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On Human Nature
No one who cares about the human future can afford to ignore E.O. Wilson's book. On Human Nature begins a new phase in the most important intellectual controversy of this generation: Is human behavior controlled by the species' biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?
With characteristic pugency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate.
In his new preface E. O. Wilson reflects on how he came to write this book: how The Insect Societies led him to write Sociobiology, and how the political and religious uproar that engulfed that book persuaded him to write another book that would better explain the relevance of biology to the understanding of human behavior.
With characteristic pugency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate.
In his new preface E. O. Wilson reflects on how he came to write this book: how The Insect Societies led him to write Sociobiology, and how the political and religious uproar that engulfed that book persuaded him to write another book that would better explain the relevance of biology to the understanding of human behavior.
288 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1978
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12044 people want to read
About the author
Edward O. Wilson
201 books2,494 followersEdward Osborne Wilson, sometimes credited as E.O. Wilson, was an American biologist, researcher, theorist, and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. He was the Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
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September 19, 2016
OBSERVING THE HUMAN ANIMAL
Many animals, especially mammals, have evolved social mechanisms to aid in survival. But a few exceptional species, such as wasps, bees and ants, have taken this to the extreme and these are the species that dominate the planet today. They can only be termed as "UltraSocial”.
Humans can also be included in this elite list of earth conquerors. After all, we live in the ‘Anthropocene’ now.
Wilson asks us to view humans as not an completely exceptional species, in spite of their great achievements and in spite of the natural bias that arises from the fact that they are our own species. If we truly want to understand the human species, understanding that they form part of a continuum in nature is essential - socially, cognitively and genetically.
If they are truly unique, then they are a lost cause.
Instead, being extra humble and situating the human emotions and social inclinations (including violence) in a larger framework of ‘possibilities,’ is what Wilson proposes to do in this book. By ‘possibilities’ he means behavioral and social options/range that has been exhibited by the many species - identify this entire range and then try to understand where the human species is situated. Even if precariously!
Hypertrophied Virtues
"Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function" than to keep intact the genetic material.
To Wilson, morality, altruism, generosity, self-sacrifice and even pleasure, and all other human ‘virtues’ are evolutionary outgrowths of the structure of the human brain, which itself was evolved as a survival mechanism. Since all social structures, including political structure and religions, then evolve from this basic raw material, they are all manifestations of our basic nature. (Further discussion of Cognitivism & Religion. Linked.)
However, even as they are manifestations of our basic nature, Wilson tells that they are not direct manifestations of our genetic imperatives, as it is the ‘super’ insects. Instead, our ‘extreme’ social traits are in fact hypertrophied versions of our instincts. The social instincts exist but our societies take them to either extremes - achieving heights of classical civilizations and also the depths of cannibalism in the same ‘civilization’. This is due to the fact that our ‘Ultrasociality’ is not natural. It is an uneasy amalgam of hypertrophied traits and needs to be propped up with care.
The Impatient Species
It is this uneasy Ultrasociality that makes human societies a tough act to pull off consistently. We are not naturally ultrasocial. Unlike ants who evolved it genetically, over millions of years, we went part of the distance genetically, then got impatient and went on a fast-forward culturally.
The leap to agriculture and state societies some 8,000 years ago represented a rare but highly successful evolutionary transition to “ultrasociality,” a type of social organization seen in only a handful of species, including ants and termites. Ultrasociality is characterized by a full-time division of labor, specialists who do not aid in food production, sharing of information, collective defense, and complex city-states.
So we end up with an even more organized structure than what the ants have, but have not their ultra-instincts that make it a breeze for them to keep up their ultrasociality. We are not wiling to submit our individuality for the group. Of course, we have a strong tendency to do so — Experiments have shown that it is shockingly easy to elicit a sense of solidarity among a group of strangers. Just tell them they’ll be working together as a team, and they immediately start working together as a team, all the while attributing to each other a host of positive qualities like trustworthiness and competence. But in spite of our team-building capabilities, we always think of number one eventually.
[ On the other hand, Ant societies don't go into massive societal/cultural collapses and dream of the past glories of their own Roman Empires of yore. ]
Also, we are not consistent in defining our groups - unlike ants who base it on strong evolutionary grounds, our cultural evolution has allowed us softer more nebulous decision-making capacities about group-formation. So we can define arbitrary ‘others’ and launch wars, and can even defy our own in-groups and go psychopath against our own societies!
This analysis points to the source of constant conflict in human societies — of ‘us’ vs ‘them’ and more importantly of ‘us vs ‘me’. And in the final analysis, what human conflict cannot be slotted into these two categories?
Science as a Substitute for Instincts
All this leads us to the depressing analysis that we cannot depend on cultural evolution alone to solve our problems. While an optimist like Pinker can point to statistical evidence to show that violence is ‘declining’, we should also realize that humans have a historic record of violent pendulum swings in violence - and this ties in very nicely with Wilson’s thesis that social evolution tries to reign in individual genetic tendencies with a variety of means but eventually they reassert themselves and civilization breaks down again. So the famous ‘Fear of Decline’ that we mock scholars/historians of having could very well be a natural tendency of human societies - because our social instincts just cannot match up to our social ambitions!
What hope then?
The best alternative would be to initiate sufficiently thorough investigation into these very instincts and evolutionary predispositions. So that we can build our societies in a more informed fashion. Stressing the virtues of cooperation can be a more nuanced approach to human nature than the “selfish gene”/economic man worldview, but the dark side to human cooperation must be understood if we are to realistically assess our present circumstances.
This is where a discipline like Sociobiology is of great value - The best way to correct mistakes in our social evolution is to understand our mental evolution and the best way to do this is by accepting ourselves as animals and conducting comparative studies through the discipline of Sociobiology… We should figure out what level of social and institutional complexity our brains (instincts) can tolerate and take a step back and build our future societies around that.
The sociobiological perspective put forward by Wilson is quite sound and holds up well even decades after being canonized as a classic work. If any criticism can be leveled, it would have to be at his refusal to use politically correct language. This is deliberate because Wilson considers there is no scope for political correctness in science, especially when the need for a harsh and unalloyed look at Human Nature is more urgent than ever.
This book is a must read precisely because it fully lives up to that highly ambitious title!
June 1, 2012
I have to admit that I have approached this text in a hypercritical mood. This is unfortunate and not in the best interests of a fair review, but rather inevitable I am afraid. This book is the progenitor of a thousand others that go about explaining complex human social and cultural relationships on the basis not so much of Darwinian evolution, as of a remarkably limited notion of human sexual selection. Endless books now ‘explain’ human culture as a kind of Freudian just-get-me-laid-right-now single answer for everything. One of the things I found rather remarkable about this book is that it is, in many ways, a polemic against Marxism. I really wasn’t expecting this, and I guess in part this is symptomatic of when it was written. Then again, this is a book of scientific materialism and I guess civil wars tend to be the fiercest wars. Nevertheless, the differences between a Marxist view and this Sociobiological view could hardly be starker. It is clear that Wilson has much more time for the religion than he does for the Marxism, though he spends lots of time in this book tarring them with the same brush.
The main point of his thesis is that humans are products of evolution, no surprise there. Clearly, this process of evolution has left us with preferences for the type of society we would rather live in – for example, ants (Wilson’s actual field of expertise) are also social animals, but they would find our kind of society remarkably strange. So, to what extent does our biology underpin the kinds of social structures we are likely to have and what does our biology close off to us as social options?
This book is also a polemic against the social sciences – a polemic based on the argument that the social sciences do not rest upon a proper foundation because they misunderstand our fundamental natures. This is because while discussing our natures they are ignorant of our biology and present us as blank slates on which anything can be written. So, from Wilson’s perspective, it will only be when our economics, sociology and so on are properly based on a recognition of our biological evolution and the constraints this places upon how we can behave that social sciences will become properly scientific and therefore also properly able to make predictions of the likely pathways of our cultural and social evolution.
Much of this is rather self-evident, I think. If we accept human evolution - that we have evolved from creatures spanning back in time to some kind of primal soup – then it would seem odd indeed to argue that this evolution would play no role at all in influencing or even in determining a range of things about us and the societies we are likely to create. The question really is to what extent does our biology determine the social structures and relations we are likely to enter into, to what extent can acknowledging that we are biological creatures explain these human societies and preferences?
Which brings me to my concerns with this book. The cover of the edition I have asks, ‘Is human behaviour controlled by the species’ biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?’ – To the extent this book is seeking to provide positive answers to these questions it would need to be viewed as a failure. I say that because all too rarely is it shown that our behaviour as social animals is limited by our biological heritage.
I don’t really know enough about the origins of the family or the kinds of family relationships that exist across various cultural societies to speak with authority here – however, from reading Wilson you would assume there is only one basic family type and that is more or less the nuclear family as it exists in the US, with perhaps a bit of Mormon polygamy thrown in for variety. But, like I said, while such an idea sounds decidedly iffy to me, I’m no anthropologist and so I’ll let that one go by.
