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Best Books of the Month
Want to know our Editors' picks for the best books of the month? Browse Best Books of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen categories.
"The Meaning of Human Existence," by Edward O. Wilson, is an extraordinary book: audacious, illuminating--and in the end, oddly comforting. How could it not be with a subject and title so outrageously brazen? Written by one of the most honored and preeminent living biologists, and at the pinnacle of his life, this is an exceptionally personal book. It is a synthesis and distillation of all the big who-are-we ideas he's put together from a lifetime of scientific research and personal experience. You might call it a highly personal philosophical anthropology. But more accurately, it's a scientific creation narrative about how we came to be what we are, what makes us special in the cosmos, and how we can use that specialness to improve our future.
I downloaded this book the day it was published and devoured it over the course of the next two days. Now, a few days later, I am still basking in the satisfying glow and deep comfort of that extraordinary experience.
The book pleased me not because it offered any major new scientific concepts or ideas. In fact, I found I was already quiet familiar with nearly all of the science presented in the book. If you've read Wilson's other bestselling books, and you're reasonably well-read in the fields of prehistory, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and comparative religions, then you, too, will find little new here. What was beautiful and remarkable was how the author was able to weave these many big concepts together to form a stunning tapestry of truth, a new science-based creation narrative.
In this book, Wilson recounts his personal scientific take on the epic journey of human evolution.Read more ›
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110 of 117 people found the following review helpful
The most ambitious thing about this relatively short book seems to be its title. Wilson fans will quickly discover that there is nothing really new here. On the contrary, it struck me to be a collection of set pieces that are not even carefully edited (as can be seen by the fact that several explanations and descriptions occur--almost verbatim--in several places).
Wilson, one of the founding fathers of sociobiology, sees not only the biological make up of mankind but also its cultural creativity shaped by the accidental developments of its evolutionary history. Thus our morality arose out of the conflicting pressures of individual selection (sin) versus group selection (virtue), our love of stories and literature, our delight in music, our sense of religious awe all exist because they provided evolving man with advantages in his existence as successful hunter-gatherer. For Wilson a phenomenon (be it biological or cultural) is explained in its meaning as soon as its evolutionary advantage for mankind has been explained, a view shared by few proponents or practitioners of the humanities. Where he seems to run into problems, however, is when it comes to deciding whether what was advantageous to hunter-gatherers can still be considered to be advantageous to the evolutionary future of mankind. Here Wilson decides to have it both ways. On the one hand, he firmly believes that it would be a mistake to fiddle with the biological make up of man's nature (p.60)--though he is quite willing to consider some drastic social engineering, which he himself admits "sounds 'fascist'" but "can be deferred for another generation or two" (p.137). Small comfort!
When he comes to the evolutionary advantages of man's culture, on the other hand, he is quite eager to pick and choose right now.Read more ›
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107 of 115 people found the following review helpful
I've read many of E.O. Wilson's books. None have stunned me in the same way as when I first read 'On Human Nature' but 'The Meaning of Human Existence' boasts a big title for what is, essentially, an echo of many of his past works. When Wilson sticks to science, he's as sharp and eloquent as ever. When he veers to philosophical guesswork, as in his chapter on Extraterrestrial Life, he's a lot less convincing.
While I liked the idea of visiting ETs being more concerned with the humanities than our scientific discoveries (they'd have reached the same scientific conclusions independent of human input) I wasn't convinced by Wilson's projections of what they might look like. I'm not sure there was any point in including such a chapter. In a book that should have been marshaling facts and arguments it felt like a less than amusing detour.
One of Wilson's main points remains that the internal conflict in human conscience is a result of thousands of years of trying to balance individual selection against group selection. In other words, selfishness is (to an extent) natural for each of us. But at the point it affects the group you belong to, it weakens that group. If it weakens it too much, adios to your entire group and goodbye to your gene pool. The rallying cry he concludes with, for humans to share enough knowledge to remember that they are part of life on earth rather than the point of life on earth, is a vital one. Fight ignorance, ask the right questions, catalog the answers - it's vintage Wilson. There are no breadcrumbs here thrown to the religious and Wilson's punches still hit home after all these years.
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