(Liveright, $28)
It takes a brave man to admit he’s wrong, said Larry Lebowitz in The Miami Herald. “Hardly a stranger to intellectual dustups,” evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson became widely known in the 1970s when two of his books helped popularize the then controversial idea that cooperative social behavior is rooted in the individual’s essentially selfish drive to spread his or her genes. Wilson, now 82, has recently had a change of heart. In this “deftly argued” book, he rejects the now widely accepted view that the drive to promote the survival of family underlies all altruistic behavior. Instead, he says that, like the ants he has spent a lifetime studying, we are “eusocial” beings, hypercooperators who have thrived because of a genetically cultivated ability to put the interests of a group—even one in which family ties are weak—ahead of the interests of self.
It’s not every book that unleashes “a firestorm of disagreement” well before its release, said Michael Gazzaniga in The Wall Street Journal. Wilson previewed this book’s arguments in a 2010 scientific paper, though, and he is challenging “one of the central pillars of modern evolutionary theory.” More than 130 of his peers signed a public letter last year lambasting his new hypothesis. But Wilson “obviously enjoys watching people squirm,” so he “cheerily” lays out his proposals here without worrying readers about the counterevidence he’s rejecting. Read him closely and you may notice that he doesn’t deny that evolution is forever selecting genes that serve the interests of the individual and its kin. He’s saying that genes that encourage group cooperation are being simultaneously selected, and that these are the genes that are key to our success as a species.
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Wilson can’t help speculating about what all this portends for humanity’s future, said Natalie Angier in Smithsonian. Convinced that our selfish instincts are older than our altruistic traits, he cultivates a “beautifully appointed” sense of doom about the dangers of wedding “Stone Age emotions” with “Star Wars” technologies. But he’s clearly hoping that our altruistic genes win out—helping us become better stewards of this planet so that we can establish what he calls “a permanent paradise for human beings.” It could be years before we know if Wilson was right to break from the conventional wisdom of his own field, said Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker. But the debate will be interesting to watch. “This is science with existential stakes.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”