In what he described as an “accident in a haphazard life,” as a child E.O Wilson lost vision in his right eye when a spine from a perchlike pinfish he had caught while fishing jerked out of the water and penetrated his pupil. That injury coupled with a congenital loss of hearing left a teenaged Wilson restricted in his early biological pursuits. He couldn’t really hear birdcalls and frog sounds—except for a vague buzzing—so “at this very early age I was destined to become an entomologist, committed to minute crawling and flying insects. … I would thereafter celebrate the little things of the world,” the critters he could grasp between his fingers and bring up close for inspection.

This interest had started at the age of nine when his father moved Wilson and his sister from the deep South to Washington, D.C., within walking distance of the National Zoo and a cheap streetcar ride from the National Museum of Natural History. He explored the tiny critters in Rock Creek Park, where “insects were everywhere present in great abundance” and spent hours at the museum, absorbed by the endless variety of plants and animals. He began collecting insects. He acquired a passion for butterflies. He became fascinated with ants. He began to envision a scientific profession, “a conception of science as a desirable life goal.”

Those early years also developed in him the idea of “nature as a sanctuary and a realm of boundless adventure.” And also a love of wilderness, which became “a dream of privacy, safety, control, and freedom.”

Looking back on this time half a century later in his 1994 memoir Naturalist, Wilson noted that there is a “lot for those who study the diversity of life to do, a new respectability, and a great responsibility.” But he said he had never lost that childhood sense of wonder. “The boy who experienced the magic of the zoo and museum is still strong within me.”

* * *

Edward O. Wilson, who died December 26, 2021, at the age of ninety-two, indeed catapulted those childhood experiences in nature into a fabulous career as a brilliant biologist and writer. He was an entomologist who became a world expert on ants and other tiny creatures and a famous life scientist and writer with an overarching vision of the biosphere and its ecosystems as a unified whole. Wilson championed the concepts of sociobiology and biophilia, saw unity in the sciences and humanities, and offered the concept of consilience. He wrote prolifically and lyrically. His first book, The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) with ecologist Robert MacArthur, was widely cited as a seminal work on that topic.

He spent most of his career at Harvard University, where he was Pellegrino University Professor and curator in entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the National Medal of Science.

He was a lifelong “scientific humanist,” unneedful of religion and critical of all dogma but nevertheless willing to engage and unite with religious leaders in dialogue over saving the global environment. He was one of the signers of The Humanist Manifesto and a member of the International Academy of Humanism.

In his latter decades and with his voluminous and oft-poetic writings, Wilson tried to educate the world about the dangerous ends toward which humanity is trending. He cautioned those ignorantly and arrogantly extending humanity’s destructive power over nature, warning the planet has little left to offer a depleted world and its overcrowded and deprived human inhabitants.

A private and gentle man—courtly some would say—he nevertheless found himself embroiled in numerous public controversies, as when his 1975 book Sociobiology created a furor in academic circles. It became much misconstrued by those who fear that if human behavior is shaped partly by genetic forces (and how can it not be?), it is somehow immune to improvement by environmental influences—the social world around us. Some suggested, perhaps correctly, that he had strayed out of his field. But he saw humans as contiguous with the rest of the animal world and realized that humans and their behavior are also shaped by evolution and natural selection.

In Naturalist, Wilson wrote two chapters about the matter, “Attaining Sociobiology” and “The Sociobiology Controversy.” They provide his personal lively account of having water poured over him by protestors at the 1978 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting. (Following this article, read Richard Dawkins’s own eyewitness account of that lamentable event.) But, more important, Wilson also gives the background of the science of sociobiology. It was new back then, but its main precepts, if not the term itself, are more or less accepted today. And he candidly described the motivations of his detractors at the time, including his department chairman and other colleagues at Harvard, who were strongly influenced by their Marxist and New Left leanings. He admits to being naive at the time about these ideological beliefs, prevalent at Harvard and elsewhere in academia then (and somewhat still). Then he rethought his own evidence and logic.

