Edward O. WilsonRecensioni

Having worked for a few decades in the fields that the author muses about, I'm unconvinced that he brings anything new or useful.

Wilson, a passionate man, piles on the data to try to get people to save what diversity we have left.
If he can't convert them, no one will

I have long admired Dr. Wilson and this book just increases my respect and , dare I say it, affection for him. An autobiography that teaches not only about his life but life on earth and life lived well

A difficult read. Wilson goes through an outline of evolution, including cladistics and then ecology in order to make sure readers understand what there is to lose and how we are losing it. He tries to persuade people for practical aesthetic a d moral reasons to preserve biodiversity and gives some great examples of value (cancer fighting plants) and loss mistletoe, to illustrate points

A difficult book that tests your definitions of science, progress and beliefs. The author crosses issues looking both ways and taking careful account of the scientific ecosystem and into the broader human condition.

The term consilience is applied to many scenarios so it is not always crystal clear. The author suggests that extending our investigation into the natural world by connecting activities to their biological, neuroscientific fundamentals we could understand social sciences like even economics as emergent from principles that go as far down as the physical sciences.

The author’s definition of free will is my favoured one that ultimately the argument on its existence is pointless given the impossibility of reconciling the scale of degrees of freedom, sensitivity to natural phenomena. Those that state it does not exist have no realistic way to demonstrate as much.

The book initially does not indicate what the big picture choices of values could or should be. It is not tech positivist but rather science method-ist bridging to all areas of human activity. The idea is we should study all without limits in the key of biological sciences particularly looking at impact of heredity and adaptation.

In the first part of the book the author takes as a fundamental truth a certain kind of enlightened progress. The idea is that consilient knowledge would help humanity “advance”. The problem with this is the author does not address how some areas of study themselves can be pandora boxes for important risks. From dividing society to technological developments that increase existential risk. Though the author underlies the importance of ethics there is little dedicated to precautionary principle, particularly where in the bioscience we have already run into problems.

At the end of the book the author introduces the problematic balancing of the growth based economies of the world and the impact on environment. This end is a sudden twist to the plot becaus now we take into implicit consideration the values of sustainability of civilisation. This consideration and focus should have been a lens from the beginning of the book as it would reframe consilience and its potential controversies around the bigger risk of environmental collapse.

I am surprised that the author does not directly address how some new ideas, technology and knowledge can increase existential risks over the long term. Consilience between areas of knowledge is not exempt from this problem. Case in point the author describes economics with a glossy picture (very different from my own) and explains that connection to psychology and neuroscience can unlock a whole new world of possibilities. I would say that since publicatiom many neuroeconomics learnings are applied in an exploitative way. Who cares? But this is the sort of activity could drive tail risks way up…

Basically across most of the text what is good for the author is a kind of evolutionary transformation of knowledge. But in this area he does not consider the risks in some of his ideas and directions. And when we reach the drama of the final chapter and it presenting only the space for a narrow escape for humanity I wonder how he can reconcile that it would be thanks to consilience that humanity “survives”?

Basically the issue is scientific investigation according to whatever style or means is almost always a consequence of a political direction. It seems simplistic to think consilient knowledge would solve these problems alone.

I'm not really into non-fiction, but had to try this for book club. There is no real narrative in the book, instead it is broken into a bunch of biodiversity topics.
Not recommended.

You'll learn a lot from this extremely interesting book. But first - couple of quotes.

- It can be said that while human societies send their young men to war, weaver-ant societies send their old ladies.

- If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

In this book however you'll not only learn about the art of ant war, like:
* Home turf matters - majority of battles are won on fields where future victors' droppings prevail.
* They seal defenders in their nests, spraying their victims with poison squirts from the tips of their bodies (think flamethrowers) and hurling small stones into shafts.
* suicide bombers is a routine practice, when an individual ant blasts itself in the midst of enemies, covering them with its highly toxic poison.
* selective highway robberies
* slave raids

But also about many ways these small creatures run their lives:

* intrigues among queens
* use of silk from pupae
* creation of live bridges
* storage of excess nutrients in overblown bodies of receptacle ants
* how cunning parasites exploit ants
* how they specialize and mimic the environment
* how they change the very environment they live in - from climate and humidity control of their nests to agriculture and pasturing that they pioneered zillions years before us.