Biological interpretations, to the extent that they are going to provide answers and foundations for understanding human behaviour, must first assume that key human traits (particularly essentially human ones) must be innate – or at least mostly innate. Hence the attraction of Chomsky’s linguistics to biological innatists. Chomsky asserts that children simply do not get enough exposure to varieties of linguistic structures to enable them to be able to become competent language users. The poverty of the linguistic environments children are faced with ought to mean virtually no one would ever learn their native language, and yet the very opposite is the case. Wilson twice states that there exist mathematical models that prove we should not be able to use language at all if we needed to learn it each time from scratch. Therefore, our brains have evolved to make the learning of language more or less inevitable, given even the scantiest of access to a native language. The problem is that such a view is not as unproblematically accepted as is made out here. The Sociolinguists have shown that rather than children being given incredibly poor linguistic environments on which to learn their native language, parents and other adults go out of their way to structure child learning so as to provide very rich learning environments. Furthermore, the richer that environment the better the language is learnt. Endless studies have now been conducted on the cognitive development of children as influenced by the richness of the language learning environment they are confronted with while learning to speak, and it is utterly clear that those exposed to the kinds of barren environments Chomsky mentions end up with tightly restricted vocabularies and grammatical abilities that severely limit their cognitive development. As Luria and Vygotsky make abundantly clear, Piaget’s view that development leads learning is actually the very opposite of what is the case. To present Piaget as the last word on learning is not only self-serving, but is also not supported by the latest in educational research.
But then, I guess it is normal for people to cherry pick when they are building a case. What is interesting about this book is how few actual pronouncements there are about the biological limits imposed on human cultures. The chapter on men and women (or rather, sex) is a case in point. He does not say women are inferior or unable to perform certain tasks or even that they would be better off doing other things. What he says is, “There is a cost, which no one can yet measure, awaiting the society that moves either from juridical equality of opportunity between the sexes to a statistical equality of their performance in the professions, or back toward deliberate sexual discrimination.” His point being that this would be against human nature and so, even though a statistical equality might be achieved, it would only come at a cost which might in the end make it not worthwhile anyway. This is a terribly strange argument to me.
I want to explain why I find this argument so odd via another route. In discussing vegetarianism he says, “I am reminded of the clever way Robert Nozick makes this point when he constructs an argument in favour of vegetarianism. Human beings, he notes, justify the eating of meat on the grounds that the animals we kill are too far below us in sensitivity and intelligence to bear comparison. It follows that if representatives of a truly superior extra-terrestrial species were to visit Earth and apply the same criterion, they could proceed to eat us in good conscience.”
Yes, an interesting aside – but what is really interesting about this is that if you think about it for a second how well it undermines Wilson’s thesis. Wilson is essentially arguing in this book that human evolution constrains human action and, despite wishful thinking or even good moral sentiment, biology will out in the end. Well, it is blindingly obvious that humans evolved to eat meat. In fact, much of this bio-babble around the differences of the sexes is based on the idea of man the hunter and woman the gatherer. We have digestive systems designed for eating meat, we have teeth that clearly mark us out as non-herbivores. So, what are we to make of the 5 to 10% of the population who are either complete or mainly vegetarians? What are we to make of the moral argument against eating meat Wilson has presented here? Why isn’t what we eat as constrained by our evolutionary past as what job we have is made out to be constrained by whether we were dressed in pink or blue at birth?
I almost laughed out loud when he said that slavery is a remarkably unstable form of human society – and then later discusses the glories of Egyptian, Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman societies. Much of this book is concerned with the ‘true’ form of human existence – that of primitive hunter-gatherer communities – and these are seen as being in some way similar to modern societies – particularly individualistic capitalist ones. Yet, slavery as a social institution lasted for much longer than capitalism has. To say it is an aberration is brave, if not foolhardy.
There is a dearth of predictions in this book of the kind anticipated on the cover – predictions of how our biological heritage limits human destiny. Those that are presented are either contested by other scientists, or so limited as to say virtually nothing interesting about human society, or just plain wrong.
There is also a dearth of attention paid to power, particularly the kind of power that is discussed by people like Foucault or Bourdieu as means of explaining social interactions. Naturally enough, this is the case because such a discussion would be far too ‘environmental’ for Wilsons tastes and he is much more interested in providing ‘innate biological’ explanations in any case. But, to me at least, the use of power as a mechanism of control, the use of power as a means of producing distinctions within societies and the reproduction of power structures within social structures has much more interesting things to say about human societies and cultures than much of the supposed biological straightjackets mentioned here.
I have, over the years, been deeply disappointed with evolutionary psychology and the just-so stories this kind of explanation tends to produce. Reading this book has done nothing to make me believe there is much of true worth in understanding humans as they exist in human societies or how these societies are likely to evolve on the basis of these biological narratives.
The main point of his thesis is that humans are products of evolution, no surprise there. Clearly, this process of evolution has left us with preferences for the type of society we would rather live in – for example, ants (Wilson’s actual field of expertise) are also social animals, but they would find our kind of society remarkably strange. So, to what extent does our biology underpin the kinds of social structures we are likely to have and what does our biology close off to us as social options?
This book is also a polemic against the social sciences – a polemic based on the argument that the social sciences do not rest upon a proper foundation because they misunderstand our fundamental natures. This is because while discussing our natures they are ignorant of our biology and present us as blank slates on which anything can be written. So, from Wilson’s perspective, it will only be when our economics, sociology and so on are properly based on a recognition of our biological evolution and the constraints this places upon how we can behave that social sciences will become properly scientific and therefore also properly able to make predictions of the likely pathways of our cultural and social evolution.
Much of this is rather self-evident, I think. If we accept human evolution - that we have evolved from creatures spanning back in time to some kind of primal soup – then it would seem odd indeed to argue that this evolution would play no role at all in influencing or even in determining a range of things about us and the societies we are likely to create. The question really is to what extent does our biology determine the social structures and relations we are likely to enter into, to what extent can acknowledging that we are biological creatures explain these human societies and preferences?
Which brings me to my concerns with this book. The cover of the edition I have asks, ‘Is human behaviour controlled by the species’ biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?’ – To the extent this book is seeking to provide positive answers to these questions it would need to be viewed as a failure. I say that because all too rarely is it shown that our behaviour as social animals is limited by our biological heritage.
I don’t really know enough about the origins of the family or the kinds of family relationships that exist across various cultural societies to speak with authority here – however, from reading Wilson you would assume there is only one basic family type and that is more or less the nuclear family as it exists in the US, with perhaps a bit of Mormon polygamy thrown in for variety. But, like I said, while such an idea sounds decidedly iffy to me, I’m no anthropologist and so I’ll let that one go by.
Biological interpretations, to the extent that they are going to provide answers and foundations for understanding human behaviour, must first assume that key human traits (particularly essentially human ones) must be innate – or at least mostly innate. Hence the attraction of Chomsky’s linguistics to biological innatists. Chomsky asserts that children simply do not get enough exposure to varieties of linguistic structures to enable them to be able to become competent language users. The poverty of the linguistic environments children are faced with ought to mean virtually no one would ever learn their native language, and yet the very opposite is the case. Wilson twice states that there exist mathematical models that prove we should not be able to use language at all if we needed to learn it each time from scratch. Therefore, our brains have evolved to make the learning of language more or less inevitable, given even the scantiest of access to a native language. The problem is that such a view is not as unproblematically accepted as is made out here. The Sociolinguists have shown that rather than children being given incredibly poor linguistic environments on which to learn their native language, parents and other adults go out of their way to structure child learning so as to provide very rich learning environments. Furthermore, the richer that environment the better the language is learnt. Endless studies have now been conducted on the cognitive development of children as influenced by the richness of the language learning environment they are confronted with while learning to speak, and it is utterly clear that those exposed to the kinds of barren environments Chomsky mentions end up with tightly restricted vocabularies and grammatical abilities that severely limit their cognitive development. As Luria and Vygotsky make abundantly clear, Piaget’s view that development leads learning is actually the very opposite of what is the case. To present Piaget as the last word on learning is not only self-serving, but is also not supported by the latest in educational research.
But then, I guess it is normal for people to cherry pick when they are building a case. What is interesting about this book is how few actual pronouncements there are about the biological limits imposed on human cultures. The chapter on men and women (or rather, sex) is a case in point. He does not say women are inferior or unable to perform certain tasks or even that they would be better off doing other things. What he says is, “There is a cost, which no one can yet measure, awaiting the society that moves either from juridical equality of opportunity between the sexes to a statistical equality of their performance in the professions, or back toward deliberate sexual discrimination.” His point being that this would be against human nature and so, even though a statistical equality might be achieved, it would only come at a cost which might in the end make it not worthwhile anyway. This is a terribly strange argument to me.
I want to explain why I find this argument so odd via another route. In discussing vegetarianism he says, “I am reminded of the clever way Robert Nozick makes this point when he constructs an argument in favour of vegetarianism. Human beings, he notes, justify the eating of meat on the grounds that the animals we kill are too far below us in sensitivity and intelligence to bear comparison. It follows that if representatives of a truly superior extra-terrestrial species were to visit Earth and apply the same criterion, they could proceed to eat us in good conscience.”
Yes, an interesting aside – but what is really interesting about this is that if you think about it for a second how well it undermines Wilson’s thesis. Wilson is essentially arguing in this book that human evolution constrains human action and, despite wishful thinking or even good moral sentiment, biology will out in the end. Well, it is blindingly obvious that humans evolved to eat meat. In fact, much of this bio-babble around the differences of the sexes is based on the idea of man the hunter and woman the gatherer. We have digestive systems designed for eating meat, we have teeth that clearly mark us out as non-herbivores. So, what are we to make of the 5 to 10% of the population who are either complete or mainly vegetarians? What are we to make of the moral argument against eating meat Wilson has presented here? Why isn’t what we eat as constrained by our evolutionary past as what job we have is made out to be constrained by whether we were dressed in pink or blue at birth?
I almost laughed out loud when he said that slavery is a remarkably unstable form of human society – and then later discusses the glories of Egyptian, Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman societies. Much of this book is concerned with the ‘true’ form of human existence – that of primitive hunter-gatherer communities – and these are seen as being in some way similar to modern societies – particularly individualistic capitalist ones. Yet, slavery as a social institution lasted for much longer than capitalism has. To say it is an aberration is brave, if not foolhardy.
