Music Hall Welcomes Pulitzer Prize Winner EO Wilson Tonight

The Music Hall's Writers on a New England Stage series welcomes renowned biologist, naturalist, and humanist E.O. Wilson¾Pulitzer Prize-winning author of On Human Nature and The Ants¾ tonight, October 14, 2014. Dr. Wilson will discuss his groundbreaking new work THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE. In it he ponders¾ as only one of the world's greatest living scientists can¾what makes human beings supremely different from all other species.

The 7:30pm event in The Music Hall's Historic Theater in downtown Portsmouth, NH, includes an author presentation and on-stage interview with Virginia Prescott, host of New Hampshire Public Radio's "Word of Mouth." The series' house band Dreadnaught will play live music during the one hour event.

"After many years of pursuit, we are thrilled and honored to finally welcome E.O. Wilson to the Music Hall stage," said Margaret Talcott, Producer of Writers on a New England Stage; "Professor Wilson is a living legend in the sciences, a wise man at the height of his wisdom, a devout humanist, an iconoclast, and a leading thinker in the social sciences. In this not-to-be missed event he brings to Portsmouth his profound insight into what truly connects us all together."

Recognized for his daring intellect and remarkable scholarship, Wilson's new book THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE addresses how the most recent advances of science and technology will ultimately bring us the greatest moral dilemmas.

In fifteen tightly interlinked essays broken into five parts (the meaning of meaning, science and the humanities, other life forms, the developed mind, and our collective future), Wilson spans the history of mankind, from its earliest inception to our debated end. Inspired by Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, Wilson looks for meaning in the so-called "rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination.

While elaborating further on his group selection theories first put forth in The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson continues to chip away at the selfish gene argument made by his most notable detractors. He posits that only group selection-whether cooperative or violent-explains the unparalleled success of the human species. It also as well as helps us to define who we are: team player or whistle blower, saint or sinner.

Wilson's book, in the end, is a call for a new Enlightenment, akin to that of the late 18th century, that would finally unite the analytical power of science with the creativity of the humanities.

Said Executive Producer Patricia Lynch, "If you care about life on this planet and the future of your fellow humans, the power of creativity over the analytical mind, don't miss this opportunity to engage with the foremost thinker on these life-critical issues."

How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?"

In THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence-from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends.

Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic and a testable way.

In THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE Wilson presents his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe.

The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham.

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