The Social Conquest of Earth

I need to admit something before I get into this one, I have basically no natural interest in insects, and a genuinely large chunk of this book is about them. Wilson’s whole career is bound up in the study of ants, and his argument here rests heavily on comparing human eusociality, the willingness to cooperate at real cost to yourself for the group, to the same trait in social insect colonies. I went in braced to skim those sections. I didn’t skim them. That’s the best compliment I can give a book, that it made me care about a subject I had zero prior interest in.

The actual thesis, that eusociality rather than kin selection is what separated our evolutionary path from every other primate, is presented as more settled than I understand it actually is in the field, and I’d have liked a clearer acknowledgment of how contested this argument still is among people who study this for a living. But contested or not, the case Wilson builds is compelling on the page even if I’m not qualified to referee the underlying science.

Where this book actually earns its length is in how it writes, not just what it argues. There’s a real elegance to the prose that I wasn’t expecting from what I assumed would be a dry evolutionary biology text. Whole passages read closer to something out of a myth than a science book, and I found myself rereading sentences purely for the pleasure of how they were built, which almost never happens to me with nonfiction.

I finished this wanting to argue with parts of it and recommend all of it, which might be the ideal outcome for a book like this. Worth the time even if, like me, you didn’t think you cared about ants going in.