NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them.” —The Wall Street Journal

One of our greatest scientists—and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants—gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. 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. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. 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.

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.

Refusing to accept the mass extinction of species as an inevitability, “the world’s greatest naturalist” (Jeffrey Sachs) proposes a plan to save Earth’s imperiled biosphere. Half-Earth resoundingly concludes the best-selling trilogy begun by The Social Conquest of Earth and The Meaning of Human Existence, a National Book Award finalist. 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. Angrily challenging the fashionable theories of Anthropocenes, who contend that humans can survive alone in an Edenic bubble engineered for their own survival, Wilson documents that the biosphere does not belong to us. Yet, refusing to believe that our extinction is, as so many fear, predetermined, Wilson has written Half-Earth as a cri de coeur, proposing that the only solution to our impending “Sixth Extinction” is to increase the area of natural reserves to half the surface of the earth. Suffused with a profound Darwinian understanding of our planet’s fragility, Half-Earth is a transformative work that reverberates with an urgency like few other books.

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 twentieth 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.

At once practical and lyric, Naturalist provides fascinating insights into the making of a scientist, and a valuable look at some of the most thought-provoking ideas of our time. As relevant today as when it was first published twenty-five years ago, Naturalist is a poignant reminder of the human side of science and an inspiring call to celebrate the little things of the world.

Edward O. Wilson recalls his lifetime with ants, from his first boyhood encounters in the woods of Alabama
to perilous journeys into the Brazilian rainforest.

“Ants are the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted against colony,” writes Edward O. Wilson, one of
the world’s most beloved scientists. “Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg.” In Tales from the Ant World, twotime Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson takes us on a myrmecological tour to such far-flung destinations as Mozambique
and New Guinea, the Gulf of Mexico’s Dauphin Island, and even his parent’s overgrown urban backyard, thrillingly
relating his nine-decade-long scientific obsession with many of the Earth’s more than 15,000 ant species.

Animating his scientific observations with illuminating personal stories, Wilson homes in on twenty-five ant
species to explain how these genetically superior creatures talk, smell, and taste, and more significantly, belong to
colonies that fight to determine dominance. Wryly observing that “males are little more than flying sperm missiles” or
that ants send their “old ladies” into battle, Wilson eloquently relays his brushes with fire, army, and leafcutter ants, as
well as more exotic species. Among them are the very rare matabele, Africa’s fiercest warrior ants, whose female hunters
can carry up to fifteen termites in their jaw (and, as Wilson reports from personal experience, have an incredibly
painful stinger); Costa Rica’s Basiceros, the slowest of all ants; and New Caledonia’s bull ants, the most endangered of
them all, which Wilson discovered in 2011 after over twenty years of presumed extinction.

Tales from the Ant World is a fascinating, if not occasionally hair-raising, personal account by one of our greatest
scientists and a necessary volume for any lover of the natural world

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 twenty-first-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. Whether attempting to explicate “the Riddle of the Human Species,” 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. Alarmed, however, that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. Edward O. Wilson is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading scientists. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of the best-selling THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH and LETTERS TO A YOUNG SCIENTIST.

“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. Chronicling the evolution of creativity from primates to humans, Wilson shows how the humanities, in large part spurred on by the invention of language, have played a previously unexamined role in defining our species. Exploring a surprising range of creative endeavors-the instinct to create gardens, the use of metaphors and irony in speech, the power of music and song- Wilson proposes a transformational “Third Enlightenment” in which the blending of science and humanities will enable a deeper understanding of the human condition and how it ultimately originated.

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. “Wilson’s new theory . could transform our understanding of human nature.”-Atlantic