We invited three prominent scientists, all CSI fellows, to give readers their own personal perspectives on E.O. Wilson.
Richard Dawkins
E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology was published around the same time as my The Selfish Gene, and I came in for a bit of backlash from the wave of misconceived controversy that enveloped Wilson. It had been stirred up by two of his Harvard University colleagues followed by a flock of sheep-like comrades and fellow travelers. It was around that time that I first met Ed Wilson, at the 1978 Washington, D.C, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A broadly smiling Wilson limped up to me at coffee time on crutches (he had broken his leg) and, without introducing himself, made a friendly joke about “not wanting any of this reductionism around here”—a genial allusion to our both being accused of the heinous sin of reductionism (whatever that might mean; its critics never seem to make up their minds).
At the same conference, Wilson was on a panel together with Stephen Jay Gould, David Barash, and others. I witnessed the Marxist-inspired rabble as they rushed the platform chanting their puerile doggerel: “Wilson, Wilson, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.” A bearded man tipped water over Wilson, and somebody else threw a cup of water, which was parried by Barash. There was uproar, during which Gould seized the microphone and aptly quoted Lenin in condemnation of “this infantile disorder.” The session chairman took the microphone from Gould and said that, as an anthropologist and a Marxist, he wanted to “personally apologize to Professor Wilson.”
Wilson dried himself off, cleaned his glasses, and then, unruffled and with characteristic good humor, gave a brilliant lecture. In the question time, I was impressed by his magisterial command of the anthropology literature, in a field far from his primary expertise in entomology. One young woman was almost in tears as she asked her question, having apparently been misled into thinking that Wilson’s ideas, if right, would condemn her to a life of stereotyped womanhood, imprisoned in the apron of domesticity. Wilson calmly dispelled this all-too-common style of misunderstanding, and she sat down, I hope satisfied.
Equally misguided, and actually downright slander, was the chant of “We charge you with genocide.” What? Did we hear right? Genocide? It is as though these people thought that any mention of the dread word gene in the same sentence as human behavior or human psychology automatically branded the speaker a genocidal racist. What superlatives remain, one wonders, to describe genuine racism when it comes along, let alone genocide?
Four decades on, the infantile disorder had died a natural death as its perpetrators grew up. But alas, a muddled re-hash of it resurfaced after Wilson’s death in—of all places—Scientific American. No water thrown this time, just nasty, snide innuendo backed up by literally no evidence—indeed no indication that its author had read a word of Sociobiology. The editor of Scientific American went on record as finding the article “intriguing.” Have the standards of that once respected journal really sunk so low? Has it abandoned science?
Edward O. Wilson was a gentleman—a humane, humanist gentleman. He was also human, capable of being wrong, as we all are. I believe he was profoundly wrong in his latter-day disagreement with virtually everyone else in the field over kin selection and inclusive fitness (a purely scientific disagreement having no connection with the political pre-occupations of the Washington water-throwers or the wetly incoherent Scientific American author). It would be hypocritical of me not to acknowledge the existence of my highly critical review of The Social Conquest of Earth, which explains the nature of the disagreement. I stand by it and do not regret its outspoken tone (it is reprinted in my 2021 book Books Do Furnish a Life). But I also stand by my profound admiration for Professor Wilson and his life work.
Edward O. Wilson was a biologist of immense distinction. In addition to his unmatched expertise in the fascinatingly alien world of ants, he was one of the world’s leading ecologists. Together with Robert MacArthur, he invented the modern science of island biogeography. If he didn’t invent biophilia and consilience, his name will remain linked with those noble philosophies as their most articulate advocate. He was an astonishingly prolific and hard-working author. Having finished a book as substantial as The Insect Societies, one might have expected him to take a well-earned rest. Comfortable laurels would have beckoned to a lesser man. But no: “Because … there was some momentum left from writing The Insect Societies, I decided to learn enough about vertebrates to attempt a general synthesis.” The result was Sociobiology. Some momentum! And even Sociobiology, which might be thought sufficiently magnum for any normal lifetime, is dwarfed by The Ants, his later opus written jointly with Bert Hölldobler.
Not many scientists can boast two Pulitzer Prizes. Even more distinguished, he won the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, widely regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for disciplines “chosen so as to complement those for which the Nobel Prizes are awarded.”
A great scientist and a great man.
Sean B. Carroll
The moment I heard of Edward O. Wilson’s passing in December, a Paul Simon lyric popped immediately into my head: “Who’ll be my role model now that my role model is gone, gone?”
Legions of biologists lost a great role model—not just a brilliant scientist, a gifted writer and storyteller, and a passionate conservationist, but a gentle soul with a deep love for all creatures great and small (especially the small ones).
