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
seventeen--among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-
dwelling shrimp--have been found to have advanced societies based on
altruism and cooperation.
Whether writing about midges who "dance about like acrobats" or schools
of anchovies who protectively huddle "to appear like a gigantic fish,"
or proposing that human society owes a debt of gratitude to
"postmenopausal grandmothers" and "childless homosexuals," Genesis is
a pithy yet path-breaking work of evolutionary theory, braiding
twenty-first-century scientific theory with the lyrical biological and
humanistic observations for which Wilson is known.