The Future Of Life Edward O Wilson Summary

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Author, researcher, and the world’s foremost expert on ants, Edward O. Wilson satirically compares two opposing groups in his book “The future of Life”. In his book he notes the similar critical and hypocritical natures the two share when using their stereotypes to classify the other. Wilson takes the extremes of these two environmentalist groups and essentially uses writing to make them face each other, displaying their hypocrisy using similar syntax styles and diction, showing us how the two groups, while advocating for two different things, share a similar language that ironically puts them ever so closer to each other. Wilson goes about comparing these two groups by having the two sides opposing each other in order to show the flaws in their logic and ideals by having them sit out in the open, so to speak. Furthermore, Wilson foremost uses stereotypes, the extremes of each group, to show their similarities to each other. These two sides ought to be the polar opposites of each other, considering one advocates for environmental preservation and the other is all for the acquisition of mineral, oil, and gas …show more content…

He realized how similar their bickering and allegations were to each other, and so he satirically compares the two in order to reveal these similarities and hypocrisy. It becomes ever so apparent that Wilson choice to use irony and caricature, in the forms of the hypocrisy of the texts and the extreme stereotyping of the groups (he literally spells it out for us in the title of each bit of text), allows the reader to make their own inferences and form their own ideas about the nature of the texts and their similarities; this is essential to the nature of Wilson’s goal as well as the nature of satire, aiming to reveal similarities and flaws via the techniques of

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