With a title as audacious as The Meaning of Human Existence, even a casual reader couldnt be faulted for expecting a veritable Rosetta Stone to the cosmos and life as we know it. But in his latest book, Edward O. Wilson offers no philosophically-satisfying answers to this age-old existence question. And maybe thats his point.

After all, the ability to ponder our own existence is all at once a blessing and a curse. Neither sharks nor swallows seem to worry about too much more than their next meal. Yet in fifteen chapters, Wilson a renowned biologist, naturalist, author and Harvard University professor emeritus, strips humanity of its soul.

Wilson is steadfastly averse to spiritual intangibles; somewhat skeptical about ever fully understanding consciousness, yet overly sanguine about cosmologys progress in understanding the nature of the universe. He also spends a significant portion of the book trashing organized religion in ways that in this atheistic age at least seem both arbitrary and predictable.

Instead, Wilson advocates a larger role for a reciprocal meeting of the minds between the humanities and science itself.

Courtesy W.W. Norton

The time has come to consider what science might give to the humanities and the humanities to science in a common search to the great riddle of our existence, writes Wilson.

In some ways he may have a point lifes intangibles bubble to the surface whenever I see a well-acted scene from Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard or hear a well-played steel guitar.

And to his credit, Wilson offers the kind of grand sweeping essays that we usually get piecemeal in books typically written by theoretical physicists pondering the imponderables.

We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of species in earths biosphere, Wilson argues. Humanity arose as an accident of evolution, a product of random mutation and natural selection.

But except for those who view evolution along the narrowest terms, do chance and necessity and supernatural intelligence have to be mutually exclusive?

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E.O. Wilson Chases The 'Great Riddle' Of Human Existence