Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #378737 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

Review
Twenty-five years after its first publication, Harvard University Press has re-released Edward O. Wilson's classic work, "On Human Nature". A double Pulitzer Prize winner, Wilson is a writer of effortless grace and stylish succinctness and this is one of his finest, most important books...[A] highly influential, elegantly written book. -- Robin McKie "The Observer" (12/19/2004)

From the Author
Nice book I wrote
In this book I tried to expand the horizons of the readers to new perspectives on how the biological nature of humans affect their behavior.

Customer Reviews

Probably the Greatest Living Biologist
Edward O. Wilson is, above all else, a scientist. He's spent his entire career learning about ants - a laborious, detailed, and probably mind-numbing task. He can document his propositions with a stunning level of empirical detail. A biologist first and a commentator on humanity second, E.O. Wilson is the farthest thing from a pseudo-scientist alive today.

Here he turns his empirical eye to humanity: we are, after all, just another organism. Applying the same techniques that made him one of the most respected biologists in the world, he sheds light on who we are, how we got that way, and where we're going.

Can change your view of human nature
In this book Wilson considers how various aspects of human nature can be explained by evolution. The book changed my world view more than any other I've read. Unfortunately it's written in a rather inaccessible style - Wilson seems to prefer to use an obscure word when there's a perfectly good alternative that won't require you to reach for the dictionary. He also allows himself to vier off the subject he was discussing at times. But don't let this put you off - the content is worth it.

If someone is strongly critical of this book I would suspect them of being a religious fundamentalist (one topic discussed is religious belief) and/or having a poor ability to understand science.

An Important Book
Alan Michael Forrester seems to completely misunderstand the genetic basis for behaviour in his review. The mechanisms that cause XYY men to end up in prison more often than normal men are completely irrelevant - the simple fact that they do is enough to show that variation between people at the genetic level contributes to variation in their behaviour.

Edward Wilson was one of the key scientists and most important intellectuals in the development of the "new sciences of Human Nature" (as Steven Plinker calls the social and biological sciences that relate to human nature), and this is an important book in that development.