You'll learn how they communicate and organize their foraging and warring activities. And much, much more :)

Trivial and boring. They try to be anthropic and literary and philosophical and much more, but fails at anything well.

Lo he contado ya muchas veces, pero yo no iba para traductora, mis opciones eran entomóloga y egiptóloga. Los bichos me dieron una infancia feliz llena de cajas de cerillas y botecitos con alcohol robado en el cuarto de baño. Entonces, hacerse con libros era mucho más difícil, pero estaban las enciclopedias, algún libro de texto, libros de mi abuelo sobre temas variados y las inevitables Selecciones del Reader’s Digest, que iban completando lo que no me daba la observación.

Las hormigas se llevaban la palma, he pasado muchas horas observando hormigueros o siguiendo la pista de esforzadas obreras entre las hierbas secas. A mis favoritas, les ponía en el abdomen un punto de laca de uñas para poder encontrarlas siempre. Es que a veces, me las llevaba al colegio y se me perdían.

Ya casi no persigo bichos (aunque una araña que ha puesto su tela en mi ventana me tiene procrastinando muy feliz), pero sigo leyendo todo lo que cae en mis manos. Este libro de Wilson ha sido un placer. Es corto, con capítulos también cortos, y se lee con mucho agrado.

I was really disappointed in this book. Wilson seems to suffer from the same problem a lot of economists display when they take on topics outside their own field - a failure to engage with the existing literature in the area. It seems as if Wilson thinks he is the only thinker concerned with the relationship between the sciences and humanities. I'm pretty sure he's wrong about that, but even if he thinks he's right, he should still explain the fact and outline the arguments of those who have come closest to what he's saying.

As a consequence, this is a just a book about what one person thinks without any useful clues as to where to look for similar or related arguments. It leaves the reader completely at a dead end, which is very disappointing.

The ideas themselves are fine, but don't seem particularly sophisticated. I will read some reviews of the book in the hope that one of them can lead me further into this interesting area.

Professor Wilson's optimism seems a little over the top, but OK, I'm in.

$5 estimate

Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Evolutionstheorie und Kreationisten nimmt dieses Buch bzw. der Autor klar Stellung. E.O. Wilson (EOW) klärt auf: komplexe Gesellschaften entstanden durch ein Geflecht unterschiedlicher, zufälliger Bedingungen, die sich weiterentwickelten im Spannungsfeld zwischen egoistischen und altruistischen Verhaltensweisen.

Dieser ewige Konflikt, also zwischen Einzel- und Gruppeninteressen wählen zu müssen, bezeichnet EOW so: „Vielleicht war es nur mit diesem Konflikt möglich, dass sich im Universum Intelligenz auf Höhe des menschlichen Verstandes und sozialer Gefüge überhaupt herausbilden konnten. Irgendwann werden wir einen Weg finden, mit unserem angeborenen Konflikt zu leben, und vielleicht erfreuen wir uns sogar daran, weil wir ihn als Urquell unserer Kreativität erkennen.“ (S.34)

Ich bin kein Biologe oder Naturwissenschaftler und werde immer etwas skeptisch, wenn ich im Klappentext lese, es sei jemand der berühmteste Wissenschaftler, hier Biologe seiner Zeit. Ich lese auf und versuche zu verstehen, das Gute behalten, das Fragwürdige aussortieren. Hier gab es fast nur Behaltenswertes, auch Skeptisches, Offenes. Gut so, denn mithin muss man sein eigenes Gehirn einschalten.

