In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to
date, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with
these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings
supremely different from all other species. Searching for meaning in
what Nietzsche once called the rainbow colors around the outer edges of
knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the
process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century
treatise on human existence--from our earliest inception to a
provocative look at what the future of mankind portends.
Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our Anthropocene Epoch,
which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the
New York Times as a sweeping account of the human rise to domination
of the biosphere, here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know
enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach
questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent
life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way.
Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an
overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The
Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on
the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human
and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different
from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate The Riddle of the
Human Species, Free Will, or Religion; warning of The Collapse of
Biodiversity; or even creating a plausible Portrait of E.T., Wilson does
indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known
universe.
The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-,
then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet
alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning
biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that
advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma
since God stayed the hand of Abraham.
