Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies

Wilson, Edward O.

ISBN 10: 1631495542 / ISBN 13: 9781631495540

Published by Liveright, 2019

About this Item

Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc.

Seller Inventory # 00085393864

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies
• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1631495542
• ISBN 13: 9781631495540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

10 line drawings

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.