There is a dearth of predictions in this book of the kind anticipated on the cover – predictions of how our biological heritage limits human destiny. Those that are presented are either contested by other scientists, or so limited as to say virtually nothing interesting about human society, or just plain wrong.
There is also a dearth of attention paid to power, particularly the kind of power that is discussed by people like Foucault or Bourdieu as means of explaining social interactions. Naturally enough, this is the case because such a discussion would be far too ‘environmental’ for Wilsons tastes and he is much more interested in providing ‘innate biological’ explanations in any case. But, to me at least, the use of power as a mechanism of control, the use of power as a means of producing distinctions within societies and the reproduction of power structures within social structures has much more interesting things to say about human societies and cultures than much of the supposed biological straightjackets mentioned here.
I have, over the years, been deeply disappointed with evolutionary psychology and the just-so stories this kind of explanation tends to produce. Reading this book has done nothing to make me believe there is much of true worth in understanding humans as they exist in human societies or how these societies are likely to evolve on the basis of these biological narratives.
May 1, 2017
No time for a proper review, and to be honest, I don't even know what I could say. This book was very informative, but maybe a little bit outdated since the field of sociobiology has gone a long way since its inception when this book was written. I had that in mind when I picked this book up so I'm not going to hold that against it, what I'm going to hold against it is the writing. It was a mixed bag, while it had moments when it was fascinating and it kept me interested, there were so many times when it was dry that I would start drifting away and not really pay attention to what I was reading. Now, maybe I was just not in the mood for non-fiction or maybe those parts just weren't written that well. Even so, I liked it.
July 25, 2025
quyển sách được viết dưới dạng review ấy, bạn nào đọc các loại tài liệu nghiên cứu rồi sẽ thấy rõ. nói chung, nội dung quyển sách không có gì mới, chỉ đơn giản là tổng hợp nhiều nguồn thông tin vào làm một.
quyển sách bảo dễ hiểu thì chắc chắn là không, nhưng cũng không phải là không quá khó hiểu. quan trọng là bạn phải đầu tư thời gian cho nó và phải tập trung, vì lơ là một chút là mất ngay. quay trở lại với dạng review, thì nội dung của các câu văn luôn súc tích và không-bao-giờ-thừa. bạn bỏ mất một câu là bỏ mất một thông tin quan trọng.
"tại sao lại thế này/thế kia? vì chúng ta muốn thế."
bố cục/chia chương đều rất hợp lý, đi từ những cái cá-nhân cho đến tập-thể
thêm một điểm đánh giá nữa là dịch thuật, cá nhân mình cho rằng dịch thuật lần này của Nhã Nam không có gì đáng phàn nàn.
tổng thể lại, đây là một cuốn sách cho những người lười không muốn đọc quá nhiều tài liệu, đương nhiên là cái giá phải trả chính là chúng ta bị chi phối bởi quan điểm của tác giả.
p.s: quyển sách cũng có kha khá các câu quote hay, trên tinh thần gây shock =)) các thanh niên nào muốn sống ảo có thể làm ra vẻ chụp ảnh deep deep rồi bỏ quote vào rồi kiểu gì cũng thành công-dân-xâu-xắc của xã hội =))
quyển sách bảo dễ hiểu thì chắc chắn là không, nhưng cũng không phải là không quá khó hiểu. quan trọng là bạn phải đầu tư thời gian cho nó và phải tập trung, vì lơ là một chút là mất ngay. quay trở lại với dạng review, thì nội dung của các câu văn luôn súc tích và không-bao-giờ-thừa. bạn bỏ mất một câu là bỏ mất một thông tin quan trọng.
"tại sao lại thế này/thế kia? vì chúng ta muốn thế."
bố cục/chia chương đều rất hợp lý, đi từ những cái cá-nhân cho đến tập-thể
thêm một điểm đánh giá nữa là dịch thuật, cá nhân mình cho rằng dịch thuật lần này của Nhã Nam không có gì đáng phàn nàn.
tổng thể lại, đây là một cuốn sách cho những người lười không muốn đọc quá nhiều tài liệu, đương nhiên là cái giá phải trả chính là chúng ta bị chi phối bởi quan điểm của tác giả.
p.s: quyển sách cũng có kha khá các câu quote hay, trên tinh thần gây shock =)) các thanh niên nào muốn sống ảo có thể làm ra vẻ chụp ảnh deep deep rồi bỏ quote vào rồi kiểu gì cũng thành công-dân-xâu-xắc của xã hội =))
December 11, 2007
This was one of the most interesting books I read during my college exploits as an anthropology major. If you're ever confused by my way of experiencing the world, read this and you might get a better idea of why I think the way I do. The moment I remember most vividly to this day is Wilson's writing on the our attempts at discovering the meaning of life. He basically postulates that our brains are not constructed in a way that would facilitate deciphering or understanding the life, universe and everything else, so we shouldn't freak out about not getting it. I felt very freed by that notion: we don't understand because we aren't meant to. There's also some really interesting conjecture on altruism and whether or not any act can be truly altruistic, and stuff on language, development, sex, aggression--you know, the basis of human existence. It's also one of the wetter (aka not dry) sociobiology texts I happened across, which is a super plus.
May 27, 2017
Without euphemism
On reading this again after a couple of decades, I am struck with how brilliantly it is written. The subtlety and incisiveness of Wilson's prose is startling at times, and the sheer depth of his insight into human nature something close to breath-taking. I am also surprised at how well this holds up after all these years. There is very little in Wilson's many acute observations that would need changing. Also, it is interesting to see, in retrospect, that it is this book and not his monumental, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), that continues to serve as an exemplar for later texts. For example, Paul Ehrlich's recent book on evolution was entitled On Human Natures (2000), the plural in the title suggesting that it was written at least in part as a reaction to Wilson. I also note that some other works including Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.(1993), Robert Wright's The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (1994), and more recently, Bobbi S. Low's Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior (2000), are organized intellectually in such a manner as to directly update chapters in Wilson's book.
On Human Nature was written as a continuation of Sociobiology, greatly expanding the final chapter, "Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology." In doing so, Wilson has met with reaction from some quarters similar to the reaction the Victorians gave Darwin. Wilson's sociobiology was seen as a new rationale for the evils of eugenics and he was ostracized in the social science and humanities departments of colleges and universities throughout the United States and elsewhere. Rereading this book, I can see why. Wilson's primary "sin" is the unmitigated directness of his expression and his refusal to use the shield and obfuscation of politically correct language. Thus he writes on page 203, "In the pages of The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Republic, Daedalus, National Review, Saturday Review, and other literary journals[,] articles dominate that read as if most of basic science had halted during the nineteenth century." On page 207, he avers, "Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young."
In the first instance, he has offended the intellectual establishment by pointing out their lack of education, and in the second his incisive expression sounds a bit elitist. But Wilson is not an elitist, nor is he the evil eugenic bad boy that some would have us believe. He is in fact a humanist and one of the world's most renowned scientists, a man who knows more about biology and evolution than most of his critics put together.
I want to quote a little from the book to demonstrate the incisive style and the penetrating nature of Wilson's ideas, and in so doing, perhaps hint at just what it is that his critics find objectionable. In the chapter on altruism, he writes, "The genius of human sociality is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute" (p. 163). Or similarly on the next page, "It is exquisitely human to make spiritual commitments that are absolute to the very moment they are broken." Or, "The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool" (p. 167). He ends the chapter with the stark, Dawkinsian conclusion that "Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function" than to keep intact the genetic material.
In the chapter on aggression, he posits, "The evolution of warfare was an autocatalytic reaction that could not be halted by any people, because to attempt to reverse the process unilaterally was to fall victim" (p. 116). On the next page, he quotes Abba Eban on the occasion of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, "men use reason as a last resort."
In the chapter on religion, he argues that the ability of the individual to conform to the group dynamics of religion is in itself adaptive. As he avers on page 184, "When the gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary."
It is easy to see why some people might be offended at such a frank and penetrating expression. But one of the amazing things about Wilson is that he can be bluntly objective about humanity without being cynical. I have always found his works to be surprisingly optimistic. He has the ability to see human beings as animals, but as animals with their eyes on the stars. In the final chapter entitled, "Hope," Wilson presents his belief that our world will be improved as scientific materialism becomes the dominate mythology. Note well this point: Wilson considers scientific materialism, like religion and the macabre dance of Marxist-Leninism, to be a mythology. His point is that there is no final or transcending truth that we humans may discover; there is no body of knowledge or suite of disciplines that will lead us to absolute knowledge. There are only better ways of ordering the environment and of understanding our predicament. He believes that toward that end scientific materialism will be a clear improvement over the religious and political mythologies that now dominate our cultures.
No one interested in evolutionary psychology can afford to miss this book, even though it was written the 1970s. It is a classic. Anyone interested in human nature (yes, one may profitably generalize about human nature, as long as one understands what a generalization is, and appreciates its limitations) should read this book, one of the most significant ever written on a subject of unparalleled importance.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
On reading this again after a couple of decades, I am struck with how brilliantly it is written. The subtlety and incisiveness of Wilson's prose is startling at times, and the sheer depth of his insight into human nature something close to breath-taking. I am also surprised at how well this holds up after all these years. There is very little in Wilson's many acute observations that would need changing. Also, it is interesting to see, in retrospect, that it is this book and not his monumental, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), that continues to serve as an exemplar for later texts. For example, Paul Ehrlich's recent book on evolution was entitled On Human Natures (2000), the plural in the title suggesting that it was written at least in part as a reaction to Wilson. I also note that some other works including Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.(1993), Robert Wright's The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (1994), and more recently, Bobbi S. Low's Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior (2000), are organized intellectually in such a manner as to directly update chapters in Wilson's book.
