Malcolm Jones at the Book Beast highlights 12 books that will be published in the coming months. It’s a great list that includes a few of my favorites such as Jonah Lehrer and John Irving. I’m really looking forward to Robert Caro’s latest installment of his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. A book that I am really excited about is Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Social Conquest of the Earth, which offers up the theory that group selection, not kin selection, is the prime driver of human evolution. Here is the summary from Barnes and Noble:
“Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? In a generational work of clarity and passion, one of our greatest living scientists directly addresses these three fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science while “overturning the famous theory that evolution naturally encourages creatures to put family first†(Discover magazine). Refashioning the story of human evolution in a work that is certain to generate headlines, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to show that group selection, not kin selection, is the primary driving force of human evolution. He proves that history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology. Demonstrating that the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature, Wilson presents us with the clearest explanation ever produced as to the origin of the human condition and why it resulted in our domination of the Earth’s biosphere.”
