On Human Nature
by Edward O. Wilson
Summary
Edward Wilson had already provoked a furious scientific and public argument with his 1975 book Sociobiology, which applied evolutionary theory to animal social behavior and controversially extended that argument to human beings as well, drawing accusations that he was reviving old and discredited ideas about biological determinism. On Human Nature is his fuller answer to that controversy, a sustained argument that traits long assumed to be purely cultural, aggression, sexuality, altruism, even religious feeling, carry a genuine evolutionary inheritance shared with other social animals, and that culture and genes shape each other over time rather than operating as two separate, unrelated forces.
The book moves through specific human behaviors one at a time, examining what an evolutionary perspective can and cannot explain about violence, sexual behavior, cooperation, and religious belief, building toward Wilson's larger claim that a strict blank slate view, in which human nature is entirely a product of culture and environment, does not fit the evidence any better than a rigid biological determinism would. He positions the whole project as completing rather than replacing Darwin's original argument, extending evolutionary thinking into the social sciences that had, in Wilson's view, resisted it for far too long.
Reading it means engaging directly with one of the most contested scientific arguments of its decade, since Wilson writes to persuade rather than simply to describe, and it suits a reader genuinely interested in the nature versus culture debate willing to weigh a scientist's case even where it remains controversial. The book asks real intellectual seriousness of its reader while staying accessible enough for someone without a background in evolutionary biology to follow the full argument.
Historical Context & Significance
Harvard University Press published On Human Nature in 1978, and it won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Wilson's first Pulitzer; he would win a second in 1991 for The Ants, an entirely different and far less controversial book on insect societies written together with Bert Hölldobler. The 1979 prize arrived while the argument begun by Sociobiology in 1975 was still very much alive, and critics inside and outside biology continued to debate whether Wilson's application of evolutionary theory to human behavior amounted to legitimate science or ideology dressed up as science.
The book remains one of the most cited and most argued over works to emerge from the sociobiology debates of the 1970s; later biologists including Jerry Coyne have criticized Wilson's willingness to draw social conclusions from evolutionary premises, while others read it as an early statement of the evolutionary approach to human behavior that later grew into evolutionary psychology. Time magazine included it in a 2011 list of the hundred best and most influential English language books published since 1923, calling its achievement a demonstration that a sociobiological view of humanity could still have grandeur.