Includes bibliographical references (pages [127]-140) and index.

Studying animal behavior to understand human behavior.

"For eons, humanity's greatest minds--philosophers, theologians, and scientists--have lacked confirmable answers to the questions that define and explain the meaning of human existence: what we are and what created us. In [this book], Edward O. Wilson, examining evolutionary history further back than he has ever done before, delivers a revelatory account of the deep origins of society. Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Wilson argues that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to appreciate the long, complicated evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least seventeen--among them the naked African mole rat and sponge-dwelling shrimp--have developed advanced societies based on similar levels of altruism and cooperation found among humans. Just as Darwin, in his 1871 Descent of Man, proposed humanity's origins through the study of apes and human behavior, Wilson here synthesizes the most updated research in evolutionary science to offer a pithy yet path-breaking work of evolutionary theory. In Genesis, Wilson eloquently braids twenty-first-century scientific research with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which he is known and admired."--Dust jacket.