The New York Times Book Review - Aarathi Prasad
Wilson's latest book…is framed as an exploration of humanity's social origins, a subject more traditionally the domain of philosophy and religion than of biological science…[Genesis] bursts to life with his observations of nature, from fire ants and social spiders to starlings.
Publishers Weekly
11/12/2018
Wilson (On Human Nature), a Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard evolutionary biologist, addresses what he calls the six “great transitions of evolution” that led to human society in this ambitious treatise, his 32nd book. He argues that these transitions (the beginnings of, respectively, life, complex cells, sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, societies, and language) have one important factor in common: “In each..., altruism at a lower level of biological organization is needed to reach the one above.” While he does an impressive job in this short text of making the nature of the transitions clear, his explanation of group selection, in which evolution acts on a whole group rather than on individuals, and in particular the concept of eusociality (“the organization of a group into reproductive and non-reproductive castes”), is far too cursory to be fully understandable to the general reader. Wilson is at his most controversial when arguing that human societies are eusocial by nature, by citing, among other points, the high “frequency of homosexuality-propensity genes in human populations.” He concludes that humans have been shaped largely through altruism and cooperation, leaving readers with a message that is optimistic and worthy of discussion even as it remains debatable. (Mar.)
Ray Olson
"Arresting.... Deeply informative and provocative."
Richard Wrangham
"Genesis is a beautifully clear account of a question that has lain unsolved at the core of biology ever since Darwin: how can natural selection produce individuals so altruistic that, rather than breeding themselves, they help others to do so?"
Richard Rhodes
"In his characteristically clear, succinct, and elegant prose, one of our grand masters of synthesis, Edward O. Wilson, explains here no less than the origin of human society."
Michael Ruse
"Endlessly fascinating, Edward O. Wilson - in the tradition of Darwin - plumbs the depths of human evolution in a most readable fashion without sacrificing scholarly rigor."