E.O. Wilson isn’t shy about the size of the questions he’s asking here, what is the meaning of a human life, how did we end up altruistic when selfishness wins for the individual every time, why do human societies organize themselves so much like ant colonies when we’re nothing alike biologically. That’s a lot to carry in one book, and Wilson mostly earns the attempt, his argument for group selection over strict kin selection as the real engine behind human cooperation is presented with the authority of someone who spent a career studying eusocial insects up close, ants and termites building complex societies through a completely different evolutionary path than we did.
The writing itself is genuinely good, clean and confident without turning purple, and there are stretches, especially early on, where I found myself nodding along with real enthusiasm. But it loses momentum in the middle third. The ant material, which is clearly Wilson’s actual home turf, starts to feel like it’s crowding out the human argument rather than supporting it, and by the time he circles back to us I’d lost some of the thread connecting the two halves.
My other hesitation, and I’ve seen other readers land here too, is how quickly he dismisses other social species, herds, flocks, schools, as lesser cases without doing much work to justify the dismissal, and how little patience he has for philosophy and linguistics as disciplines with anything to add. Calling competitive sports “the moral equivalent of war” is the kind of line that made me wonder if he’d been in the research tower a little too long. Still an ambitious, well-argued book from someone who’s earned the right to swing big. I just don’t think every swing connects.