Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    On Human Nature
    On Human Nature
    On Human Nature
    Audiobook7 hours

    On Human Nature

    Written by Edward O. Wilson

    Narrated by Joe Barrett

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    No one who cares about the human future can afford to ignore Edward O. Wilson's audiobook. On Human Nature, Revised Edition, begins a new phase in the most important intellectual controversy of this generation: Is human behavior controlled by the species' biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?

    With characteristic pungency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate. He shows how...evolution has left its traces on the most distinctively human activities, how patterns of generosity, self-sacrifice, and worship, as well as sexuality and aggression, reveal their deep roots in the life histories of primate bands that hunted big game in the last Ice Age. His goal is nothing less than the completion of the Darwinian revolution by bringing biological thought into the center of the social sciences and the humanities.

    Wilson presents a philosophy that cuts across the usual categories of conservative, liberal, or radical thought. In systematically applying the modern theory of natural selection to human society, he arrives at conclusions far removed from the social Darwinist legacy of the last century. Sociobiological theory, he shows, is compatible with a broadly humane and egalitarian outlook. Human diversity is to be treasured, not merely tolerated, he argues. Discrimination against ethnic groups, homosexuals, and women is based on a complete misunderstanding of biological fact. But biological facts can never take the place of ethical choices. Once we understand our human nature, we must choose how "human" in the fullest, biological sense, we wish to remain. We cannot make this choice with the aid of external guides or absolute ethical principles because our very concept of right and wrong is wholly rooted in our own biological past. This paradox is fundamental to the evolution of consciousness in any species; there is no formula for escaping it. To understand its essence is to grasp the full predicament of the human condition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity Press Audiobooks
    Release dateJul 15, 2010
    ISBN9781509494811
    On Human Nature

    More audiobooks from Edward O. Wilson

    Related to On Human Nature

    Related audiobooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Why Are Humans So Kind, Yet So Cruel?

      Mar 6, 2019

      Under different circumstances, humans can be the kindest, gentlest species or the most murderous. Evolution may hold clues to that Jekyll and Hyde nature.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Why Physics Is Not a Discipline: Physics is not just what happens in the Department of Physics.

      Apr 21, 2016

      Have you heard the one about the biologist, the physicist, and the mathematician? They’re all sitting in a cafe watching people come and go from a house across the street. Two people enter, and then some time later, three emerge. The physicist says,

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Self Is Other People

      Apr 3, 2018

      The Self Is Other People
      3 min read

    • Article

      No, You Can’t Feel Sorry for Everyone: The idea of empathy for all ignores the limits of human psychology.

      Apr 14, 2016

      The world seems to be getting more empathetic. Americans donate to charity at record rates. People feel the pain of suffering in geographically distant countries brought to our attention by advances in communications and transportation. Violence, see

      5 min read

    • Article

      Searching For Sense Amid Chaos

      Sep 28, 2023

      EVER SINCE THE POLITICAL STRATEGIST Steve Bannon mentioned, vaguely and dubiously, “Julius Evola and different writers of the early twentieth century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really kind of eve

      4 min read

    • Article

      Nature

      Jun 19, 2023

      In an article published last year in the Scientific American, contemplating developments in our search for extraterrestrial life, Andrea Gawrylewski writes, “Given the math, it seems impossible that we humans would be the only living things in the co

      3 min read

    • Article

      If You Think You’re a Genius, You’re Crazy

      Mar 9, 2017

      When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supe

      4 min read

    • Article

      Evolution The Big Liee

      Oct 2, 2020

      Evolution The Big Liee
      4 min read

    • Article

      E.O. Wilson Saw the World in a Wholly New Way

      Jan 5, 2022

      I first met Edward O. Wilson in 1971 when I was a student in an ecology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Wilson, a famous Harvard professor, was sitting in on the student project reports. After I reported my ex

      12 min read

    • Article

      If You Think You’re a Genius, You’re Crazy: Both geniuses and madmen pay attention to what others ignore.

      Oct 30, 2014

      When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supe

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Belief System That Doesn’t Add Up

      Aug 26, 2021

      IMAGINE WAKING-UP TO DISCOVER oneself living in a theocracy; in workplaces and even when chatting with friends it becomes obligatory to signal one’s belief. Kids are subjected to indoctrination sessions at school. The national broadcaster schedules r

      4 min read

    • Article

      Science Is Proving That Tragic Curses Are Real: Epigenetics and behaviorism suggest the ancient Greeks were right.

      Nov 19, 2015

      In the first lines of Sophocles’ Antigone, the title character bemoans her fate to the chorus: How many miseries our father caused!And is there one of them that does not fallOn us while yet we live? Antigone must reckon with the choices her father Oe

      6 min read

    • Article

      Humans Are Wired for Goodness

      Aug 22, 2019

      Nicholas Christakis and I are on the same page: We would definitely sacrifice our lives to save a billion strangers, perhaps even several hundred million, plucked at random from Earth’s population. But, for sure, not a thousand strangers, or a millio

      15 min read

    • Article

      Wake Up To Reality!

      Oct 28, 2021

      Wake Up To Reality!
      5 min read

    • Article

      What If Man Is a Killer Ape Beset by Original Sin?

      Jun 21, 2019

      TODAY, SELF-HELP BOOKS and relationship gurus invoke evolution to explain everything from marital infidelity to the paleo diet. Our early ancestors’ survival needs echo through our ideas today. But this is not the first time our hominid ancestry’s ro

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Beauty Of Science

      Jan 29, 2023

      The Beauty Of Science
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for On Human Nature

    4.5/5

    50 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      For a book that is written in 1979 this is relevant today in a scary way

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      It takes concentration as it’s language is dense and academic.