The Social Conquest of Earth

I’m an armchair reader of evolutionary biology at best, so I’ll say upfront I don’t fully understand the controversy between kin selection and group selection, which is the central scientific claim here, that group selection explains human eusociality better than the kin model most of the field has settled on. What I can say is that Wilson makes the argument compellingly enough that I went and read three separate summaries of the ensuing controversy afterward, which is more homework than a science book has sent me to do in a while.

The parts that worked best for me weren’t the ant chapters, honestly, though I know that’s Wilson’s own specialty and where his credibility comes from. It was the sections tracing the origins of human culture, art, and religion that did it for me, the kind of species that builds cathedrals and armies, something neither ants nor chimps quite manage. His writing there has a real narrative pull to it, more legend than lecture in places, and I found myself reading stretches of it the way I’d read something like the Silmarillion, a big sweeping origin story dressed as nonfiction.

Where it drags is exactly where the science gets most technical: the arguments against kin selection and the genetics chapters got repetitive and dry for me, the same point restated with slightly different framing several times in a row. I don’t doubt it’s necessary groundwork for the argument he’s making to an audience of specialists, but as a general reader I found my attention span drifting there more than anywhere else in the book.

His closing chapters on humanity’s future felt like the weakest part by a wide margin, his views on where we’re headed in space rather narrow-minded given how expansive the rest of the book is willing to be, though he does land a fair point that we shouldn’t just bank on colonizing other planets and trashing this one. I’d still have trimmed them down.

Four stars for the ambition and the sentences, docked one for a genetics debate I couldn’t fully follow and an ending that undersold the rest of the book.