Michael F. Duggan
The biologist Edward O. Wilson turned 90 on Monday, June 10th.
Arguably the most influential living scientist, he is a world authority on ants, the “father of sociobiology” and a leader of the biodiversity movement who coined the terms “biophilia” and Eremozoic (the latter to describe the geological period dominated by human beings sometimes called the Anthopocene).
In the 1970s he gave much needed firepower to the “Nature” side of Nature/Nurture discourse and infuriated a lot of social “scientists” (not long ago he wrote that “[h]istory makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory make no sense without biology”).
He has written 29 books–eleven of them since the age of 80–and won two Pulitzer Prizes (one for the classic 1978 On Human Nature). His newest book Genesis: The Deep Origins of Society, just came out. His 2016 book “Half-Earth” tells us what we need to do to save the planet.
In his twin volumes, The Social Conquest of Earth and The Meaning of Human Existence–developing some ideas of Darwin from The Descent of Man–he posits the view that human morality is the result of tensions between the pressures of individual selection (and thus selfishness) and the pressures of group selection (altruism/empathy). He believes that the success of the human species (success to a fault) is largely due to our eusociability, a cooperative social structure (strategy?) shared in very different form with social insects like ants and termites, creatures that have also taken over the world.
One need not agree with him on all points he has made over a long and illustrious career to recognize his importance.
I met him in the early 2000s and he inscribed my first edition copy of On Human Nature. Seemed to be a first-rate guy. Happy birthday.