There’s more to this unbuttoned and intellectually playful book than its plea for a conservation of ethic and the preservation of animal species in all their diversity. We get, for example, several autobiographical glimpses into the background of Professor Wilson… We see Professor Wilson as a boy growing up in the Florida panhandle… Elsewhere he astonishes us with a description of the mating dance of the male Emperor of Germany bird of paradise, and the degree of genetic congruity between pygmy chimpanzees and <i>Homo sapiens</i>.

- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

E. O. Wilson is the entomologist Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. His science writing for the general public has won him the Pulitzer Prize and his scientific publications have won him the highest honors American science can bestow. He is well equipped to engage a subject dear to nature-lovers which until now has not been identified as a species trait—<i>biophilia</i>. The freshness of Wilson’s approach lies in its freedom from the obsessions of the environmentalist movement… While he shares the conservationist ethic of environmentalists, and seeks to impart its practical imperatives, he eschews cultism… Let this highly readable book then be commended to all biophiliacs and technocrats.

- Hiram Caton, Times Literary Supplement

<i>Biophilia</i> is an immensely readable book. Wilson is a master storyteller, skillful at evoking exotic scenes.

Washington Post Book World