On Human Nature was written as a continuation of Sociobiology, greatly expanding the final chapter, "Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology." In doing so, Wilson has met with reaction from some quarters similar to the reaction the Victorians gave Darwin. Wilson's sociobiology was seen as a new rationale for the evils of eugenics and he was ostracized in the social science and humanities departments of colleges and universities throughout the United States and elsewhere. Rereading this book, I can see why. Wilson's primary "sin" is the unmitigated directness of his expression and his refusal to use the shield and obfuscation of politically correct language. Thus he writes on page 203, "In the pages of The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Republic, Daedalus, National Review, Saturday Review, and other literary journals[,] articles dominate that read as if most of basic science had halted during the nineteenth century." On page 207, he avers, "Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young."
In the first instance, he has offended the intellectual establishment by pointing out their lack of education, and in the second his incisive expression sounds a bit elitist. But Wilson is not an elitist, nor is he the evil eugenic bad boy that some would have us believe. He is in fact a humanist and one of the world's most renowned scientists, a man who knows more about biology and evolution than most of his critics put together.
I want to quote a little from the book to demonstrate the incisive style and the penetrating nature of Wilson's ideas, and in so doing, perhaps hint at just what it is that his critics find objectionable. In the chapter on altruism, he writes, "The genius of human sociality is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute" (p. 163). Or similarly on the next page, "It is exquisitely human to make spiritual commitments that are absolute to the very moment they are broken." Or, "The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool" (p. 167). He ends the chapter with the stark, Dawkinsian conclusion that "Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function" than to keep intact the genetic material.
In the chapter on aggression, he posits, "The evolution of warfare was an autocatalytic reaction that could not be halted by any people, because to attempt to reverse the process unilaterally was to fall victim" (p. 116). On the next page, he quotes Abba Eban on the occasion of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, "men use reason as a last resort."
In the chapter on religion, he argues that the ability of the individual to conform to the group dynamics of religion is in itself adaptive. As he avers on page 184, "When the gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary."
It is easy to see why some people might be offended at such a frank and penetrating expression. But one of the amazing things about Wilson is that he can be bluntly objective about humanity without being cynical. I have always found his works to be surprisingly optimistic. He has the ability to see human beings as animals, but as animals with their eyes on the stars. In the final chapter entitled, "Hope," Wilson presents his belief that our world will be improved as scientific materialism becomes the dominate mythology. Note well this point: Wilson considers scientific materialism, like religion and the macabre dance of Marxist-Leninism, to be a mythology. His point is that there is no final or transcending truth that we humans may discover; there is no body of knowledge or suite of disciplines that will lead us to absolute knowledge. There are only better ways of ordering the environment and of understanding our predicament. He believes that toward that end scientific materialism will be a clear improvement over the religious and political mythologies that now dominate our cultures.
No one interested in evolutionary psychology can afford to miss this book, even though it was written the 1970s. It is a classic. Anyone interested in human nature (yes, one may profitably generalize about human nature, as long as one understands what a generalization is, and appreciates its limitations) should read this book, one of the most significant ever written on a subject of unparalleled importance.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
December 24, 2020
Disappointing. Wilson uses very dry language throughout which makes it difficult to stay interested. And while the subject might have been groundbreaking when it came out in the 70s, now it's just kind of boring. There are some interesting observations on sexuality, witchcraft, and the pastoral nature of the Judeo-Christian monodeity, but they are not nearly enough to make up for the various ideological and literary shortcomings.
First, it's difficult to even tell what Wilson is trying to say, what his overarching point is. It takes careful reading to parse from some short comments what his true intentions are. For example, on page 54 he refers to a human infant as a "marvellous robot." So okay, we know he's a biological determinist, which also could have been evident given his acknowledgement to B.F. Skinner, among others, in the beginning. The only problem is that judging by Walden Two , Skinner was a sociopath who advocated the creation of a behaviorally engineered utopia, a la Brave New World.
After this you know what Wilson is but you're not sure what he's after, and he takes you on a sometimes-interesting journey through the biological origins of aggression, sexuality, altruism and religion. Only towards the end do you begin to catch sight once more of what his goal might be. He says in the last chapter on p. 201:
So now we know that Wilson is a biological determinist who would not mind seeing science replace religion as the world's great faith, but he takes his views even further just a couple of pages later. He says on page 207:
While only a minor problem in comparison with the dangerous dogma he's deceptively espousing, I must also take issue with Wilson's patronizing treatment of "primitive" hunter-gatherer tribes. He seems to take it for granted that these people are the vestigial remnants of pre-civilization humanity, but a competent scientist would have to question this premise. Is it not possible that modern society split from its hunter-gatherer brethren back in the day, taking a divergent and parallel evolutionary path (e.g. what Daniel Quinn proposes)?
Also, his treatment of "primitive" aggression and egalitarianism betrays an ignorance on the subject. He cites Levi-Strauss but I found Pierre Clastre's interpretations (particularly his Archeology of Violence -- see my review) both more intriguing and convincing. And though Wilson repeats it frequently, he never fully explains how an egalitarian society could possibly contain the "seeds" of tyranny and oppression. Probably because an explanation would give away that his statement (and thus his premise) doesn't hold water. It seems equally reasonable that modern-day oppression and hunter-gatherer egalitarianism are two completely different beasts.
Not Bad Reviews
@pointblaek
First, it's difficult to even tell what Wilson is trying to say, what his overarching point is. It takes careful reading to parse from some short comments what his true intentions are. For example, on page 54 he refers to a human infant as a "marvellous robot." So okay, we know he's a biological determinist, which also could have been evident given his acknowledgement to B.F. Skinner, among others, in the beginning. The only problem is that judging by Walden Two , Skinner was a sociopath who advocated the creation of a behaviorally engineered utopia, a la Brave New World.
After this you know what Wilson is but you're not sure what he's after, and he takes you on a sometimes-interesting journey through the biological origins of aggression, sexuality, altruism and religion. Only towards the end do you begin to catch sight once more of what his goal might be. He says in the last chapter on p. 201:
What I am suggesting, in the end, is that the evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.He says this in comparison to religion. So now we know that -- despite his mild protestation -- he's out to replace religion with science. He is so intellectually enamored with the truth-seeking capacity of science that he imagines it to be the only worthwhile human pursuit. Another passage on p. 205 is telling:
Such a view will undoubtedly be opposed as elitist by some who regard economic and social problems as everywhere overriding. There is an element of truth in that objection. Can anything really matter while people starve in the Sahel and India and rot in the prisons of Argentina and the Soviet Union? In response it can be asked, do we want to know, in depth and for all time, why we care?Here he is implying that mere academic investigation is a justifiable substitute for helping less fortunate human beings. This is the problem with academia and science in general: they are too preoccupied by theoretical possibilities to bother with practical reality. And then they're shocked when the rest of the world isn't awed by their amazing ideas.
So now we know that Wilson is a biological determinist who would not mind seeing science replace religion as the world's great faith, but he takes his views even further just a couple of pages later. He says on page 207:
I believe that a remarkable effect will be the increasingly precise specification of history. One of the great dreams of social theorists -- Vico, Marx, Spencer, Spengler, Teggart, and Toynbee, among the most innovative -- has been to devise laws of history that can foretell something of the future of mankind. . . Now there is reason to entertain the view that the culture of each society travels along one or the other of a set of evolutionary trajectories whose full array is constrained by the genetic rules of human nature.So now he's gone from promoting science to promoting scientific historicism. Instead of going into the many dangers of historicism (i.e. the idea that we can somehow predict the future based on historical patterns), I'll just refer any interested readers to Karl Popper, who argued convincingly against it in The Open Society and Its Enemies (see my reviews of Vol. I and Vol. II). But then on the next page Wilson goes even further:
Human genetics is now growing quickly along with all other branches of science. In time, much knowledge concerning the genetic foundation of social behavior will accumulate, and techniques may become available for altering gene complexes by molecular engineering and rapid selection through cloning. At the very least, slow evolutionary change will be feasible through conventional eugenics. The human species can change its own nature. What will it choose? Will it remain the same, teetering on a jerrybuilt foundation of partly obsolete Ice-Age adaptations? Or will it press on toward still higher intelligence and creativity, accompanied by a greater -- or lesser -- capacity for emotional response? New patterns of sociality could be installed in bits and pieces. . .Hmm, loaded question much? I wonder which Wilson prefers? He ends the genetic engineer's wet dream with a weak word of caution:
But we are talking here about the very essence of humanity. Perhaps there is something already present in our nature that will prevent us from ever making such changes.And then he passes the buck to the folks a hundred years down the road:
In any case, and fortunately, this third dilemma belongs to later generations.Let's be clear about what Wilson is saying here. He is advocating genetic engineering, selective cloning, and a massive scale eugenics program, he is just too cowardly to come out and say it directly. Instead he prevaricates and whimpers about our humanity, but only after providing a ridiculous choice between two completely lopsided options. He's trying to cover his ass with half-hearted lip service. There's not much that bothers me more than a scientist who won't take responsibility for his/her ideas.
While only a minor problem in comparison with the dangerous dogma he's deceptively espousing, I must also take issue with Wilson's patronizing treatment of "primitive" hunter-gatherer tribes. He seems to take it for granted that these people are the vestigial remnants of pre-civilization humanity, but a competent scientist would have to question this premise. Is it not possible that modern society split from its hunter-gatherer brethren back in the day, taking a divergent and parallel evolutionary path (e.g. what Daniel Quinn proposes)?
