Showing results by author "Edward Wilson" in All Categories

This revised edition of Human Nature begins a new phase in the most important intellectual controversy of this generation: Is human behavior controlled by the species' biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?

With characteristic pungency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate.

Edward O. Wilson is one of the world’s preeminent biologists, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of more than 25 books. The defining work in a remarkable career, The Social Conquest of Earth boldly addresses age-old questions (Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?) while delving into the biological sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books tells the story of the first and greatest visionary of the print age, a man who saw how the explosive expansion of knowledge and information generated by the advent of the printing press would entirely change the landscape of thought and society. He also happened to be Christopher Columbus’ illegitimate son.

"Creativity is the unique and defining trait of our species, and its ultimate goal, self-understanding", begins Edward O. Wilson's sweeping examination of the humanities and its relationship to the sciences. By studying fields as diverse as paleontology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, Wilson demonstrates that human creativity began not 10,000 years ago, as we have long assumed, but over 100,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Age.

Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least 17 - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.

Edward O. Wilson - winner of two Pulitzer prizes, champion of biodiversity, and Faculty Emeritus at Harvard University - is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Yet his celebrated career began not with an elite education but from an insatiable curiosity about the natural world and drive to explore its mysteries. Called "one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written" by the Los Angeles Times, Naturalist is a wise and personal account of Wilson's growth as a scientist and the evolution of the fields he helped define.

In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.

History is not a prerogative of the human species, Edward O. Wilson declares in Half-Earth, a brave work that becomes a radical redefinition of human history. Demonstrating that we blindly ignore the histories of millions of other species, Wilson warns of a point of no return that is imminent.

"Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony.... Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg", writes Edward O. Wilson in his most finely observed work in decades. In a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambique and New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico's Dauphin Island and even his parents' overgrown yard back in Alabama, Wilson thrillingly evokes his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with more than 15,000 ant species.

Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called “the rainbow colors” around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a 21st century treatise on human existence. Once criticized for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls here his most expansive and advanced theories on human behavior, recognizing that, even though the human and spider evolved similarly, the poet’s sonnet is wholly different than the spider’s web.

When all the species of birds, trees, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, wildflowers, dragonflies, tiger beetles, and ants are tallied, Alabama harbors more species than ninety percent of the other states in the US. The state's 4,533 species, with more being inventoried and discovered each year, are supported by no less than sixty-four distinct ecological systems—each a unique blend of soil, water, sunlight, heat, and natural disturbance regimes. Although Alabama is teeming with life, the state's prominence as a refuge for plants and animals is poorly appreciated.

Our world is infinitely richer than previously guessed, yet it is so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the century. In this dazzlingly intelligent and ultimately hopeful work, biologist E.O. Wilson describes what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose forever—in many cases animals, insects, and plants we have only just discovered—and what we can do to save them. Wilson explores the ethical and religious bases of the conservation movement and deflates the myth that environmental policy is antithetical to economic growth.

Catesby is a spy with an antiestablishment chip on his shoulder. Loathed by the Americans and trusted by the Russians, he is sent to Havana and Washington to make clandestine contacts. London has authorised Catesby to offer Moscow a secret deal to break the Cuban Missile Crisis deadlock. But then Catesby meets the Midnight Swimmer, who has a chilling message for Washington.... Merging fact and fiction, sleaze and high politics, this white-knuckle thriller sees a superpower standoff played out against a backdrop of honey-trap blackmail, Mafia contracts, assassination and Vatican scandal.

Perhaps more than any other scientist of our century, Edward O. Wilson has scrutinized animals in their natural settings, tweezing out the dynamics of their social organization, their relationship with their environments, and their behavior, not only for what it tells us about the animals themselves, but for what it can tell us about human nature and our own behavior. He has brought the fascinating and sometimes surprising results of these studies to general readers through a remarkable collection of books.

London, 1956. A generation of British Spies are haunted by the ghost of friends turned traitors. Henry Bone, a Mandarin spymaster, is convinced that a man code-named Butterfly is an aristocratic pervert whose political tastes are as ugly as his sexual preferences. Worst of all, Butterfly has the ability to identify each traitor!

A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them—an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music—returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other—a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan—ends up as the national poet of Portugal.

Bremen, 1951. An MI6 officer, haunted by an SS atrocity, kills a Nazi war criminal in the ruins of a U-boat bunker. The German turns out to be a CIA asset being rat-lined to South America. Britain, 1947. A young cabinet minister negotiates a deal with Moscow trading Rolls-Royce jet engines for cattle fodder and wood. The fates of the two men become entwined as one rises through MI6 and the other to Downing Street where, in the mid-1970s, a secret plot unfolds on both sides of the Atlantic to overthrow the prime minister. Can MI6 officers Catesby and Bone prevent it?

Lady Somers is the first woman to head up the Ministry of Defence. She also has something to hide. Catesby’s job is to uncover her story and bury it forever. His quest leads him through the sex scandals of London in the Swinging '60s and then on to Moscow where a shocking message changes everything. His next mission is a desperate hunt through the war-torn jungles of Southeast Asia, where he finally makes a heartbreaking discovery that is as personal as it is political.

Without libraries, what have we? We have no past and no future. This book tells for the first time in English the story of the first great universal library in the age of printing - and of the son of Christopher Columbus who created it. This is the scarcely believable - and wholly true - story of Christopher Columbus' bastard son Hernando, who sought to equal and surpass his father's achievements by creating a universal library. His father sailed across the ocean to explore the known boundaries of the world for the glory of God, Spain and himself. His son Hernando sought instead to harness the vast powers of the new printing presses to assemble the world’s knowledge in one place.

The setting is 1950s London, at the height of the Cold War. Kit Fournier is ostensibly a senior diplomat at the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, but is actually CIA bureau chief in London. The Arms Race informs much of the action in this fast-paced story which sees Kit go undercover to meet a dissident KGB agent, lose a loved one, have a crisis of soul and get blackmailed into becoming a double agent for M16....