The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth - Softcover

Wilson, Edward O.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393330486 ISBN 13: 9780393330489

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

The book that launched a movement: “Wilson speaks with a humane eloquence which calls to us all” (Oliver Sacks).

Called “one of the greatest men alive” by The Times of London, E. O. Wilson proposes an historic partnership between scientists and religious leaders to preserve Earth’s rapidly vanishing biodiversity.

About this title

About the Author

Edward O. Wilson is widely recognized as one of the world’s preeminent biologists and naturalists. The author of more than thirty books, including Half-Earth, The Social Conquest of Earth, The Meaning of Human Existence, and Letters to a Young Scientist, Wilson is a professor emeritus at Harvard University. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he lives with his wife, Irene Wilson, in Lexington, Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. With his usual eloquence, patience and humor, Wilson, our modern-day Thoreau, adds his thoughts to the ongoing conversation between science and religion. Couched in the form of letters to a Southern Baptist pastor, the Pulitzer Prize–winning entomologist pleads for the salvation of biodiversity, arguing that both secular humanists like himself and believers in God acknowledge the glory of nature and can work together to save it. The "depth and complexity of living Nature still exceeds human imagination," he asserts (somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms have been discovered to date), and most of the world around us remains unknowable, as does God. Each species functions as a self-contained universe with its own evolutionary history, its own genetic structure and its own ecological role. Human life is tangled inextricably in this intricate and fragile web. Understanding these small universes, Wilson says, can foster human life. Wilson convincingly demonstrates that such rich diversity offers a compelling moral argument from biology for preserving the "Creation." Wilson passionately leads us by the hand into an amazing and abundantly diverse natural order, singing its wonders and its beauty and captivating our hearts and imaginations with nature's mysterious ways. 25 illus. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0393330486
• ISBN 13: 9780393330489
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192