Also, his treatment of "primitive" aggression and egalitarianism betrays an ignorance on the subject. He cites Levi-Strauss but I found Pierre Clastre's interpretations (particularly his Archeology of Violence -- see my review) both more intriguing and convincing. And though Wilson repeats it frequently, he never fully explains how an egalitarian society could possibly contain the "seeds" of tyranny and oppression. Probably because an explanation would give away that his statement (and thus his premise) doesn't hold water. It seems equally reasonable that modern-day oppression and hunter-gatherer egalitarianism are two completely different beasts.
Not Bad Reviews
@pointblaek
August 14, 2020
Reading this book today, 42 years after its original publication, the ideas does not sound as surprising, though it still remains an intensely though provoking and important book. There are many more people now who agree with this point of view, and an even larger number who have accepted this perspective. But I can only imagine the uproar it must have created in the seventies, when the academic world was totally convinced that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all of it is a product of culture, and therefore relative and changeable.
Isn't it absurdly wrong to believe that while all other animals have instinctive behaviors that are product of millions of years of evolution, that human beings are somehow immune to our evolutionary past, and we can just erase that into a blank slate. And yet, that was the bedrock of the belief system in the 70s and 80s, and it was blasphemous to say that perhaps there are things in our mind that were created by the living conditions of the ice age, and while culture can fight them, they cannot be ignored. Today the growing body of scientific evidence makes such a claim impossible to support, but old thoughts die hard, especially when it is propped up by personal ideologies.
There are probably better books on this subject today, that gains strength from a larger body of scientific evidence. In spite of its speculative nature, this book will remain a classic, and illustrate the depth of thinking of Wilson, and his ability to see science and humanities as a single continuum.
Isn't it absurdly wrong to believe that while all other animals have instinctive behaviors that are product of millions of years of evolution, that human beings are somehow immune to our evolutionary past, and we can just erase that into a blank slate. And yet, that was the bedrock of the belief system in the 70s and 80s, and it was blasphemous to say that perhaps there are things in our mind that were created by the living conditions of the ice age, and while culture can fight them, they cannot be ignored. Today the growing body of scientific evidence makes such a claim impossible to support, but old thoughts die hard, especially when it is propped up by personal ideologies.
There are probably better books on this subject today, that gains strength from a larger body of scientific evidence. In spite of its speculative nature, this book will remain a classic, and illustrate the depth of thinking of Wilson, and his ability to see science and humanities as a single continuum.
May 28, 2020
Amazing work of science. I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
November 30, 2021
what we can expect from H. sapiens, at least until genetic engineering.
This was research for a book, and a re-read. I didn't remember much from the first time around, but maybe that's just because I internalized the information on human behavior. Like other old, influential books, On Human Nature suffers from the passage of time. The true parts now appear obvious, and the false parts ridiculous. I wish there was a more current wide-scope book for laypeople about the behavior of the human animal, but I haven't found it yet.
This was research for a book, and a re-read. I didn't remember much from the first time around, but maybe that's just because I internalized the information on human behavior. Like other old, influential books, On Human Nature suffers from the passage of time. The true parts now appear obvious, and the false parts ridiculous. I wish there was a more current wide-scope book for laypeople about the behavior of the human animal, but I haven't found it yet.
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May 10, 2021Chao đã lâu lắm rồi từ ngày Nhã Nam mới xuất bản cuốn này và tôi mong cầm trên tay biết bao dẫu là không mua mà chỉ chơi giveaway bất thành thôi. Nhưng run rủi nay đọc thực thất vọng nhiều quá vì về nội dung chắc ai theo sinh học xã hội mới mê còn thì đứng ở góc độ dân ngoại lai chỉ thấy lập luận cứ lòng vòng ngoằn ngoèo đâm ra lại chỉ dấy lên độc mối quan tâm về nghệ thuật chú giải, tức là khi nào cần chú giải, phục vụ cho loại thông tin gì, mục đích làm rõ điều gì, nội dung thế nào là vừa đủ.
January 7, 2013
Lemuel Gulliver made his famous evaluation of humanity after observing little people, big people, nonsentient people and sentient horses. Little people, big people and nonsentient people still being people, and horses being mammals, his reference points were not very far removed from Homo Sapiens. Edward Wilson is an entomologist specializing in ants, social animals that are as different from humans as any on Earth (coral polyps are even more different, but they are not very behaviorally interesting). In this book, he attempts to describe the behavior of humans as if we were just another animal species. Wilson says, correctly, that the wide range of human behavior in all societies known to anthropology is nonetheless very narrow compared to the range of ape, primate and animal behavior in general. He brings up a list of "human universals" obtained by reviewing anthropological literature, and speculates on what such a list would look like for sentient beings who evolved from eusocial insects (caste differentiation, cannibalism, prohibition on unauthorized egg-laying). He then discusses aggression, sexuality and sex differences, altruism and religion, deriving each from biological necessities, and illustrates this derivation with many examples. According to Wilson, all these facets of human nature exist because they helped our ancestors with survival and reproduction.
All of this is true, but in itself not very interesting. Of course, biology dictates that humans cannot breathe underwater, fly, generate electricity, read thoughts or move at four times the normal speed. However, technology allows humans to breathe underwater (in a submarine), fly (in an airplane), generate electricity, and create very fast-moving machines. Though humans cannot live in a baboon-like or a chimpanzee-like society, we can still live in a very wide variety of societies. The Khmer Rouge built a particularly repulsive society, but it was still a human society, not a chimpanzee society or a baboon society. The Jesuits of Paraguay performed an extraordinary social experiment for 150 years. And of course while humans are well within the range of other species of animals on some behavioral parameters, there are other parameters on which we are way beyond anything else alive. As far as I know, a rat running through a maze can be trained to look into every other door - thus a rat can be said to understand the concept of an even number. No rat, chimpanzee or any other non-human animal understands the concept of a prime number - and of course, Sloane's Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has classes of natural numbers that are far more complicated.
That the differences between humans and other species are biological in nature is obvious. More interesting is the question, whether this is true of the differences between different groups of humans. That the Maasai are taller than the Pygmies is caused by genetics; that the rich in Victorian England were taller than the poor was caused by the environment. That humans are more intelligent than chimpanzees is caused by genetics; what about the measured differences in average IQ between different American racial groups? This is a politically explosive topic, on which a biologist has nothing to say. That most people feel sexual attraction to the opposite sex has an obvious biological cause; however, some people are homosexual and others are asexual (probably not all Roman Catholic priests are pedophiles). What can a biologist say about the cause of this distinction?
Paul Samuelson once said something about the economic determinists that I think is also applicable to the biological determinists:
When the governess of infants caught in a burning building reenters it unobserved in a hopeless mission of rescue, casuists may argue; "She did it only to get the good feeling of doing it. Because otherwise she wouldn't have done it." Such argumentation is not even wrong.
All of this is true, but in itself not very interesting. Of course, biology dictates that humans cannot breathe underwater, fly, generate electricity, read thoughts or move at four times the normal speed. However, technology allows humans to breathe underwater (in a submarine), fly (in an airplane), generate electricity, and create very fast-moving machines. Though humans cannot live in a baboon-like or a chimpanzee-like society, we can still live in a very wide variety of societies. The Khmer Rouge built a particularly repulsive society, but it was still a human society, not a chimpanzee society or a baboon society. The Jesuits of Paraguay performed an extraordinary social experiment for 150 years. And of course while humans are well within the range of other species of animals on some behavioral parameters, there are other parameters on which we are way beyond anything else alive. As far as I know, a rat running through a maze can be trained to look into every other door - thus a rat can be said to understand the concept of an even number. No rat, chimpanzee or any other non-human animal understands the concept of a prime number - and of course, Sloane's Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences has classes of natural numbers that are far more complicated.
That the differences between humans and other species are biological in nature is obvious. More interesting is the question, whether this is true of the differences between different groups of humans. That the Maasai are taller than the Pygmies is caused by genetics; that the rich in Victorian England were taller than the poor was caused by the environment. That humans are more intelligent than chimpanzees is caused by genetics; what about the measured differences in average IQ between different American racial groups? This is a politically explosive topic, on which a biologist has nothing to say. That most people feel sexual attraction to the opposite sex has an obvious biological cause; however, some people are homosexual and others are asexual (probably not all Roman Catholic priests are pedophiles). What can a biologist say about the cause of this distinction?
Paul Samuelson once said something about the economic determinists that I think is also applicable to the biological determinists:
When the governess of infants caught in a burning building reenters it unobserved in a hopeless mission of rescue, casuists may argue; "She did it only to get the good feeling of doing it. Because otherwise she wouldn't have done it." Such argumentation is not even wrong.
April 27, 2021
This book fills me with awe. Reading it gives me the sense that everything is possible, not just in science, but in my own field of dramatic literary theory. All that it takes for success is an idea, the conviction to pursue the idea, and the daring to continue when the world misinterprets and turns against you. In the 1950s, Wilson discovered how the social insects communicate with one another with (through pheromones or smell). In the 1970s, Wilson took what he had learned from insect behaviour, and applied it to vertebrate animals, including humans. Behaviour, he argued, is genetically determined. He created a new field called sociobiology, sometimes known as evolutionary psychology. For this endeavour, he was called out in many quarters. In the 1990s, he attempted to unite science with the humanities through the concept of consilience. In 2021, he is 91 years old and still active. His life and work inspire me. He has the fire.
