In his recent book, The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson combines these two arguments to take on what he considers the most precious grail: understanding the human condition. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) he picks up on the old dream from the Enlightenment to try uniting all knowledge, including the humanities and the arts under the wings of science. The mood of the uproar was captured by an incident at the 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at which Wilson had a pitcher of ice water poured over him. As though this was not enough, Wilson later moved on to an arguably bigger task. However, Wilson’s extension of his argument about the evolution of social behaviour to humans resulted in a tirade of hyperbolic accusations of racism and elitism.

The book, a 700-page doorstop, is still mandatory reading for any student of animal behaviour. Wilson became a household name in 1975 when he published the book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson is currently writing about is a good start. To date, if you want to get an idea of where contemporary controversy in evolutionary biology lies, looking at what Edward O. Ever since, however, the now 83-year-old Harvard professor, likely the most famous evolutionary biologist alive, has never been afraid of an intellectual brawl. It did not take long for young Ed to learn enough genetics to dismiss Lysenko. Wilson, 14 at the time, wrote an enthusiastic essay about the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, a Stalinist protégé who advocated the now discredited theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

The first scientific controversy to capture the mind of the young Edward O. Reviewed in this essay: The Social Conquest of Earth, by Edward O.

Eo wilson on human nature