Edward O. Wilson

A 21st-century philosophical argument against mechanistic views of human life outlines expansive and advanced theories on human behavior to consider how humans are supremely different from all other species. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of On Human Nature. 75,000 first printing.

The Meaning of Human Existence

Lance Willett

"The most successful scientist thinks like a poet — wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical — and works like a bookkeeper."

Wilson explains that humans have evolved (unlike all other animals or plants) to consider and devote our time and thoughts to stories; both replaying the past and foretelling the future. Humanities — a true companion to science — are the natural history of our culture, and our most private and precious heritage.

I felt this collection of essays is motivational and introspective, hitting big areas of concern: how tribal divisions drive our existence via such things as religious wars, how we balance group versus individual choices to drive our decision-making: selfish versus altruistic, and how humanities describe the human condition and science describes human existence. And that they're both important and crucial to understand our human race.

Science will be soon be "finished" as we learn everything we can about our physical past and present, whereas humanities will always improve and grow richer as our history expands.

Style note: I like how Wilson doesn't italicize Latin phrases (they just exist in situ). Marking to re-read this again soon.

Christopher Wheeler

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham.

The Meaning of Human Existence

Reviews