Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche called  the rainbow colours  around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence.

Once criticised for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls his most expansive and advanced theories on human behaviour. Whether attempting to explicate  the Riddle of the Human Species , warning of  the Collapse of Biodiversity  or creating a plausible  Portrait of E.T. , Wilson believes that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. Alarmed, however, that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma in millennia.