Background

Born in 1929 in Alabama, E. O. Wilson showed an interest in science from an early age. His mother was Inez Freeman and his father and namesake remarried when Edward was a young child. Enjoying the natural world, he took an interest in insects and butterflies as he still has a good close up vision. On a trip to the Rock Creek Park in Washington, District of Columbia, he became fascinated with citronella ants that were living in a rotting tree. From a young child, he always hoped to become a biologist.

Education

After finishing high school, Wilson received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1949 and a Master of Science degree in 1950 from the University of Alabama. In 1955, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Harvard University, where he transferred in 1951.

Career

After receiving a doctorate in biology at Harvard University in 1955, he was a member of Harvard’s biology and zoology faculties from 1956 to 1976. At Harvard, he was later Frank B. Baird Professor of Science (1976-1994), Mellon Professor of the Sciences (1990-1993), and Pellegrino University Professor (1994-1997; professor emeritus from 1997). In addition, Wilson served as a curator in entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (1973-1997).

Damage to his depth perception as a result of a childhood eye injury, and the onset of partial deafness during his adolescence, precluded Wilson from pursuing his interest in ornithological fieldwork. He exchanged bird studies, conducted at a distance, and requiring acute hearing, for entomology. Wilson could easily observe insects without straining his damaged senses. In 1955 he completed an exhaustive taxonomic analysis of the ant genus Lasius. In collaboration with W.L. Brown, he developed the concept of "character displacement," a process in which populations of two closely related species, after first coming into contact with each other, undergo rapid evolutionary differentiation in order to minimize the chances of both competition and hybridization between them.

After his appointment to Harvard in 1956, Wilson made a series of important discoveries, including the determination that ants communicate primarily through the transmission of chemical substances known as pheromones. In the course of revising the classification of ants native to the South Pacific, he formulated the concept of the "taxon cycle," in which speciation and species dispersal are linked to the varying habitats that organisms encounter as their populations expand. In 1971 he published The Insect Societies, his definitive work on ants and other social insects. The book provided a comprehensive picture of the ecology, population dynamics, and social behavior of thousands of species.

In Wilson’s second major work, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), a treatment of the biological basis of social behavior, he proposed that the essentially biological principles on which animal societies are based also apply to humans. This thesis provoked condemnation from prominent researchers and scholars in a broad range of disciplines, who regarded it as an attempt to justify harmful or destructive behavior and unjust social relations in human societies. In fact, however, Wilson maintained that as little as 10 percent of human behavior is genetically induced, the rest being attributable to the environment.

In On Human Nature (1978), for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1979, Wilson discussed the application of sociobiology to human aggression, sexuality, and ethics. His book The Ants (1990; with Bert Hölldobler), also a Pulitzer winner, was a monumental summary of contemporary knowledge of those insects. In The Diversity of Life (1992), Wilson sought to explain how the world’s living species became diverse and examined the massive species extinctions caused by human activities in the 20th century.

In his later career, Wilson turned increasingly to religious and philosophical topics. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), he strove to demonstrate the interrelatedness and evolutionary origins of all human thought. In Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (2006), he developed further the evolutionarily informed humanism he had earlier explored in On Human Nature. In contrast to many other biologists, notably Stephen Jay Gould, Wilson believed that evolution is essentially progressive, leading from the simple to the complex and from the worse-adapted to the better. From this, he inferred an ultimate moral imperative for humans: to cherish and promote the well-being of their species.

He further elucidated the complex functional relationships that drive ant, bee, wasp, and termite colonies in The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (2009; with Bert Hölldobler). That volume was followed by a monograph on leafcutter ants, The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct (2011). Kingdom of Ants: José Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World (2011; with José M. Gómez Durán) was a brief biography of Spanish botanist José Mutis, with particular emphasis on the ants he encountered while exploring South America.

In 1990 Wilson and American biologist Paul Ehrlich shared the Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to support areas of science not covered by the Nobel Prizes. Wilson’s autobiography, Naturalist, appeared in 1994. In 2010 he released his debut novel, Anthill: A Novel, which featured both human and insect characters. Letters to a Young Scientist (2013) was a volume of advice directed at nascent scientific investigators.

Achievements

• Edward Osborne Wilson, more commonly known as E. O. Wilson, is an American biologist who is widely considered to be the world's leading authority on ants. One of the leading figures in sociobiology, he is often dubbed as "the father of sociobiology."
  
  A notable author and researcher, Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize twice; for his best seller book "On Human nature" and for his 1990 book "The Ants" which he co-authored with German entomologist Bert Hölldobler.
  
  In today’s world, he is regarded as the foremost authority on the study of ants which is also known as myrmecology and he has contributed immensely towards further discoveries in this field. In addition to myrmecology, E. O. Wilson is also credited for being the founding father of the branch of biology known as sociobiology and biodiversity. In addition to his research work, he has written bestselling books that have gone on to win major accolades. Many universities and organizations across the world have conferred upon him numerous accolades and honors.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies

    (Whether writing about midges who "dance about like acroba...)

    2019
  • The Social Conquest of Earth

    (Refashioning the story of human evolution, Wilson draws o...)

    2013
  • Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

    (One of our greatest living scientists - and the winner of...)

    1999
  • The Ants

    (This landmark work, the distillation of a lifetime of res...)