Nicht ganz einfach zu lesen, erschließen sich hier eine Menge an klugen Einsichten, z.B. im Nachdenken darüber, wenn Gruppenverhaltensweisen alles dominieren würden: „…so würden wir zu engelsgleichen Robotern - einer Art übergroßer Ameisen.“

Individuen haben im Lauf der Evolution immer Ähnliches, Gleiches, Bekanntes bevorzugt, Fremdes zunächst mit Skepsis behandelt, völlig normal also, wenn man Anderes erstmal ausschließt und nur über komplizierte Anpassungsmechanismen hereinlässt, gezielt, und nie zu viele.

Ich kann alle Gedanken vor allem auch deshalb nachempfinden, weil hier ein Konzept des Menschlichen vertreten wird, das ich ebenso vertrete: „Es gibt keine Vorherbestimmung, kein unergründliches Rätsel des Lebens. Dämonen und Götter buhlen nicht um unsere Treue. Nein, wir sind auf uns selbst gestellt, unabhängig, allein und angreifbar, eine biologische Art, die dem Leben in einer biologischen Welt angepasst ist.“

Nur mit gedanklicher Unabhängigkeit und intelligenter Selbsteinschätzung können wir überleben, dabei sind nach EOW die größten Bremser metaphysische Konstrukte, die konsequent aus dem öffentlichen Raum zu entschleunigen sind.

Er fordert dafür u.a.: „…dass die Anführer aller Religionen und Sekten mit Unterstützung von Theologen die übernatürlichen Einzelelemente ihres Glaubens öffentlich darstellen und in Konkurrenz zu anderen Glaubensrichtungen verteidigten müssen, begleitet von eine kausalen und historischen Analyse.“

Nicht Blasphemie dürfte also im Vordergrund stehen, sondern objektive, diskursive Auseinandersetzung über Sinn oder Unsinn bzw. die Einordnung der Götter in den biologischen Zusammenhang. Ich fürchte, auf diesen Befreiungsschlag müssen wir noch lange warten und auf das Ende aller Kriege im Namen von Religionen. „Fanatikern wie Diktatoren würde die Macht zwischen ihren Fingern zerrinnen, wenn sie ihre Annahmen erklären (Sprechen Sie bitte klar und deutlich!) und ihre zentralen Glaubenssätze rechtfertigen müssten.“

Ein ganz hervorragendes Buch, nicht ganz einfach zu lesen, aber mit größten Erkenntnisgewinnen.

Interesting vignettes on various ant species.

I wanted to like this book however its premise is not one that I can agree - which is that human beings are innately destructive. Initially I agreed with the author, then later based on how he aligned human behavior with certain phrases I became hyper alert....it almost sounds like a replica of the ultra-religious "innate sin" that humans carry....and (separate to the book) I am increasingly sensitive to the partnership between green-economy & religious fundamentalism.

I enjoyed reading/learning of the author Wilson's outlining human evolution...especially the deep memory of fields of grass behind a primordial memory of safety/security.

I enjoyed parts of this book very much. I recommend this book to read however if it is too dry for you, then recommend skipping around. It is worth seeing almost like a reference book rather than a cover-to-cover read.

The Diversity of Life is more or less The Short History of Time of evolutionary ecology and biological diversity but with a disturbing twist. The cosmos and its workings are hardly threatened by man while we're destroying earth's ecosystems and its biodiversity at an alarming and depressing rate (and this book was published in 1992). The science is fascinating, and perhaps no one's better at communicating it to non-specialists than Wilson. But it's hard to imagine an ending to the story that's not very bad, possibly catastrophic (even for human life, eventually). Some of Wilson's ideas about how to address the problems seem pretty unlikely, but none of them are sci-fi or poorly thought through, much less fantasy as with too many others' ideas to save the planet (Lester Brown comes to mind). Surely better understanding of ecology and biodiversity by many more people is a place to start, probably a necessity, and this may well be the best general audience book for that purpose.

