Book of the week: The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson

(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.”