    1990
  • Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration

    (Richly illustrated and delightfully written, Journey to t...)

    1994
  • Sociobiology: The New Synthesis

    (When this classic work was first published in 1975, it cr...)

    1975
  • The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies

    (The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of The Ants render the...)

    2009
  • The Diversity of Life: With a New Preface

    (Watching from the edge of the Brazilian rain forest, witn...)

    2010
  • The Meaning of Human Existence

    (In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical...)

    2015
  • Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

    (In his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize-winning a...)

    2017
  • The Future of Life

    (One of the world’s most important scientists, Edward O. W...)

    2003
  • Letters to a Young Scientist

    (Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson imparts...)

    2014
  • Nature Revealed: Selected Writings

    (Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson is one of...)

    2006
  • Biophilia

    (Biophilia is Edward O. Wilson's most personal book, an ev...)

    1984
  • Tales from the Ant World

    (Edward O. Wilson recalls his lifetime with ants - from hi...)

    2020

Religion

E. O. Wilson considers himself more like Agnostic, then Atheist. He claimed: "I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist and Christian no more."

Views

One of Wilson’s most notable theories was that even a characteristic such as altruism may have evolved through natural selection. Traditionally, natural selection was thought to foster only those physical and behavioral traits that increase an individual’s chances of reproducing. Thus, altruistic behavior - as when an organism sacrifices itself in order to save other members of its immediate family - would seem incompatible with this process. In Sociobiology Wilson argued that the sacrifice involved in much altruistic behavior results in saving closely related individuals - i.e., individuals who share many of the sacrificed organism’s genes. Therefore, the preservation of the gene, rather than the preservation of the individual, was viewed as the focus of evolutionary strategy; the theory was known as kin selection. In later years, however, Wilson was inclined to think that highly social organisms are integrated to such an extent that they are better treated as one overall unit - a superorganism - rather than as individuals in their own right. This view was suggested by Charles Darwin himself in On the Origin of Species (1859). Wilson expounded on it in Success, Dominance, and the Superorganism: The Case of the Social Insects (1997).

Using examples drawn from human history and from the natural history of social insects, Wilson made a case for multilevel selection as the driver of social evolution in a series of papers and, at length, in The Social Conquest of Earth (2012). He argued that the evolution of eusociality occurred at the level of the group - regardless of genetic relation - prior to occurring at the kinship and individual levels. By his reasoning, the emergence of eusocial animals such as ants (and, arguably, humans) could be attributed to a genetic predisposition to act altruistically toward even unrelated conspecifics and to act in concert with one group against another group. Wilson was excoriated by many of his colleagues, who maintained that he had erroneously contradicted his own earlier ideas regarding kin selection as the primary driver of social evolution. His detractors - among them English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Canadian American evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker - claimed that the idea of group selection was predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of natural selection. They argued that, though animals inarguably benefit from sociality, a group of organisms was not a unit of selection in the manner of a gene or individual organism and that altruistic social behavior was more than adequately explained by kin selection.

Wilson briefly synthesized his deterministic beliefs about behavior in The Meaning of Human Existence (2014). Situating the human species on an evolutionary continuum, he contended that humanity had spent most of its history in ignorance of the biological factors that drove the formation of society and culture. Though science had latterly established the origins of Homo sapiens and the ultimate insignificance of the species in the universe, Wilson asserted that humans remained beholden to primitive survival impulses that lacked utility in contemporary society, leading to religious and tribal conflicts. Nonetheless, he supposed an incipient thought revolution, enabled by further scientific inquiry, that would allow humanity a more fulsome understanding of itself on a cosmic scale. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016) advanced the idea that plummeting biodiversity could be mitigated by reserving a full half of the planet for nonhuman species. By linking extant conservation areas as well as new ones using a system of corridors of protected land, Wilson argued that a tenable system for human coexistence with the rest of life on Earth could be created.

Quotations: "Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction."

"By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified."

"Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition."

"There is no better high than discovery."

"Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals."

"True character arises from a deeper well than religion."

"To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong."

"Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science."

"If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth."

"It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are."

Membership

E. O. Wilson is a fellow to different societies, such as Deutsche Akademy Naturforsch, American Philosophical Society, American Academy Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of National Academy of Sciences, Royal Science Society Uppsala (Sweden), Russian Academy of Sciences, Royal Entomological Society, Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Royal Society in London, Netherlands Entomological Society, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Association of Tropical Biology, Academy of Humanism, American Humanist Association, Zoological Society London, Entomological Society of America, British Ecological Society, American Genetics Association), Explorers Club and others.

Personality

Physical Characteristics: A fishing accident damaged his right eye when he was seven years old.

Quotes from others about the person

• "I’ll tell you something about Ed - he’s a bit of an intellectual grenade thrower. He likes to be a provocateur. That’s unusual in someone as established as he is." - David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist.

Connections

Edward O. Wilson married Irene Kelley on October 30, 1955. the couple has one child Catherine Irene.

Father:

Edward Osborne Wilson

Mother:

Inez (Freeman) Wilson

Spouse:

Irene Kelley

child:

Catherine Irene Wilson

colleague:

Berthold Karl Hölldobler

References

• Sociobiology: 1st (First) Edition
• E.O. Wilson: Of Ants and Men
  2015