My allusion to Simon’s catchy line is no accident. The musician met the biologist fifteen years ago at a TED conference and was inspired by Wilson’s vision for what our world could be. The two men became friends, and Simon devoted a 2017 tour to raising funds for the E.O. Wilson Foundation.
In addition to rock icons, Wilson influenced countless students, teachers, and scientists over his truly epic career. His chief tools were his pen, his vision, and his Southern charm—a personal warmth that belied a difficult childhood growing up in Alabama. In addition to losing the use of one eye in a fishing accident, he had to deal with the challenges of being an only child of unhappy parents.
Perhaps the first person Wilson impressed was his fifth-grade teacher during a brief interlude living in Washington, D.C. “Ed has genuine writing ability, and when he combines that with his great knowledge of insects, he produces fine results,” she wrote in one of the most prophetic report cards of the twentieth century.
Those fine results would include two Pulitzer-Prize–winning books (On Human Nature and The Ants, coauthored with Bert Hölldobler)—although I will disclose that my favorite of all Wilson’s writings is his autobiography, Naturalist. Wilson’s tales of growing up exploring the Alabama woods, his adventures in Melanesia, and his seminal work in the Florida Keys are treasures that should be shared with every budding naturalist or scientist.
Wilson was often likened to a modern-day Charles Darwin. In temperament, his thirst for adventure, and his profound love of all living things (he coined the term biophilia), the comparison was apt. He conjured his nineteenth-century forefather when he wrote of exploring the tiny mangrove islets of the Florida Keys:
No one but a naturalist or escaped convict would choose to traverse the gluelike mud flats or climb through the tangled prop roots and trunks of the mangrove trees. … I drifted along from landfall to landfall, collecting specimens, studying charts, filling my notebook with impressions. Mine was anything but a world-class voyage, but I was as content as Darwin on the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle.
His thirst for adventure was lifelong such that at age eighty-two, he made his first trip to Southern Africa to visit Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. There, in a magnificent wilderness healing from two decades of conflict and destruction, he discovered more grounds for the optimism that permeated his worldview. He left a trail of inspiration, from encouraging young Mozambican Tonga Tercida to switch career goals from guide to biologist (see https://tinyurl.com/5hvvzx5k) to establishing a new research laboratory in the park. The Edward O. Wilson Laboratory is now headquarters for the training of generations of Mozambican scientists who will lead the country’s ambitious conservation efforts.
I have said nothing here of Wilson’s many specific scientific achievements; his firsts and their influence can fill many pages. I wanted to give a brief glimpse of a life so well-lived, so engaged with—and so in love with—the world. The fate of our world was his constant concern, expressed in full by his book-length plea to set aside half of the Earth for humans and the other half for nature.
A nonbeliever, Wilson merged that concern while facing his mortality in an Afterword to Naturalist that will serve as his epitaph:
The astonishing depths of wonders in the universe, continuously revealed by science is my temple. The capacity of the informed human mind, liberated at last by the understanding that we are alone and thus the sole stewards of Earth, is my religion. The potential of humanity to turn this planet into a paradise for future generations is my afterlife.
Steven Pinker
Twenty-five years ago, Edward O. Wilson sent me a typed letter of moral support, out of the blue, after I had written a controversial article and was being attacked by the political and religious Right. He recalled the failure of colleagues to support him when he had been a target of vituperation and felt an obligation to support younger scientists who advanced new ideas.
Wilson was warm, unpretentious, genial, courtly, and happy to engage those who disagreed with him, including, at times, me. Late in his career, he claims to have rethought the widespread rejection of group selection as an explanation for altruism, though the record shows that he had never relinquished the idea in the first place. He held it even during the heyday of William Hamilton, George Williams, and Richard Dawkins, who showed that adaptations are for the benefit of the gene. Wilson tried to push the idea that people are nice to each other only because it makes their tribe more formidable in warfare, which I find neither plausible nor theoretically warranted.
Wilson was known within evolutionary biology for his expertise on all things myrmecological and for his daring work on island biogeography (imagine fumigating a mangrove island for the sake of science today!).
He became infamous in the public sphere for his treatment in Sociobiology of Homo sapiens as just another kind of animal shaped by natural selection, including its behavior. This was a kind of foray into psychology, though Wilson was neither trained in nor a substantive contributor to that field. He didn’t really distinguish between internal motivation, which could plausibly be a target of selection, and overt behavior, which depends critically on context and compromise. But the very idea that human psychology could be illuminated by evolution was a thoughtcrime in the 1970s, and in many discussions the concept of human nature retains its aura of taboo today. Surely one of his greatest contributions was to challenge that taboo.
Edward O. Wilson deserves additional credit for advancing two ideas, each captured in a book title: biophilia, the pleasure and comfort we take in natural living environments, and consilience, the unity of knowledge despite academic silos.