“What I had said was defensible as science. The attack on it was political, not evidential.” The group of academics who attacked him, who had joined with the “radical activists” in the Science for the People group who protested at AAAS meetings, “had no interest in the subject beyond discrediting it. They appeared to understand very little of its real substance” (Naturalist, 339).

Controversy has even chased him in the weeks since his death. Some critics turned up evidence for what they see as support for racist views. It was an echo of the old controversy over sociobiology, but they had new documentation for Wilson’s support for the controversial Canadian psychologist and academic J. Philippe Rushton (who researched race and IQ)—not just on the grounds of academic freedom but in defending Rushton’s science. Nathan Lents, a City University of New York professor of biology and CSI fellow, felt so strongly about the new revelations about Wilson that he declined to contribute to this memorial section. When evolutionary biologist and author Jerry Coyne learned of these new accusations, based on folders a husband-wife team of scholars recently found in the Library of Congress, he blogged (on February 4), “In the end, what do I think of Wilson after these new revelations, which are definitely not a hit job? I think less of him as a person. While he was an excellent scientist in nearly every way, he was wrong in the case of Rushton. He was wrong (and foolish) to support Rushton’s ideas.”

Of course, Wilson is no longer here to respond to the accusations.

* *  *

I regrettably never met Wilson, although as editor of Skeptical Inquirer I had some rudimentary correspondence with him. He was a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry fellow, certainly one of our most prominent, but we never had him at a Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) or Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) conference and never honored his prodigious contributions to science and literature.

Richard Dawkins has lamented that no scientist, even those with immense literary gifts (he named Peter Medawar and Jacob Bronowski among others), has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. That is true, but E.O. Wilson may be unique among scientists for having won not just one Pulitzer Prize (Carl Sagan did that for The Dragons of Eden) but two. His 1978 book On Human Nature won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and his massive 1990 work The Ants (my copy of this beautiful, large-format, 732-page tome weighs nearly six pounds), with Harvard colleague Bert Hölldobler as lead author, won the same prize in 1991. “The neglect of ants in science and natural history is a shortcoming that should be remedied,” they said in that book’s first chapter, while confessing that they wrote the book to “celebrate a personal muse.” Ants, they said, “represent the culmination of insect evolution.”

I was in the same room with Wilson at least once, at the Smithsonian Institution’s epic “Man and Beast” symposium in 1969. (My wife helped Smithsonian anthropologist Wilton Dillon organize it.) There he delivered a paper on competitive and aggressive behavior in animals and man. Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on memory; it appears in the 1971 book of the symposium, Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior, edited by J.F. Eisenberg and W. Dillon, Smithsonian Press), and it anticipates some of the themes that marked Wilson’s future books.

He began by noting the recent public ascension of animal behaviorists, suggesting that their discoveries may seem to offer some comfort and assurance to humanity:

It is, after all, comforting to think that our sins are only animal sins. … And that we are no more than naked apes momentarily disoriented in our jerry-built civilization. We want to believe that the beastliness in human nature is beastliness in the primordial sense and not some dark angelic flaw, to trust that we have not escaped so far from our ancestral genes as to be due for an early extinction.

Toward the end, he summarizes:

From my own point of view as a biologist, the task now before anthropology seems almost overwhelming. Anthropology must encompass human genetics, extending that science to generate a new discipline, anthropological genetics, the study of the heredity of the behavioral traits that affect culture. Only by this means can a measure be taken of heritability and evolutionary potential of the basic personality and behavioral traits.

He concluded, “Competition is widespread but not universal in animal species. Current ecological theory predicts that there are several easily obtained conditions under which competition could be permanently avoided.” He said it may be true that man’s immediate ancestors, the primitive Hominidae, were territorial and very aggressive, but he cautioned that studies of primate sociology are “wholly inconclusive” on this point.

Finally, he added: “I can only repeat my generalization: theory predicts that competition is not an essential property of species, and data from empirical studies show that competition is in fact very far from being universal.” In his subsequent books Sociobiology and On Human Nature (1979), Wilson expanded on these and other themes.