Well, Wilson’s been on my to-read list for a while, but I just never could get very far in Sociobiology or Biophilia. Thankfully we still have the random nature of used (and new) bookstore browsing in addition to web searches. Being obsessed with ancient Greek philosophy, Wilson got me with the title of his first chapter – The Ionian Enchantment. Yes, that’s something I understand – maybe it’s a disease, but I sensed a somewhat kindred spirit. Then as I browsed a bit I remembered that his primary thesis in this book is one of my pets – in my terms, that “science” and “philosophy” were once the same thing, and that that thing encompassed all fields of inquiry. Which isn’t to say the pursuit of highly specialized knowledge is a bad thing, but if the vast majority of people who seriously pursue knowledge do so as specialists without context or connections with the broad range of human knowledge, the prospects seem spooky, or at least questionable. I don’t expect I’ll be on the same page with Wilson on all points, but c'est la vie and viva le difference – I’m very interested to see how this viewpoint is articulated and developed by a brilliant scientist who’s got as much highly-specialized cred as you’re likely to find anywhere. Yes, the Ionian Enchantment indeed ....

Entomologist Edward O. Wilson examines the relationship between the humanities and the sciences. He traces the origins of human creativity, which he defines as “the innate quest for originality,” back one hundred thousand years. Wilson proposes that humankind needs “a third enlightenment,” a new philosophy that unites arts and sciences to achieve a more meaningful existence. The book begins with history – the development of language, abstract thinking, intelligence, and cooperation. He explains the factors that allowed homo sapiens to thrive. He then moves into some of the challenges faced by the separate branches of humanities and sciences, before moving into his final argument of the need for a combined approach.

This book reads like a script for a documentary. The scientific sections may be dry for those without a keen interest. Wilson occasionally ventures off topic, but these diversions expanded my knowledge. He includes appealing anecdotes on literary works, metaphors, archetypes, music, great films, and the natural world. “The grail to be sought is the nature of consciousness, and how it originated.”

Wilson introduces a number of thought-provoking questions, but I do not think his intent is to provide all the answers. In fact, he suggests we do not yet have the answers and that by combining forces, in the humanities and the sciences, we can leap forward, breaking through current barriers and advancing civilization. Definitely worth the time.

I liked this book for the parts on the ants, especially, but also all the other fauna of the Nokobee Preserve in southern Alabama. Edward Wilson is an important naturalist, but I wonder at his character's ability to love nature, but still eat, for example, crayfish that had been boiled alive. Cognitive dissonance.

Edward O. Wilson was a highly respected and accomplished myrmecologist, i.e., an expert on ants.

You may not think ants are fascinating, but in this book, narrated by Jonathan Hogan, Wilson geeks out about them with joy. In this short book, he gives us overviews of twenty-five different species of ants. Fire ants and leafcutter ants, the fastest-moving ants and the slowest-moving ants, ants who conduct slave raids to steal juveniles who will emerge into adulthood in the raiders' colony and grow up as part of that colony. Ants who farm and ants who keep "cattle." Ants who fight over territory, and ants who enter into peaceful alliances with other colonies, establishing peaceful "civilizations" over relatively large territories.

Ants who live in caves, which seems counterintuitive, and yet can be a quite welcoming environment for them. Even more counterintuitive, why you should welcome the presence of house ants in your home.

This isn't an intense, serious work of science. It's lively and interesting, and interspersed with Wilson's personal stories about his travels and research. It's both educational and fun.

I wasn't thrilled with the narrator, but my initial irritation faded fairly quickly, as I became caught up in the substance of the book.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

Not the book I was expecting, based on both the title and the reputation of the author. The book praises modern technology, as if more of what is destroying Earth's ecosystems is a good thing. The book assumes that human means all humans. In this book he only talks about one culture of humans, the dominant culture based on the war-focused Indo-European cultures. Civilization has not turned out to be good news for future humans and non-humans. This book praises modernity, almost overlooking the ongoing destruction caused by this culture. He doesn't mention any other human culture, many of which are much wiser and live in balance with the living world. A disappointing book. I was hoping he was going to talk about listening to indigenous peoples of the world, and turning away from the cities and technologies that are causing great harm.

