Where do we come from, who are we, where are we going?
Those interested in scientifically based answers to these questions will find brilliant attempts to do so in the work of Edward Osborne Wilson (1929-2021), emeritus professor of entomology and evolutionary biology at Harvard. Wilson was adept at bringing unconnected phenomena from different domains under one heading and linking them to an illuminating insight. This ability to accomplish consilience was Wilson’s great strength – he also wrote a book with that title and is regarded as one of the most eminent biologists of the past century. Wilson passed away on Sunday, December 26 at the age of 92.
In 1975 Wilson published the monumental book sociobiology, a synthesis of just about everything that was known in the evolutionary-ecological field about social behavior of animals. That book was groundbreaking and still inspires biologists worldwide. It grew out of his work on ants, but in the book Wilson covered the social behavior of countless animals, from ants to humans.
Lost eye
As a teenager, Wilson was already well on his way to becoming an ant expert, eventually becoming one of the most important in the world. He had an extremely good left eye – the right eye he had lost in a nasty fishing accident where the razor-sharp spine of a sea bream pierced his eye. This limitation made him dependent on studying small animals such as insects. Fortunately, he liked to crawl. He had no greater pleasure than crawling on his knees through rough terrain, turning over rocks, inspecting rotten stumps, looking for colonies of thief ants, button ants, or rather undescribed species.
Once when young Wilson put more than one queen in an ant colony, the worker bees stabbed all but one of them to death and bit them to pieces. He noted that they never made the mistake of killing the last potential queen so that the colony could no longer produce workers. This experiment spawned all his later work that focused on understanding the social behavior of ants. How is the colony organised, what division of tasks does the species have (there are thousands of ant species on earth), what factors determine the ultimate structure of social organization? This turned out to have a lot to do with the ants’ food type and foraging techniques, for example above ground or underground.
Also read: The Friendly Ant, an interview with Edward O. Wilson about altruism
Wilson studied biology at the University of Alabama, which he rated highly, and continued his work from 1951 at the prestigious Harvard, the university to which he would remain associated for life. There was already the largest ant collection in the world, which he managed to expand considerably.
Admiration for soldiers
Ants are willing to sacrifice themselves for the community and in that respect they bear similarities to the people Wilson most admired. As a child, after his parents divorced in 1937, he spent some time in an unimaginative drill school in the southern United States. There, unruly children were prepared for a military career. Wilson loved it, he wrote in his candid autobiography naturalist (1994), a lifelong admiration for soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives for the community. They were his heroes, rather than musicians, artists or film directors. Even Nobel Prize-worthy researchers he estimated less highly. The inner conflict with which every person struggles to a greater or lesser extent between the pursuit of self-interest and altruism, making sacrifices for the community, has always had his interest. The evolution of altruism was given an important place in his scientific work.
Wilson argued with verve but not always diplomatically that the social sciences would benefit from a natural science approach. Otherwise they would be stuck in an immature scientific stage. He went so far as to claim that the natural sciences would soon be swallowing up the social sciences. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, they would all inevitably become sociobiology, neurology and cognitive research. Quite a few researchers from the social field and also some colleagues at Harvard such as the paleontologist Stephen J. Gould and the geneticist Richard Lewontin reacted with concern or even furiously. Wilson was certainly not denying that human culture largely evades genetic influences. Yet his assertion that human leeway is limited and that we will also always be linked culturally, albeit loosely, with our genetic software, went too far for these critics.
ice shower
Just before he was about to start a lecture on the subject, Marxist students once doused him with a bucket of ice-cold water. Drenched in water, the imperturbable Wilson, who had learned from ants that you should not let anything or anyone move you, began his story to loud applause. He did, however, understand the criticism. He understood the fear of Social Darwinism and certainly did not want to encourage it. His sociobiology had nothing to do with fascism, as some critics feared.
Earlier, Wilson, along with Robert MacArthur, had launched a groundbreaking theory that caused less of a stir than sociobiology, but no less important was the publication of the book The Theory of Island Biogeography from 1967. A mathematically grounded and original approach to ecological problems that instantly lifted that branch of science above the descriptive and impressionistic level. Wilson was a fantastic field biologist but, like many biologists, had limited aptitude for mathematics. He needed help and found it in the mathematician Robert MacArthur. Typically, a mathematician is to a field biologist what a mobility scooter is to an elderly disabled person. It takes you where you would never have come on your own, opens new perspectives and vistas through which you can move forward, but don’t expect any biological insight from it. But MacArthur was not only a mathematician, but also an ornithologist. He did have feeling for biological problems and complemented Wilson perfectly. The two formed an ideal tandem for years.
Clearing Islands
Wilson and MacArthur took an experimental approach on a number of small islands in South Florida. They had been rigorously cleaned, that is, stripped of all plants, worms, insects, spiders, snails and lizards. A series of blank mini islands. They then tracked exactly how they were repopulated, which insects flew there, which spiders or lizards hitched a ride on wreckage to such an island. They found that at some point the number of new species arriving on an island balances out with the number of established species that had disappeared from the island. The total number of species on the island therefore remains the same, while the mixture of species changes. This so-called dynamic equilibrium is an important ingredient of the now world-famous theory of island biogeography.
Unsurprisingly, the number of species that managed to establish themselves on an island was also determined by factors such as distance from the mainland, the size of the island, and the number of ecological niches available. The insights of Wilson and MacArthur are now being used by conservationists who want to determine the minimum required size of a nature reserve, as well as by city planners. The latter want to make and keep city parks, after all also a kind of green islands in a wasteland of asphalt and stone, as biologically diverse as possible.
Pulitzer Prize
Wilson has become known outside professional circles for several dozen books that he wrote for a wide audience on social behavior of animals, biodiversity and nature conservation. He thought it was important to set aside time for basic scientific research in addition to doing basic scientific research science writing. In addition to numerous scientific awards, he was twice awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize: for his sociobiological book On Human Nature (1979) and for The Ants (1990) with Bert Holldöbler, an impressive work on the ecology and social behavior of ant species from around the world.
Wilson was born in a century when the last white spots on the world map disappeared. With the exploration of the farthest corners of the earth, more and more biological species disappeared. Wilson wrote about the emergence of biodiversity, the structure and complexity of ecosystems, but also the destruction of habitats, the felling of rainforests and the overfishing of the oceans. Half a century ago, he signaled the rapid impoverishment of ecosystems in places where exotic plant or animal species ended up with human help, especially on vulnerable islands and in lakes (islands of water). Thanks in part to Wilson, the main cause is now generally known: the exponential increase in the number of people over the past century and a half.
Also read: Marx, ants and people, an interview with Edward O. Wilson on the importance of biodiversity
Wilson also recalled that most biological species disappear silently, without ever being discovered, let alone scientifically described. When it became clear in the 1970s how incredibly rich in unseen species the upper reaches of the rainforest were, he committed to raising research funds to explore those habitats before it was too late.
Remarkably, Wilson never became a doomsayer, but remained an optimistic rationalist who looked for practical solutions. For many who feel battered and powerless by the continuous stream of increasingly alarming messages, a book like The Future of Life from 2002 stimulating and hopeful. In it, Wilson indicated how crucial parts of biodiversity could be safeguarded for the time being with relatively little effort and resources. His book was published in 2016 Half-Earth, in which he calls for half of the earth to be turned into a nature reserve, free from humans. This idea is now a favorite topic of discussion among biologists and conservationists.
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