By Michael F. Duggan
A great man of science is gone.
A gentle man of large ambition and focus and a world-historical intellect, Wilson was one of the great minds of the late 20th-early 21st century and likely the greatest biologist of his time. He wrote about 50 books (many over the age of 80) and contributed parts to about 100 more. He was a wonderful stylist and for the past 25 years, he was one of my favorite writers and his Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature is one of my favorite books. Widely considered to be the father of modern sociobiology, he was “Darwin’s natural heir” for our time. He died on December 26.
Wilson was the world authority on ants. Because the behavior of most ants is instinctive—hardwired—Wilson decided to address questions on the sociobiological basis for human behavior. It became the second great prong of his professional career.
Over the next half-century, sociobiology/evolutionary psychology became a counterbalance to a purely social science approach to questions related to nature and nurture in human life. For this he was pilloried and was actually assaulted by social science advocates for merely suggesting that the underlying behavior of human beings was in part the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural sculpting and trial-and-error. As he wrote in his 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth, “History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He never said that his view was the final word (for me his 1998 book, Consilience is likely a bridge too far in its universality on the unity of knowledge), and taken together, sociobiology and the social sciences explain a lot more than either does by itself. If you do not know what we are as an animal, then you have little understanding of yourself or your kind.
I met him once at a lecture he gave at the National Academy of Science years ago, and he seriously entertained a question I asked (“does the pheromone communication of ants have an equivalent to the deep grammar of human generative language?” I was being the precocious recently-minted Ph.D.).
There are many evolutionary biologists I have read and admired over the years—Niles Eldridge, Stephen J. Gould, Ernst Mayr, Lynn Margulis, James A. Shapiro—but Wilson was a singular Napoleonic figure who towered above them all. He was also a tireless champion of the environment (a third prong) and wrote wonderfully and with admonishment on biodiversity and even provided a basis—the minimum requirements—for saving the planet (Half-Earth, 2016).
If you are in need of a suggestion for a charitable donation this year, you could do worse than investigate the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. https://eowilsonfoundation.org/
As when Stephen Hawking died in 2018, I feel as if a calm, rational, and wise presence has left an increasingly chaotic world when he and his kind are needed the most. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was 92.