> To my knowledge, only one species has evolved (without multiplying) in the Galápagos by itself: a carpenter ant given the scientific name Camponotus williamsi, after an earlier expedition leader. This ant apparently evolved on the islands, but has not split into multiple species.

> The number of species in relative terms exploded in many groups, including crane flies, damselflies, delphaeid leafhoppers, saldid bugs, Odynerus wasps, colletid bees, Hyposmocoma moths, and among birds, the fabulously diverse and beautiful drepaniid honeycreepers. In a few of these cases there are more species on Hawaii than in the rest of the world combined. All of this production is now shrinking because of the combined activities of humans and their invasive companions, especially ants

> Over the top of the arena he attached a roof that could be flooded with light from above. The roof was then covered with photos of the canopy taken in the Kenyan forest. The Paltothyreus were next allowed to forage into the altered arena, find food there, and carry it back to the artificial home nest. Were they using the photographs to find their way? If so, Hölldobler reasoned, he could perceive the direction they were walking by simply turning the roof on its axis, and seeing whether the ants changed their direction in the same way and amount. He did, and they did. The Paltothyreus ants, in short, can both learn and use maps.

> In 1955, early in my career as a field biologist, I had managed to identify about 175 ant species in a square kilometer of lowland rain forest in Papua New Guinea. This I believed likely to last as a world record. Not so. In later years, twice that number, 355, were collected by Stefan Cover and John Tobin at a single locality in the Amazon.

5/14/22

I've been hearing about E.O.Wilson as a great entomologist & naturalist for over 5 yrs - probably 1st from my friend Irene Moon, the entomologist/performer, & then perhaps from my friend Germaine. Both REVERE Wilson. B/c of this, from time-to-time, I'd see one of his nature bks & consider reading it. But it wasn't until I found this 1st novel of his in Grinnell, IA, recently released & already in the budget bin, that I finally got something by him.

SO, I read it. The cover reeks of 'feel-good' homey country life story. The novel is so conventionally written that it more or less has no style or writer's personality at all. That's probably why it's been widely read by GoodReads folks but only has an average rating slightly above 3. In other words, don't read this for the writing - it's completely mediocre in a functional way that teachers worldwide probably consider to be acceptable but that bores me.

BUT, of course, I wasn't reading something by Wilson for its literary value, I was reading it for its nature studies value. As far as that goes, it was fine. The central meat of the bk is "The Anthill Chronicles" - framed as it is by the seemingly alternate universe semi-autobiography of a boy turned man who champions a particular natural area. "The Anthill Chronicles" tells the story of some ant colonies in the area championed by the bk's protagonist. I found it interesting & educational, albeit somewhat 'shallowed-down' for the novel's presumed targeted readership.

One thing that particularly caught my attn was Wilson's attempt to describe the 'ant's-eye view' by having humans described as "walking trees" & gods. While this approach to description appeals to me in some ways, it also rubbed me the wrong way somehow. Do ants even have a concept for 'trees' that cd morph into 'walking trees'?

In the end, I shd just read Wilson's least populist entomological work(s) & get material that isn't dumbed down. Forget all the marketing hype - the main character is NOT a "modern-day Huck Finn" (as the bk's blurb says) - nor is this "War and Peace-among the ants" as a review on the back cover states. Wd that it were both! No, the writing is shallow & the bk's presumed intention is to strike a resonant chord among young readers w/ an inclination toward protecting the rest of the world from humanity's inter-species brutality & destructiveness - & that's fine w/ me.

On the other hand, Wilson argues the bk from a 'conservative' eco-protection standpoint. The protagonist becomes a lawyer, etc.. Presumably the bk's mass-marketing is partially based on the way he tries to subtly discredit more radical approaches to ecology.