The Diversity of Life.

WILSON, Edward O.

$750.00

Item Number: 131698

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

First edition of this work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “For Ruth Turner with warmest regards and respect Edward O. Wilson.” Wilson who has also added a drawing of an ant. The recipient, Ruth Turner was a colleague of Wilson’s at Harvard and was also a pioneering marine biologist and malacologist. She was the world’s expert on Teredinidae or shipworms, a taxonomic family of wood-boring bivalve mollusks which severely damage wooden marine installations. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Marianne Perlak. An exceptional association.

"The central message of Edward O. Wilson's Diversity of Life is that Homo sapiens is in imminent danger of precipitating a biological disaster to rival anything in evolutionary history. Mr. Wilson...is the doyen of American biology. Two decades ago he popularized the term 'sociobiology,' and generated a small industry of speculation about the biological basis of human nature. In this book he stops asking what biology does to humans, and asks instead what we humans are doing to biology" (David Papineau New York Times Book Review).