After The Meaning of Human Existence, world-renowned biologist/naturalist Wilson continues to wax philosophical, drawing on paleontology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience to consider the source of human creativity. Wilson sees creativity emerging not 10,000 years ago, as scientists have long opined, but more than 100,000 years ago, and he draws on everything from song to metaphor to gardening as he explains how the creative impulse moved from primates to humans. What's next? A "Third Enlightenment" blending of science and the humanities to clarify the origins of the human condition.

Wilson (emeritus, Honorary Curator in Entomology, Harvard Univ.; The Ants; The Social Conquest of Earth) returns to the task he previously wrote of in Consilience: uniting science and the humanities to look at the how and why of existence. Although he posits science and the humanities as complementary products of the human mind, he situates the former as the bedrock out of which springs the latter, with its broader reach going beyond physical reality into the imagination. Wilson is strongest when explaining creativity and symbolic reasoning as evolutionary adaptations that allowed the genus Homo to thrive in multiple ecologies. He describes the coevolution of genes and culture, highlighting intriguing genetic vestiges of our common heritage on the African savanna in language, aesthetics, and other endeavors. Another recent publication in this vein is Augustín Fuentes's The Creative Spark. Less convincingly argued, perhaps, is Wilson's contention that the humanities must extend the limits of human perception (e.g., the visible spectrum, the range of audible sounds) to achieve their full potential. VERDICT A rallying cry for uniting scientific and humanistic inquiry to answer big questions, this book will resonate with science enthusiasts who appreciate that a life worth living means embracing more than the material world. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]—Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Wilson (Half-Earth) makes a case for blending an understanding of the sciences into the humanities in his latest work, raising provocative questions in the process. He ponders what sets humans apart from other hominids and what societal factors may be suppressing the humanities as a field of study, but despite his title's promise he only provides brief glimpses of answers to his central question. As Wilson is one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, it is not surprising that he focuses so much on the evolutionary history of our species. "Because the creative arts entail a universal, genetic trait, the answer to the question lies in evolutionary biology," he posits. He argues that the humanities have failed to make enough progress on this front and have lost public support because "they remain largely unaware and uncaring about the evolutionary events of prehistory that created the human mind, which after all created the history on which the humanities focus." He integrates examples largely from literature and the visual arts to analogize cultural innovation to genetic mutation. Wilson concludes by calling for a "third enlightenment" in which the humanities and the sciences draw more heavily on one another but, even as he professes otherwise, he appears to place far more weight on the latter. (Oct.)