What I've Been Reading

The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O.Wilson. A very very important book of  this century which pissed off too many people. I am not qualified to comment but I guess this is neither Darwin's Origin of Species nor Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population. Wilson's theory is important and probably will provide significant insights on understanding ourselves in decades to come. For a youngster, I think its better to read Wilson's other simple (but yet packed with wisdom) books like Biophlia and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge before reading this one. Those earlier books of his has had a great influence on how I view the world. 


“Where do we come from?” “What are we?” “Where are we going?” Conceived in ultimate simplicity by Paul Gauguin on the canvas of his Tahitian masterpiece, these are in fact the central problems of religion and philosophy. Will we ever be able to solve them? Sometimes it seems not. Yet perhaps we can. Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

Eusocial Theory in a nutshell:

In briefest terms, a full theory of eusocial evolution will consist of a series of stages, subject to experimental verification, of which the following may be recognized: 

• The formation of groups. 
• The occurrence of a minimum and necessary combination of preadaptive traits in the groups, causing the groups to be tightly formed. In animals at least, the combination includes a valuable and defensible nest. The nest-dependent condition predetermines the likelihood that primitively eusocial groups will be a family— parent and offspring in insects and other invertebrates, and extended families in vertebrates. 
• The appearance of mutations that prescribe the persistence of the group, most likely by the knockout of dispersal behavior. Evidently, a durable nest remains the key element in maintaining the prevalence. Primitive eusociality may emerge immediately due to spring-loaded preadaptations— those evolved in earlier stages that by chance cause groups to behave in a eusocial manner. 
• In the insects, emergent traits caused by either the genesis of robot-like workers or the interaction of group members are shaped through group-level selection by environmental forces. 
• Group-level selection drives changes in the insect colony life cycle and social structures, often to bizarre extremes, producing elaborate superorganisms. 

Given that the last two steps occur only in the insects and other invertebrates, how, then, did the human species achieve its own unique, culture-based social condition? What mark has the combined genetic and cultural process put on human nature? Stated another way, what are we? 

Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins critique here and here.