On Human Nature inspired two book chapters that are coming out later this year. Wilson’s work on tribalism directly informed my essay: “Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes: A Patriot’s View of Patriotism.” Wilson’s work also indirectly influenced another essay: “Tragedy, Comedy, and Chance in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.” In this second essay, it was Wilson’s beautiful image of anastomosing paths and forks that inspired me. Wilson is as much a scientist as he is an artist. He writes with beauty.
Wilson’s book has also solved a long-standing mystery. I’ve been a fan of Nietzsche for a long time. One of the core ideas in his thinking is the “will to power.” To Nietzsche, the will to power is an unconscious drive that seeks to survive, and not only survive, but to assert control and dominion in the process of surviving. It is a life force. The feeling of strength. The fuse of life. In this post, I described it as a form of “appetite.” Jaspers, in his book-length critique of Nietzsche, threw me a sidewinder, however. Jaspers said that Nietzsche knew that he could not prove the will to power, and consequently abandoned his attempts to make it the centrepiece of a philosophical doctrine. Nietzsche had hypothesized that the will to power was the base human drive. Like other base human drives driving the other human drives, he could not demonstrate its existence. I was perplexed. After reading Wilson, I understood why: to demonstrate the will to power, Nietzsche needed a theory of sociobiology, a theory that said that human behaviours originated from something material such as the genes. The will to power, as a human behaviour, can, in the centuries to come, be demonstrated or falsified by science. It exists as a genetic imperative, or does not.
This insight filled me with tremendous awe. Even in my middle age, there are so many rudimentary ideas on things I have been thinking about my whole life I am only beginning to grasp. Amazing. This feeling of wonder and awe is what makes it all worthwhile. Here's the link to my full, 3500 word, in-depth review: https://melpomeneswork.com/review-of-...
On Human Nature inspired two book chapters that are coming out later this year. Wilson’s work on tribalism directly informed my essay: “Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes: A Patriot’s View of Patriotism.” Wilson’s work also indirectly influenced another essay: “Tragedy, Comedy, and Chance in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.” In this second essay, it was Wilson’s beautiful image of anastomosing paths and forks that inspired me. Wilson is as much a scientist as he is an artist. He writes with beauty.
Wilson’s book has also solved a long-standing mystery. I’ve been a fan of Nietzsche for a long time. One of the core ideas in his thinking is the “will to power.” To Nietzsche, the will to power is an unconscious drive that seeks to survive, and not only survive, but to assert control and dominion in the process of surviving. It is a life force. The feeling of strength. The fuse of life. In this post, I described it as a form of “appetite.” Jaspers, in his book-length critique of Nietzsche, threw me a sidewinder, however. Jaspers said that Nietzsche knew that he could not prove the will to power, and consequently abandoned his attempts to make it the centrepiece of a philosophical doctrine. Nietzsche had hypothesized that the will to power was the base human drive. Like other base human drives driving the other human drives, he could not demonstrate its existence. I was perplexed. After reading Wilson, I understood why: to demonstrate the will to power, Nietzsche needed a theory of sociobiology, a theory that said that human behaviours originated from something material such as the genes. The will to power, as a human behaviour, can, in the centuries to come, be demonstrated or falsified by science. It exists as a genetic imperative, or does not.
This insight filled me with tremendous awe. Even in my middle age, there are so many rudimentary ideas on things I have been thinking about my whole life I am only beginning to grasp. Amazing. This feeling of wonder and awe is what makes it all worthwhile. Here's the link to my full, 3500 word, in-depth review: https://melpomeneswork.com/review-of-...
February 3, 2010
"The first dilemma, in a word, is that we have no particular place to go. The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature. It could be that in the next hundred of years humankind will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and material crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. ... But what then? Educated people everywhere like to believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and the realization of individual potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized? Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. ...
... the second dilemma: innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow."
"The biological significance of sex has been misinterpreted by the theoreticians of Judaism and Christianity. To this day the Roman Catholic Church asserts that the primary role of sexual behavior is the insemination of wives by husbands. ...
The Church takes its authority from natural-law theory, which is based on the idea that immutable mandates are placed by God in human nature. This theory is in error. The laws it addresses are biological, were written by natural selection, require little if any enforcement by religious or secular authorities, and have been erroneously interpreted by theologians writing in ignorance of biology. All that we can surmise of humankind's genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as means for procreation."
An interesting read for sure.
... the second dilemma: innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political practice flow."
"The biological significance of sex has been misinterpreted by the theoreticians of Judaism and Christianity. To this day the Roman Catholic Church asserts that the primary role of sexual behavior is the insemination of wives by husbands. ...
The Church takes its authority from natural-law theory, which is based on the idea that immutable mandates are placed by God in human nature. This theory is in error. The laws it addresses are biological, were written by natural selection, require little if any enforcement by religious or secular authorities, and have been erroneously interpreted by theologians writing in ignorance of biology. All that we can surmise of humankind's genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as means for procreation."
An interesting read for sure.
June 10, 2015
An amazing book. Edward O. Wilson asks if there is anything more important than human nature or, in other words, who we are and why? And then he proceeded to attempting to answer that question, based on the then-new discipline of "evolutionary psychology." We humans, like any other species, are the result of millions of years of evolution, 99% of which we spent as hunter-gatherers, which makes our needs and responses based pretty much on that experience and not as a result of "civilization" during the last 9000 years or so. Wilson examines 4 aspects unique to human life: aggression, sex, altruism and religion, and shows how they could be results of our evolutionary phylogeny. Still readable and eminently relevant almost 40 years after it was published - albeit with a new preface - this slim book was a giant step for mankind, a decisive and heroic attempt to bring together science and the "humanities" by tracing their evolutionary origins. An important work for any thinking person.
May 14, 2013
This is a book I wish I had read 20 years ago. It has the potential to completely redirect one's life, to make one reconsider so many notions about sex, religion, morality and history. The book is dated only because there is more data nowadays, but the ideas and ways in which Wilson puts them together have an important contemporary tone and value.
A must read. Even for people who have read a lot on science and anthropology, even if you don't find a new hypothesis or theory in here, the essence of this book is strong and poignant and will make a huge impact on its readers.
A must read. Even for people who have read a lot on science and anthropology, even if you don't find a new hypothesis or theory in here, the essence of this book is strong and poignant and will make a huge impact on its readers.
September 24, 2012
2.5 stars for the bad and unorganized writing.
I would recommend Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature instead of this one. That book was a true delight.
I would recommend Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature instead of this one. That book was a true delight.
September 13, 2017
EO Wilson has his moments of obsequiousness, but his ability to calmly state and explain strong signposts of human beings is staggeringly impressive. Especially since this book was written in the 70s. He's definitely a scientist father figure for me. I want to read his ant books.
May 8, 2020
Intriguing blast from the past about that which is socialised behaviour and that which has its root in our biology as humans.
April 30, 2024
Good book if you’re a fan of understanding, bad book if you’re a Marxist
Want to read
December 20, 2020**************************
*Naturalist 4 stars
*On Human Nature TBR
*Naturalist 4 stars
*On Human Nature TBR
March 12, 2023
Enjoyed
April 17, 2023
This book was probably a game changer when published in 1979 with its novel thoughts on nature vs nurture. But now much of the info presented is common knowledge.
May 21, 2024
Beautiful and great flow.
Good book. I agree with most of his arguments. Even if you don’t agree with his arguments, the writing is beautiful and its clear that he is a big proponent of the marriage of the humanities and the sciences. While some of his arguments may be dated and controversial, this book is still relevant and anyone curious to understand our species just a little bit more, could learn a lot from this book.
Good book. I agree with most of his arguments. Even if you don’t agree with his arguments, the writing is beautiful and its clear that he is a big proponent of the marriage of the humanities and the sciences. While some of his arguments may be dated and controversial, this book is still relevant and anyone curious to understand our species just a little bit more, could learn a lot from this book.
March 31, 2020
A really important and profound book on how we're a social species, and that although our overall nature is significantly shaped by environment (mostly culture), the set of possible shapes that our nature might take is still profoundly constrained by our genetics. We are not a blank slate at all, despite what some sociologists might claim. Instead, we can:
To investigate the limits of genetics, and the flexibility of the human responses to it, Wilson looks at four of the "elemental categories of behavior": aggression, sex, altruism, and religion.
On aggression, for example, Wilson leaves no doubt that our genetics are those of an aggressive primate, while our culture has striven to remove most of it from our societies.
In response to those who point to the tiny minority of societies that appear to be pacific, Wilson asks us to look at even their history.
None of this is to deny our ability to overcome our genetic tendencies. But first we must recognize that they exist, and the patterns through which they show up in our societies.
This same style of treatment is given to the other topics. For sex, for example, we start with why there are genders at all - and why two of them, versus the thousands of genders in some fungi, or the haplodiploid arrangement of some bees, wasps and ants. From there, we look at what sexual differences seem to genetically exist in humans, and why they might have evolved. His treatment of homosexuality is very sympathetic for the time it was written (1978), and is generally directed towards potential kin-selection benefits of a predisposition to homosexuality, which is perhaps a little dated, but not too far away from my understanding of contemporary views.
Perhaps only in the final chapter, entitled Hope, do I find myself disappointed. Not with Wilson, but with humankind. Wilson's view is that a correct application of evolutionary theory would uphold three core values: the nobility of the individual (benefiting humankind over their own individual genes), diversity in the gene pool (to allow enough room for human brilliance across any field to emerge), and universal human rights (because power is fluid in our societies in the long term, and any long-term inequity will be visibly dangerous to its temporary beneficiaries). Perhaps he is right, and we're just not there yet!
