Summary of Edward O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 The origin and meaning of humanity is a great riddle that humanity cannot solve. Religion will never solve it. Since Paleolithic times, each tribe has invented its own creation myth to explain their existence.

#2 The great riddle of the human condition cannot be solved by introspection. It can only be solved by recourse to the mythic foundations of religion, or by the scientific process.

#3 The questions of where we came from and what we are can be answered by bringing together information from multiple disciplines, ranging from molecular genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to archaeology, ecology, social psychology, and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669387206

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Insights on Edward O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The origin and meaning of humanity is a great riddle that humanity cannot solve. Religion will never solve it. Since Paleolithic times, each tribe has invented its own creation myth to explain their existence.

#2

The great riddle of the human condition cannot be solved by introspection. It can only be solved by recourse to the mythic foundations of religion, or by the scientific process.

#3

The questions of where we came from and what we are can be answered by bringing together information from multiple disciplines, ranging from molecular genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to archaeology, ecology, social psychology, and history.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Human beings create cultures by means of flexible languages. We invent symbols that are intended to be understood among ourselves, and we generate networks of communication that are orders of magnitude greater than any animal’s.

#2

The pace of evolution of ants and termites was slow enough to be balanced by counterevolution in the rest of life. As a result, these insects were not able to tear down the rest of the terrestrial biosphere by force of numbers, but became vital elements of it.

#3

The ancestors of humans were the exterminators of other species, and they have continued to be so ever since. Only ten thousand years ago, humans invented agriculture, which dramatically increased the food supply and the density of people on the land. This led to exponential population growth and the conversion of most of the natural land environment into simplified ecosystems.

#4

The human condition was created by the human brain, which was both highly intelligent and intensely social. It had to build mental scenarios of personal relationships rapidly, both short-term and long-term. Its memories had to travel far into the past to summon old scenarios and far into the future to imagine the consequences of every relationship.

#5

The prehumans were a radically new type of candidate for eusociality. insects, from their origin in the first vegetation on land during the Early Devonian 400 million years ago to the present day, have been encased in a knight’s armor of chitinous exoskeleton. They could not grow to the size of mammals, so they could not achieve eusociality