Cultural markers like religious affiliation, language, sexual practices, sporting traditions, economic arrangements, or conventions on which side of the road to drive on may look like they are the group-level equivalent to genes because they get passed on to succeeding generations, seem to have an effect on the fitness of the groups that practice them, and undergo gene-like mutations and alterations, but they are at base mere phenotypes, and no appeal to "top-down" processes like group selection or "superior culture" are needed to explain them.

The "centrifugal force" of between-group conflict and "centripetal force" of in-group altruism that Wilson devotes much of the book to discussing are, in the mainstream view, no different, and so I had some trouble enjoying the (very interesting and well-written) Out-of-Africa chapters thereof because I was constantly wondering when Wilson was going to circle back around and fully explain his bombshell. There were many points where he brings up evidence that seems like trouble for his group-selection theory, such as when he uses the example of the full competence of Australian aboriginal children brought up by white families - if the 45,000 genetic divergence of native Australians and modern white Australians is able to be so easily overcome by upbringing in a particular culture, how does that disprove the theory that cultural differences are essentially interchangeable epiphenomena of our overwhelmingly similar genes? He cited an insight from the great cybernetician Herbert Simon about the fact that human societies are decomposable into nearly discrete sub-systems shows the advantages of division of labor to a hierarchical society, but mere complexity is not in itself a sign of a qualitatively different type of evolution; Simon himself had a bit in his pioneering The Sciences of the Artificial where he discussed how complex behavior can be merely the result of complexities in the environment, and not in the system directly. For example, Modern France is much more complex than the France of 1500 AD, but any kind of group evolution would have to work on what seems to be implausibly fast levels to have any role in this, and the fact that groups can descend to much lower levels of complexity (e.g. post-Fall Romans, Easter Islanders, the Mayans) without any noticeable changes in the genetic makeup of the populations made me skeptical that group selection is anything other than the interface of genetic epiphenomena with the outside world.

It took until the ant chapters for me to really come to terms with his thesis, maybe because I had fewer preconceived notions and was more open to his theory when it was put in terms of ants rather than people. He explained two criteria for eusociality: first, every eusocial species typically has large investments in nests, with the corollary that some percentage of individuals never leave the nest; second, each eusocial species also has a division of labor, with the corollary that some individuals labor for the good of the collective instead of for direct personal gain. Thus bees have their hives with attendant workers and soldiers, while humans have cities with the same, and this kind of multi-generational investment and specialization ("capital accumulation" and "career paths", in human terms) give individual members of the collective/polity more advantages than if they were simply fending for themselves and had to begin each generation from scratch. This reframing of traditional Adam Smith-style economics is both banal and pretty clever, and it reminded me of Paul Krugman's short essay "What Economists Can Learn from Evolutionary Theorists" on the similarities between neoclassical economic models and their biological counterparts in population simulations and so forth, in that it showed the interesting conclusions you can get by broadening your scope to include other disciplines.

The ant sections are also where Wilson made the clearest preparatory arguments for his group selection thesis by going over the analogous preadaptations that insect species went through in order to develop eusociality: fortified nest sites, protection against predators, and the presence of some incremental advantage to being in a hive versus being solitary. The one bright line appears to be the emergence of a distinct worker caste. With that discussion of the nature of eusociality, Wilson then turned to why individual selection seemed unable to explain it. The distinction between the gene as a unit of heredity and the gene or individual as the unit of selection, phenotype plasticity (the tendency for identical genes to have different phenotypes depending on environmental circumstances, such as humans having distinct fingerprints even though we all have the same finger genes), and the puzzle of why some eusocial species are diploid versus haplodiploid formed the main platform for the discussion of Hamilton's inequality, which is at the heart of kin selection theory. Stated briefly, "rb > c, meaning that an allele prescribing altruism will increase in frequency in a population if the benefit, b, to the recipient of the altruism, times r, the degree of kinship to the altruist, is greater than the cost to the altruist." This had always seemed very reasonable to me, and it still does, though Wilson spent a great deal of time going over its theoretical and empirical shortcomings.

As a layman I'm obviously not qualified enough to fully judge his conclusions, but I did not see a real falsifiable prediction in the book: is it actually impossible for something like a sterile worker caste to evolve using the principle of kin selection? There was a lot of talk about the failings of kin selection in simulations, yet it seemed like the actual proof was left to an appendix that never arrived. Furthermore, it seemed like he was only interested in the question of which type of selection was correct as a way to talk about eusociality, which seemed like putting the cart before the horse. The way he discussed it, eusociality is to individualism roughly as multicellularism is to unicellularism, which makes sense on an analogical level, yet the book just plain needed more about group selection to back that up. However, his discussion of eusociality was awesome, and seemed full of good insights. Much much more could be written about group and individual forces, and the sections that talked about how they interacted in terms of culture were really good, especially when he mentioned art or religion. His insights on how much of art is merely patterns that excite the pattern-recognition systems of the human brain are not new, but the argument gains new meaning in the context of the social purposes of art and what artistic endeavors do for group solidarity.

His closing contention that space travel is a harmful, expensive mirage annoyed me as a science fiction fan and as someone who thinks that space travel is a logical next step in the long-term evolution of Earth life, but that ending aberrance shouldn't detract from the fascinating meditation on the true nature of our species and its ultimate destination. These sentences in particular touch on a very important theme in all politics: "[A]n iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies." Wilson may not have definitively answered the question of Where Are We Going?, but I would love for some further discussion from him, and from the other geneticists who oppose group selection, yet have not given eusociality the kind of treatment it gets here. ( )

Better towards the end... or at least I found it more interesting. Surprised a bit by some redundancies early on. Also thought that he could have done a better job explaining certain concepts within the sections on insects.... Preferred the book on self-righteousness as providing some scientific/evolutionary perspective on human morality. ( )

I am not scientifically minded as a matter of natural inclination, but this particular book caught my attention as it addresses the field of sociobiology -- looking at questions of psychology, biology, sociology, and philosophy. Much of it requires further reading and study, but as a first glance into the field, I found it fascinating. There is one section where the author states that if all living humans and all living ants were log-stacked into a cube, each cube would measure less than a mile in dimension; this made my head hurt for the rest of the day. ( )