The Social Conquest of Earth

I’m an armchair reader of evolutionary biology at best, so I want to say upfront that I can’t actually evaluate the central scientific claim here, that group selection explains human eusociality better than the kin selection 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 connecting eusociality to human culture, art, religion, why we’re the kind of species that builds cathedrals and armies and neither ants nor chimps quite manage either one. 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 genetics chapters defending his position against kin selection got repetitive 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 sliding there more than anywhere else in the book.

His closing chapters on humanity’s future and space colonization felt like the weakest part by a wide margin, oddly narrow given how expansive the rest of the book is willing to be. I’d have cut them.

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.