Edward O. Wilson was Pellegrino University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University. In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes (one of which he shares with Bert Hölldobler), Wilson has won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

There’s more to this unbuttoned and intellectually playful book than its plea for a conservation of ethic and the preservation of animal species in all their diversity. We get, for example, several autobiographical glimpses into the background of Professor Wilson… We see Professor Wilson as a boy growing up in the Florida panhandle… Elsewhere he astonishes us with a description of the mating dance of the male Emperor of Germany bird of paradise, and the degree of genetic congruity between pygmy chimpanzees and Homo sapiens.

• *1. Prologue *2. Bernhardsdorp *3. The Superoganism *4. The Time Machine *5. The Bird of Paradise *6. The Poetic Species *7. The Serpent *8. The Right Place *9. The Conservation Ethic *10. Surinam * Reading Notes * Acknowledgments