Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"The Meaning of Human Existence," by Edward O. Wilson, is an extraordinary book: audacious, illuminating--and in the end, oddly comforting. How could it not be with a subject and title so outrageously brazen? Written by one of the most honored and preeminent living biologists, and at the pinnacle of his life, this is an exceptionally personal book. It is a synthesis and distillation of all the big who-are-we ideas he's put together from a lifetime of scientific research and personal experience. You might call it a highly personal philosophical anthropology. But more accurately, it's a scientific creation narrative about how we came to be what we are, what makes us special in the cosmos, and how we can use that specialness to improve our future. I downloaded this book the day it was published and devoured it over the course of the next two days. Now, a few days later, I am still basking in the satisfying glow and deep comfort of that extraordinary experience. The book pleased me not because it offered any major new scientific concepts or ideas. In fact, I found I was already quiet familiar with nearly all of the science presented in the book. If you've read Wilson's other bestselling books, and you're reasonably well-read in the fields of prehistory, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and comparative religions, then you, too, will find little new here. What was beautiful and remarkable was how the author was able to weave these many big concepts together to form a stunning tapestry of truth, a new science-based creation narrative. In this book, Wilson recounts his personal scientific take on the epic journey of human evolution. Wilson focuses that journey heavily on his recent groundbreaking thesis about the importance of human eusociality (see his "The Social Conquest of Earth"). The book also touches briefly on the latest scientific knowledge concerning instinct, the biology of religion, free will, and consciousness. As an important side note--yet given a whole chapter of its own--the author makes it clear that in the greater scheme of things, it is "microbes that rule the Galaxy." For me, the most entertaining and enlightening chapter was the one entitled, "Portrait of E. T." In that chapter, the author speculates--based on scientific theory--about the characteristics he would expect from any "human-grade aliens on Earth-like planets." He gives us eight characteristics; taken together, they form a startling and eye-opening portrait, one significantly different from that we currently see in most science fiction. Finally, the book celebrates the dual importance of the humanities in addition to the sciences as the joint hallmarks of human achievement. He makes a point that if intelligent aliens were ever to contact earth, they would probably be far less interested in our science than our arts and humanities. After all, if they were to contact us, it is obvious that we would have little knowledge about science that they would not already know. It is our amazing accumulation of cultural heritage that would fascinate and thrill them. In closing, it would be an enormous oversight if I failed to note what a sublime pleasure it always is to read Wilson's clear, thoughtful, eloquent and exquisite prose. I will be deeply saddened if this turns out to be his last book.