A great book, written by one of the XX Century great minds. Too sad that much of it is dedicated to polemic with inclusive fitness theory and, especially, Dawkins, whom he hates so much that he even uses arguments of B. F. Skinner against him, despite the fact that behaviorists are uniformly despised by him in other parts of the book. Noam Chomsky is viciously derided by Wilson as well. Furthermore, he promotes a competent linguist, who unnaturally evolved (pun intended!) to a neocon philosophical charlatan in the spirit of Fukuyama and a defender of pedophile Epstein, Steven Pinker, whose views are congenial to Wilson's. But Dawkins' and Chomsky's views are not so incompatible with his own. Group selection theory, which Wilson advances against inclusive fitness is remarkably difficult to formalize.
But one can imagine that, sometimes, a population splits into disconnected clusters which do not exchange genes between themselves. In fact, the Galapagos observations were instrumental for Darwin. A given cluster might have a suboptimal genetic profile, which is yet insufficient to cause its extinction. But, in case of a large environmental catastrophe, only one population with a given genetic profile could randomly survive, or be the best adapted to the new environment and propel its genes to posterity. Then, Wilson group selection theory can be formulated in the language, probably almost identical to the "selfish gene" proposal of Dawkins.