Wilson writes all this in 1978; I read a copy of the 25th anniversary edition from the early 2000s, but the subject matter is still just as important today. And very little of it is dated. 4.75 stars, rounded up to 5 for brilliance of exposition.
"hope to decide more judiciously which of the elements of human nature to cultivate and which to subvert, which to take open pleasure with and which to handle with care. We will not, however, eliminate the hard biological substructure until such time, many years from now, when our descendants may learn to change the genes themselves."
To investigate the limits of genetics, and the flexibility of the human responses to it, Wilson looks at four of the "elemental categories of behavior": aggression, sex, altruism, and religion.
On aggression, for example, Wilson leaves no doubt that our genetics are those of an aggressive primate, while our culture has striven to remove most of it from our societies.
"Throughout history, warfare, representing only the most organized technique of aggression, has been endemic to every form of society, from hunter-gatherer bands to industrial states ... Virtually all societies have invented elaborate sanctions against rape, extortion, and murder, while regulating their daily commerce through complex customs and laws designed to minimize the subtler but inevitable forms of conflict. Most significantly of all, the human forms of aggressive behavior are species-specific: although basically primate in form, they contain features that distinguish them from aggression in all other species."
In response to those who point to the tiny minority of societies that appear to be pacific, Wilson asks us to look at even their history.
"Among contemporary !Kung San, violence in adults is almost unknown ... But as recently as fifty years ago, when these Bushman populations were denser and less rigidly controlled by the central government, their homicide rate per capita equaled that of Detroit and Houston"
None of this is to deny our ability to overcome our genetic tendencies. But first we must recognize that they exist, and the patterns through which they show up in our societies.
"Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens ... We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression .... (These) learning rules of violent aggression are largely obsolete. We are no longer hunter-gatherer who settle disputes with spears, arrows, and stone axes. But to acknowledge the obsolescence of the rules is not to banish them .... We must consciously undertake those difficult and rarely traveled pathways in psychological development that lead to master over and reduction of the profound human tendency to learn violence."
This same style of treatment is given to the other topics. For sex, for example, we start with why there are genders at all - and why two of them, versus the thousands of genders in some fungi, or the haplodiploid arrangement of some bees, wasps and ants. From there, we look at what sexual differences seem to genetically exist in humans, and why they might have evolved. His treatment of homosexuality is very sympathetic for the time it was written (1978), and is generally directed towards potential kin-selection benefits of a predisposition to homosexuality, which is perhaps a little dated, but not too far away from my understanding of contemporary views.
Perhaps only in the final chapter, entitled Hope, do I find myself disappointed. Not with Wilson, but with humankind. Wilson's view is that a correct application of evolutionary theory would uphold three core values: the nobility of the individual (benefiting humankind over their own individual genes), diversity in the gene pool (to allow enough room for human brilliance across any field to emerge), and universal human rights (because power is fluid in our societies in the long term, and any long-term inequity will be visibly dangerous to its temporary beneficiaries). Perhaps he is right, and we're just not there yet!
Wilson writes all this in 1978; I read a copy of the 25th anniversary edition from the early 2000s, but the subject matter is still just as important today. And very little of it is dated. 4.75 stars, rounded up to 5 for brilliance of exposition.
November 9, 2017
And just like that I am now a supporter of training members of a society to eliminate all sexual differences and behaviour as done by diversity quotas in the West or conditioning members of a society to exaggerate the differences between men and women and their behaviours as done by Japan.
The book points out that there is a third option that societies can take to deal with gender power-imbalance and that is to actively do nothing other than to provide equal opportunity and access. This is the view I subscribed to for a long time having never been provided a solid argument for why not since I believed things would just naturally tend to "equilibrium" and max equality if governmental policies didn't intervene other than to make sure no discrimination exists. This doesn't seem to be the case as evidenced by the failure of non-intervention policies from working as implemented for decades in Israel. Without diversity quotas making it easier for women to get into positions of power our evolutionary psychology will still (at the group level and taken as a statistical whole) lead to more men opting to place themselves into high positions of power with women being more satisfied with other positions. This creates an inescapable and problematic power imbalance that doesn't work to safeguard the equal rights and representation of women. That being the case, women finding a more easier way into influential positions than men due to diversity quotas is not them unfairly stealing away jobs from men who may be more qualified, it is them as a group safeguarding a more fair society for all of us. After reading this books diversity quotas seem like such a small price to pay for making the world for both men and women a better place.
And now you're wondering, perhaps in shock, why I think Japan's patriarchy (born out of exaggerating the differences between men and women) is as good a solution as diversity quotas? This is a view I didn't hold before reading this book. It is true that patriarchies are the dominant type of culture throughout societies and that this largely leads to the subjugation of women by men and their exclusion from many professional activities. But this need not be the case. A society with strong sexual divisions could be richer in spirit, more diversified and even more productive and safer (women are less likely to be assaulted than a unisex society (Exhibit A = Japan). Japan as a society might safeguard human rights even while channelling men and women into different professions.
So pick your poison. To create a society without power imbalance you can either put personal freedoms in jeopardy and disallow some individuals from reaching their full potential as done by the West or you can be ok with some social injustice being inevitable as done by Japan.
So with that being said, the only enemy to creating a fair world for men and women, given our inescapable human nature, is doing nothing.
(What the book didn't talk about was option D: Genetic engineering woo-hoo!... ok I'll stop.)
Suffice to say I went in with low expectations given I've read that some of the stuff herein is outdated. But wowzers this book seems to have aged well. The smattering of well-grounded arguments all put together in a coherently structured format make this an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to learn more about the field. And I absolutely adore how this book doesn't at all feel repetitive. It doesn't dive into a particular topic in full-depth, but covers everything with enough depth that it doesn't feel like overly broad "pop science" either. It is, simply put, an excellent introduction to the field. I welcome any recommendations on what I should read after this, especially books critical of Wilson's views!
Here are some of my favourite points covered in this exceptionally brief book. I don't believe these count as spoilers:
- Biochemistry vs cyantology = the fight between fields specialising in different levels attempting to explain behaviour
- Traits that all human cultures have and then traits all ant societies would have if they were as smart as us
- Ants with rationalizing brains. What would a human-level intelligent ant rationalize when faced with cognitive biases?
- Why is there such a strong taboo against father daughter porn?
- Hypergymy = females mate at their level or above and move up the social ladder generally when they choose a mate. What are the implications for human nature when facets of it like this are so universally predictable and evolutionary ingrained?
- Is one's race linked to traits? Particular races to express particular genes and even behaviours more than others even after controlling for social factors.
- Despite imposing holistic interpretations of Durkheim in sociology and Daniel Radcluff in anthropology, cultures are *not* superorganisms that evolve by their own dynamics.
- Slavery is not "natural," but at the same time it is
- Humans resemble pack hunters more than other primates. Cannibalism being partially evidenced and killing surplus being very well
- Chronic meat crises in our past have tended to lead to cannibalism
- No unitary aggression train exists. There are species that just aren't aggressive for good reason.
- With human headhunter cultures, the focus was inexorably about "the game."
- In times where there is no external enemy the likely limit to population growth is the number of women... so in these groups, predictably, war has been over women.
- Prostitutes are reviled in large part due to evolutionary reasons
- Girls smile more from birth
- There are 3 routes for societies to take given hoe gendar roles have a biological origin (discussed above!)
- Female prisons provide supporting evidence that the nuclear family ideal is genetically ingrained
- Homosexuality was an important part of the development of altruism
- Compassion in humans is something that can be malleable for political ends. Palestinians get our compassion but nothing is said of the muslims killed in Pakistan (more than the populations of Jordan and Syria combined)
- How natural selection works at the individual vs group level. An analogy is given between sharks vs man-o-war jelly fish
- It is exquisitely human to make absolute commitments to something spiritual... until that commitment is broken
- How can evolution account for mother Teresa?
- Can cultural evolution gain momentum to supplant evolutionary constraints? Nope
- There is often an analogy made between human ceremony and animal communication rituals. This analogy is mistaken.
- The human brain is designed to create false binaries
- The witch-hunt actually provides a challenge to sociobiology. Why does it exist in societies?
- The arbitrary tends to become sacred
- Objectification = one of the mechanisms of organised religion
- High Gods and the Apocalapse are actually rare if surveying all religions
- An active moral god is even less widespread
- Marxism vs religion
- Marxism, traditional religion vs scientific materialism
- When all is said and done you cannot beat religion or the "spiritual epic"
- The evolutionary epic denies immortality to the individual and therefore it sadly wont be able to supplant religion
The book points out that there is a third option that societies can take to deal with gender power-imbalance and that is to actively do nothing other than to provide equal opportunity and access. This is the view I subscribed to for a long time having never been provided a solid argument for why not since I believed things would just naturally tend to "equilibrium" and max equality if governmental policies didn't intervene other than to make sure no discrimination exists. This doesn't seem to be the case as evidenced by the failure of non-intervention policies from working as implemented for decades in Israel. Without diversity quotas making it easier for women to get into positions of power our evolutionary psychology will still (at the group level and taken as a statistical whole) lead to more men opting to place themselves into high positions of power with women being more satisfied with other positions. This creates an inescapable and problematic power imbalance that doesn't work to safeguard the equal rights and representation of women. That being the case, women finding a more easier way into influential positions than men due to diversity quotas is not them unfairly stealing away jobs from men who may be more qualified, it is them as a group safeguarding a more fair society for all of us. After reading this books diversity quotas seem like such a small price to pay for making the world for both men and women a better place.