In 2019, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Wilson’s On Human Nature, Paul Brown revisited the book in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2019). Even after all this time, he said, the book “is still brimming with ideas and insights about who we are, how we got here, and how to get wherever we want to go.” Calling Wilson “one of the most storied scientists of the past hundred years,” he noted that the book, even four decades later, remains “a touchstone in the debate about whether human nature is innate, and therefore universal, or imprinted, and therefore necessarily local in space and time. Spoiler alert! On Human Nature argues that it is both.” But the book goes on to argue that evolutionary biology at least constrains, as Brown phrased it, “the many forms, often bizarre and sometimes not particularly beautiful, that human cultures take on.”

Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience addressed his lifetime “dream of unified learning.” He argued for the “fundamental unity of all knowledge” and the search for consilience, the idea that everything in the world is organized by a small number of physical laws that underly every branch of learning. It drew upon Wilson’s optimistic vision that an emerging unity of knowledge would help us rise out of outdated irrationalities and selfish short-term thinking.

“I would like to share his enthusiasm,” reviewer Robert M. May wrote in Scientific American (June 1998), “but I cannot.” May feared that the inflexibility of social institutions will continue to emphasize short-term individual self-interests.

Philosopher and CSICOP founder Paul Kurtz reviewed Consilience in a long and thoughtful piece for the Skeptical Inquirer (July/August 1998). He called it a “bold and provocative book” and said it outlined two tasks, one reasonable, the other more difficult. The first was to defend the sciences against the forces that would undermine their integrity, to integrate knowledge across disciplines, and to apply this knowledge for human betterment. This first task, Kurtz suggested, “is eminently reasonable.”

What would be “far more difficult to achieve,” Kurtz said, was Wilson’s goal to unify all knowledge. He noted that Wilson was rare among scientists, most of whom must focus solely on their specialties, because he not only was a world-class specialist on ants and social insects, “but he displays encyclopedic knowledge and consummate literary skills” that brought him two Pulitzers “and enable[d] him to write for a wider public outside his own specialty.” He called Wilson’s goal of unity “valiant” and “insightful” but added, “Many of his claims need further skeptical scrutiny. Some skeptics will no doubt reject many of Wilson’s speculations as unwarranted.” Kurtz wrote, “In my view, we should not ignore the efforts of scientists such as Wilson to seek comprehensive explanations of the universe.” He noted that this is easier within the scientific world than in the “literary, aesthetic, philosophical, or theological” worlds, because scientific theories can be tested.

Ten years later, philosopher/biologist and CSI Fellow Massimo Pigliucci addressed Wilson’s views about consilience with both sympathy and skepticism (SI, March/April 2008). What worried him was that Wilson’s view of unifying human knowledge into one broad vision would be achieved “not by a dialogue between the sciences and the humanities but rather by the absorption and reduction of the latter by the former.” Whether or not Wilson really thought of it that way, the concern undoubtedly has some merit.

In his later decades, Wilson concentrated more on the world’s stunning loss of biodiversity and the consequences we all face as a result. He became our moral conscience in protecting the planet, whether we listened or not. His 2016 book Half-Earth is eloquent in that regard. Let’s hear some of it in his own words:

What is man? Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world. Thinking with a gabble of reason, emotion, and religion. Lucky accident of primate evolution during the late Pleistocene. Mind of the biosphere. Magnificent in imaginative power and exploratory drive, yet yearning to be more master than steward of a declining planet.

Our moral reasoning is conflicted and shaky, Wilson wrote, and not up to the needs of the modern world:

Like it or not, we remain a biological species in a biological world, wondrously well adapted to the peculiar conditions of the planet’s former living environment, albeit tragically not this environment or the one we are creating. In body and soul we are children of the Holocene, the epoch the created us, yet far from well adapted to its successor, the Anthropocene.

The book is a lovely and tragically sad evocation of what we have unwittingly done to the natural world we are a part of. “We should forever bear in mind that the beautiful world our species inherited took the biosphere 3.8 billion years to build,” he writes (Half-Earth, 211). “Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world. Our own ultimate future depends on that understanding.”

He tried to end on a hopeful note: “I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendent moral precept concerning the rest of life. It is simple and easy to say: Do no further harm to the biosphere.”