This isn’t technically science fiction and I’m not going to pretend it fits the beat cleanly, but it’s exactly the kind of nonfiction that reads like it, big questions about origin and destiny asked with real swagger by someone who’s spent a career underground with ants and thinks that’s given him standing to answer them. Wilson opens with Gauguin’s painting, the three questions carved into its corner, where do we come from, what are we, where are we going, and then spends three hundred pages actually trying to answer them using eusociality as his central lens.

The book’s real argument, and the one that got him into fights with half his own field, is against kin selection as the dominant explanation for altruism, in favor of group selection instead, and I don’t have the biology background to referee that fight properly, but the case he builds is compelling on the page even to a lay reader. The insect chapters are the hardest going, dense material on ant colony structure that a few readers I’ve seen mention skipping, and I understand the temptation, but I pushed through and the payoff is that by the time he pivots to human evolution the framework actually means something instead of being asserted.

The prose has moments of real reach, calling humans “the mind of the biosphere” is the kind of line that either lands as profound or overreaching depending on your mood that day, and mine varied chapter to chapter. Repetitive in places, particularly the sections arguing against alternative theories. But it’s the rare popular science book that earns its scope instead of just claiming it. Four stars.