And now you're wondering, perhaps in shock, why I think Japan's patriarchy (born out of exaggerating the differences between men and women) is as good a solution as diversity quotas? This is a view I didn't hold before reading this book. It is true that patriarchies are the dominant type of culture throughout societies and that this largely leads to the subjugation of women by men and their exclusion from many professional activities. But this need not be the case. A society with strong sexual divisions could be richer in spirit, more diversified and even more productive and safer (women are less likely to be assaulted than a unisex society (Exhibit A = Japan). Japan as a society might safeguard human rights even while channelling men and women into different professions.
So pick your poison. To create a society without power imbalance you can either put personal freedoms in jeopardy and disallow some individuals from reaching their full potential as done by the West or you can be ok with some social injustice being inevitable as done by Japan.
So with that being said, the only enemy to creating a fair world for men and women, given our inescapable human nature, is doing nothing.
(What the book didn't talk about was option D: Genetic engineering woo-hoo!... ok I'll stop.)
Suffice to say I went in with low expectations given I've read that some of the stuff herein is outdated. But wowzers this book seems to have aged well. The smattering of well-grounded arguments all put together in a coherently structured format make this an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to learn more about the field. And I absolutely adore how this book doesn't at all feel repetitive. It doesn't dive into a particular topic in full-depth, but covers everything with enough depth that it doesn't feel like overly broad "pop science" either. It is, simply put, an excellent introduction to the field. I welcome any recommendations on what I should read after this, especially books critical of Wilson's views!
Here are some of my favourite points covered in this exceptionally brief book. I don't believe these count as spoilers:
- Biochemistry vs cyantology = the fight between fields specialising in different levels attempting to explain behaviour
- Traits that all human cultures have and then traits all ant societies would have if they were as smart as us
- Ants with rationalizing brains. What would a human-level intelligent ant rationalize when faced with cognitive biases?
- Why is there such a strong taboo against father daughter porn?
- Hypergymy = females mate at their level or above and move up the social ladder generally when they choose a mate. What are the implications for human nature when facets of it like this are so universally predictable and evolutionary ingrained?
- Is one's race linked to traits? Particular races to express particular genes and even behaviours more than others even after controlling for social factors.
- Despite imposing holistic interpretations of Durkheim in sociology and Daniel Radcluff in anthropology, cultures are *not* superorganisms that evolve by their own dynamics.
- Slavery is not "natural," but at the same time it is
- Humans resemble pack hunters more than other primates. Cannibalism being partially evidenced and killing surplus being very well
- Chronic meat crises in our past have tended to lead to cannibalism
- No unitary aggression train exists. There are species that just aren't aggressive for good reason.
- With human headhunter cultures, the focus was inexorably about "the game."
- In times where there is no external enemy the likely limit to population growth is the number of women... so in these groups, predictably, war has been over women.
- Prostitutes are reviled in large part due to evolutionary reasons
- Girls smile more from birth
- There are 3 routes for societies to take given hoe gendar roles have a biological origin (discussed above!)
- Female prisons provide supporting evidence that the nuclear family ideal is genetically ingrained
- Homosexuality was an important part of the development of altruism
- Compassion in humans is something that can be malleable for political ends. Palestinians get our compassion but nothing is said of the muslims killed in Pakistan (more than the populations of Jordan and Syria combined)
- How natural selection works at the individual vs group level. An analogy is given between sharks vs man-o-war jelly fish
- It is exquisitely human to make absolute commitments to something spiritual... until that commitment is broken
- How can evolution account for mother Teresa?
- Can cultural evolution gain momentum to supplant evolutionary constraints? Nope
- There is often an analogy made between human ceremony and animal communication rituals. This analogy is mistaken.
- The human brain is designed to create false binaries
- The witch-hunt actually provides a challenge to sociobiology. Why does it exist in societies?
- The arbitrary tends to become sacred
- Objectification = one of the mechanisms of organised religion
- High Gods and the Apocalapse are actually rare if surveying all religions
- An active moral god is even less widespread
- Marxism vs religion
- Marxism, traditional religion vs scientific materialism
- When all is said and done you cannot beat religion or the "spiritual epic"
- The evolutionary epic denies immortality to the individual and therefore it sadly wont be able to supplant religion
October 18, 2020
Ever since I had come across the sociobiology, I wondered how biology and humanities interact and render who we are and how we behave. This book may be the best answer for it.
Human being just like every other species of fauna and flora conditioned by its genes which have evolved for billions of years. Later humans began developing cerebral capacities over millions of years. Finally, the culture and language of modern species have emerged as recently as tens of thousands of years.
Though we are rich with various customs, religions, and peculiar behaviors across the world, they could boil down to constraints underpinned by DNA and the brain. Our cultures overshoot every once in a while which would be brought back to the earth eventually.
However, do not jump to a conclusion. We human beings are very strange species after all. In the short run, our social values blind or trump our biological natures sometimes and in some places. Also, we are not fully aware of how genes and brains work and influence our behaviors. It might be our only hope that we remain as humble as the author.
Human being just like every other species of fauna and flora conditioned by its genes which have evolved for billions of years. Later humans began developing cerebral capacities over millions of years. Finally, the culture and language of modern species have emerged as recently as tens of thousands of years.
Though we are rich with various customs, religions, and peculiar behaviors across the world, they could boil down to constraints underpinned by DNA and the brain. Our cultures overshoot every once in a while which would be brought back to the earth eventually.
However, do not jump to a conclusion. We human beings are very strange species after all. In the short run, our social values blind or trump our biological natures sometimes and in some places. Also, we are not fully aware of how genes and brains work and influence our behaviors. It might be our only hope that we remain as humble as the author.
August 26, 2011
It is not surprising that On Human Nature receives a lot of criticism in the social sciences field. The solution he suggests is to effectively re-engineer the social sciences more thoroughly within the natural sciences. A process that would completely eradicate some current fields of academics (such as theology). While his delivery is crass in this sense, I do believe the book is worth reading and contains much valuable insight and knowledge. It is interesting to point out that the 1st dilemma he suggests human society faces is a need for what Paul Tillich calls faith. Though Wilson tries to rewrite it scientifically it is impossible to ignore this if you have read both authors. In this light I would say the question Wilson raises is valid, and the information he provides is vital, it is only his solution that I would disagree with (and only slightly). Basically what Wilson suggests is that we engineer culture to promote humaneness. The way he says it is different, and his method of doing this is different from what I would suggest. However, overall I think he is on the right path.
August 15, 2016
quyển này mình mua để đọc trên đường bay từ Vn sang Mĩ (34 giờ). sau đó quên bẵng hơn 1 năm nay, hôm nay thấy còn có mươi trang nên đọc nốt cho hết.
tác phẩm được viết năm 1978 và hoàn thành năm 1979. Wilson dựa trên sinh học xã hội và thuyết tiến hóa để lí giải hành vi xã hội của sinh vật, bao gồm con người và các loài vật khác. ngoài ra ông cũng đề ra sử thi của tiến hóa. bằng cách nào đó, trên con đường tiến hóa của con người, họ tạo ra một vị chúa trời ( và ông cũng nói rằng đa số các vị cao nhất ở tôn giáo thờ độc nhất một thần là đàn ông) mang đủ yếu tố sức mạnh (mà) giống tộc cần.
mình thích điểm ông bàn về chủ nghĩa marx, mặc dù có đôi dòng, nhưng quan điểm của ông ấy là bằng một cách nào đó, các tín đồ của marx sẽ phát triển theo hướng phản bội lại tín điều cơ bản. nghĩa là bắt đầu từ số 1, đi một hồi là càng phát triển càng phản bội lại số 1.
bản dịch tiếng việt đọc hơi khó hiểu.
sau khi biết năm tác giả viết, mới thấy mình chậm hơn thế giới đâu khoảng (2014 - 1979) 35 năm. hi vọng mấy bạn chọn sách dịch cho các nxb trong vòng 5 năm trở lại thì hay biết mấy.
tác phẩm được viết năm 1978 và hoàn thành năm 1979. Wilson dựa trên sinh học xã hội và thuyết tiến hóa để lí giải hành vi xã hội của sinh vật, bao gồm con người và các loài vật khác. ngoài ra ông cũng đề ra sử thi của tiến hóa. bằng cách nào đó, trên con đường tiến hóa của con người, họ tạo ra một vị chúa trời ( và ông cũng nói rằng đa số các vị cao nhất ở tôn giáo thờ độc nhất một thần là đàn ông) mang đủ yếu tố sức mạnh (mà) giống tộc cần.
mình thích điểm ông bàn về chủ nghĩa marx, mặc dù có đôi dòng, nhưng quan điểm của ông ấy là bằng một cách nào đó, các tín đồ của marx sẽ phát triển theo hướng phản bội lại tín điều cơ bản. nghĩa là bắt đầu từ số 1, đi một hồi là càng phát triển càng phản bội lại số 1.
bản dịch tiếng việt đọc hơi khó hiểu.
sau khi biết năm tác giả viết, mới thấy mình chậm hơn thế giới đâu khoảng (2014 - 1979) 35 năm. hi vọng mấy bạn chọn sách dịch cho các nxb trong vòng 5 năm trở lại thì hay biết mấy.
September 8, 2015
Although it is now clearly dated, this fine book still addresses with dignity, respect, and sound reason the intersection of science and culture, of biology and sociology, and even of the physical and metaphysical. In a fairly recent interview on BBC, Wilson stated that he didn't have a problem with religion, only faith. After reading this book, I can begin to understand what that means. I think he probably still has a more objective, thoughtful understanding of religious practice in the context of human evolution than other atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, who have become so entrenched in their criticism of religion that they seem to refuse to deal with its place and purpose in modern society or its parallel development with Homo sapiens. This is my first book by Wilson, but I suspect it will not be my last.
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