E. O. Wilson

Edward Osborne Wilson (June 10, 1929 – December 26, 2021) was an American biologist, naturalist, entomologist and writer. According to David Attenborough, Wilson was the world's leading expert in his specialty of myrmecology, the study of ants. He was nicknamed the "ant man".

Wilson has been called "the father of sociobiology", "the father of biodiversity" and the "natural heir" to Charles Darwin. He has been praised for his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. Among his contributions to ecological theory is the theory of island biogeography (developed in collaboration with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur), which served as the foundation of the field of conservation area design, as well as the unified neutral theory of biodiversity of Stephen P. Hubbell.

Wilson was the Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. The Royal Swedish Academy awarded Wilson the Crafoord Prize. He was a humanist laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for ''On Human Nature'' in 1979, and ''The Ants'' in 1991) and a ''New York Times'' bestselling author for ''The Social Conquest of Earth'', '' Letters to a Young Scientist'', and ''The Meaning of Human Existence''.

Early life

Edward Osborne Wilson was born on June 10, 1929, in Birmingham, Alabama, a single child to Inez Linnette Freeman and Edward Osborne Wilson. According to his autobiography '' Naturalist'', he grew up in various towns in the Southern United States including Mobile, Alabama, Decatur, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. From an early age, he was interested in natural history. His father was an alcoholic who eventually committed suicide. His parents allowed him to bring home black widow spiders and keep them on the porch.
They divorced when he was seven.

In the same year that his parents divorced, Wilson blinded himself in one eye in a fishing accident. He suffered for hours, but he continued fishing. He did not complain because he was anxious to stay outdoors. He did not seek medical treatment. Several months later, his right pupil clouded over with a cataract. He was admitted to Pensacola Hospital to have the lens removed. Wilson writes, in his autobiography, that the "surgery was a terrifying 9thcentury ordeal". Wilson retained full sight in his left eye, with a vision of 20/10. The 20/10 vision prompted him to focus on "little things": "I noticed butterflies and ants more than other kids did, and took an interest in them automatically."

Although he had lost his stereoscopic vision, he could still see fine print and the hairs on the bodies of small insects. His reduced ability to observe mammals and birds led him to concentrate on insects.

At the age of nine, Wilson undertook his first expeditions at the Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. He began to collect insects and he gained a passion for butterflies. He would capture them using nets made with brooms, coat hangers, and cheesecloth bags. Going on these expeditions led to Wilson's fascination with ants. He describes in his autobiography how one day he pulled the bark of a rotting tree away and discovered citronella ants underneath. The worker ants he found were "short, fat, brilliant yellow, and emitted a strong lemony odor". Wilson said the event left a "vivid and lasting impression on im. He also earned the Eagle Scout award and served as Nature Director of his Boy Scout summer camp. At age 18, intent on becoming an entomologist, he began by collecting flies, but the shortage of insect pins caused by World War II caused him to switch to ants, which could be stored in vials. With the encouragement of Marion R. Smith, a myrmecologist from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, Wilson began a survey of all the ants of Alabama. This study led him to report the first colony of fire ants in the U.S., near the port of Mobile.
Wilson said he went to 15 or 16 schools within 11 years of schooling.

Education

Wilson was concerned that he might not be able to afford to go to a university, and tried to enlist in the United States Army, intending to earn U.S. government financial support for his education. He failed the Army medical examination due to his impaired eyesight, but was able to afford to enroll in the University of Alabama, where he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in biology in 1950. In 1951, Wilson transferred to Harvard University.

Appointed to the Harvard Society of Fellows, he could travel on overseas expeditions, collecting ant species of Cuba and Mexico and travel the South Pacific, including Australia, New Guinea, Fiji, New Caledonia, and Sri Lanka. In 1955, he received his Ph.D. and married Irene Kelley.

Career

From 1956 until 1996, Wilson was part of the faculty of Harvard. He began as an ant taxonomist and worked on understanding their microevolution, how they developed into new species by escaping environmental disadvantages and moving into new habitats. He developed a theory of the "taxon cycle".

In collaboration with mathematician William H. Bossert, Wilson developed a classification of pheromones based on insect communication patterns. In the 1960s, he collaborated with mathematician and ecologist Robert MacArthur in developing the theory of species equilibrium. In the 1970s he and Daniel S. Simberloff tested this theory on tiny mangrove islets in the Florida Keys. They eradicated all insect species and observed the re-population by new species. Wilson and MacArthur's book ''The Theory of Island Biogeography'' became a standard ecology text.

In 1971, he published ''The Insect Societies'', which argues that insect behavior and the behavior of other animals are influenced by similar evolutionary pressures. In 1973, Wilson was appointed the curator of entomology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1975, he published the book '' Sociobiology: The New Synthesis'' applying his theories of insect behavior to vertebrates, and in the last chapter, humans. He speculated that evolved and inherited tendencies were responsible for hierarchical social organization among humans. In 1978 he published ''On Human Nature'', which dealt with the role of biology in the evolution of human culture and won a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Wilson was named the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science in 1976 and, after his retirement from Harvard in 1996, became the Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus.

In 1981 after collaborating with Charles Lumsden, he published ''Genes, Mind and Culture'', a theory of gene-culture coevolution. In 1990 he published ''The Ants'', co-written with Bert Hölldobler, his second Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

In the 1990s, he published ''The Diversity of Life'' (1992), an autobiography: '' Naturalist'' (1994), and '' Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge'' (1998) about the unity of the natural and social sciences.

Retirement and death

In 1996, Wilson officially retired from Harvard University, where he continued to hold the positions of Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology.
He fully retired from Harvard in 2002 at age 73. After stepping down, he published more than a dozen books, including a digital biology textbook for the iPad.

He founded the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, which finances the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is an "independent foundation" at the Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University. Wilson became a special lecturer at Duke University as part of the agreement.

Wilson and his wife, Irene, resided in Lexington, Massachusetts. He had a daughter, Catherine. He was preceded in death by his wife (on August 7, 2021) and died in nearby Burlington on December 26, 2021, at the age of 92.

Work

''Sociobiology: The New Synthesis'', 1975

Wilson used sociobiology and evolutionary principles to explain the behavior of social insects and then to understand the social behavior of other animals, including humans, thus establishing sociobiology as a new scientific field. He argued that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is the product of heredity, environmental stimuli, and past experiences, and that free will is an illusion. He referred to the biological basis of behavior as the "genetic leash".E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, New York, Knopf, 1998. The sociobiological view is that all animal social behavior is governed by epigenetic rules worked out by the laws of evolution. This theory and research proved to be seminal, controversial, and influential.

Wilson argued that the unit of selection is a gene, the basic element of heredity. The ''target'' of selection is normally the individual who carries an ensemble of genes of certain kinds. With regard to the use of kin selection in explaining the behavior of eusocial insects, the "new view that I'm proposing is that it was group selection all along, an idea first roughly formulated by Darwin."

Sociobiological research was at the time particularly controversial with regard to its application to humans. The theory established a scientific argument for rejecting the common doctrine of tabula rasa, which holds that human beings are born without any innate

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