It was a birthday gift to me from a dear friend, and I admire E. Here’s an 18 minute video. There’s also this 1 hour entertaining talk where Peter Nonacs discusses alternative models to kin selection to give some more background. For example, this recent back and forth in Nature summarizes the whole thing quite well in two pages. So I have provided some links throughout to help people avoid this trap. I’m also writing this because so many people I’ve heard from recently have fallen prey to the same misunderstanding as Wilson: that inclusive fitness and multi-level selection are alternative hypotheses for how social evolution works, rather than what they are: simply different modeling styles, different perspectives on the same biological process. The rogue view I’m speaking of concerns modern group selection, or multi-level selection. (Ideally, such a review would come from people with more scientific street cred and visibility than me, and appear someplace where someone might actually read it, but oh well.) The book has received many positive reviews from journalists who don’t realize that the ideas of the book are Wilson’s own rogue views which don’t reflect what most evolutionary biologists think. Fenster’s tongue-in-cheek remark. But I’m taking him up on the suggestion, in part because I’ve decided after reading it– that this book does certainly deserves some critical reviewing.

The book continues in the direction of alienating most evolutionary biologists. Wilson’s made some rather abrasive and controversial claims in a widely criticized paper on the evolution of eusociality a couple of years ago. He suggested (I think facetiously) that I should write a review of it on my blog (a t the time I did not have a blog).Į. Charles Fenster on campus a few weeks ago, I mentioned to him that I was reading The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O.

Eo wilson the social conquest of earth