On Human Nature

Revised Edition

With a new Preface

Edward O. Wilson

  • Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

Wilson is a sophisticated and marvelously humane writer. His vision is a liberating one, and a reader of this splendid book comes away with a sense of the kinship that exists among the people, animals, and insects that share the planet.
   --New Yorker

Compellingly interesting and enormously important...The most stimulating, the most provocative, and the most illuminating work of nonfiction I have read in some time.
   --William McPherson, Washington Post Book World

A work of high intellectual daring...Here is an accomplished biologist explaining, in notably clear and unprevaricating language, what he thinks his subject now has to offer to the understanding of man and society...The implications of Wilson's thesis are rather considerable, for if true, no system of political, social, religious or ethical thought can afford to ignore it.
   --Nicholas Wade, New Republic

Twenty-five years after its first publication, Harvard University Press has re-released Edward O. Wilson's classic work, On Human Nature. A double Pulitzer Prize winner, Wilson is a writer of effortless grace and stylish succinctness and this is one of his finest, most important books...[A] highly influential, elegantly written book.
   --Robin McKie, The Observer

A seminal, groundbreaking, informative, thought-provoking, enduringly valuable, and highly recommended read.
   --Bookwatch

Emily Wilson's The Death of Socrates is an exceptionally lucid introduction to this famous trial and death...Not only does Ms. Wilson carefully reconstruct the circumstances of the philosopher's demise but she also asks, rather refreshingly, the implicitly obvious but mostly overlooked question of "why the death of Socrates has mattered so much, over such an enormously long period of time and to so many different people." The history of the interpretation of Socrates' death, it turns out, is in large part the history of philosophy itself...The man who has been condemned to death for corrupting the sons of the city ends by instructing his executioners about how to raise his own. He goes to his death without the comfort of a Christian afterlife or any promise of a posthumous reputation, but only with faith in his own reason. After 2,400 years, it's still a resounding epitaph.
   --Thomas Meaney, Wall Street Journal

  • Cover: On Human Nature
  • A photo of the author

Author photo: by Jon Chase/Harvard 1996

Edward O. Wilson is Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes (one of which he shares with Bert Hölldobler), Wilson has won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.