Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson: Darwin's Natural Heir

A fishing accident when he was seven blinded his right eye, and he refused to see a doctor because it would have meant staying indoors. The remaining left eye healed to 20/10 vision, sharp enough to read the fine print of the world at close range but useless for watching hawks. So he looked down instead. "Nobody in the world has ever known as much as Ed Wilson about ants," David Attenborough said of him, and out of those ants Wilson built a theory of how life organises itself, two Pulitzer Prizes, and one of the ugliest arguments in twentieth-century science.

A Boy With One Good Eye

Edward Osborne Wilson was born on 10 June 1929 in Birmingham, Alabama, to Inez Linnette Freeman and Edward Osborne Wilson Sr., an alcoholic who later took his own life. His parents divorced when Wilson was seven, the same year as the fishing accident; cataracts followed months later, and the lens of the damaged eye had to be removed.

The injury made him an entomologist. Unable to follow birds and mammals at distance, he could focus intensely on small things close to hand, and butterflies and then ants became the obsession. At nine, collecting in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., he lifted bark and found citronella ants: "short, fat, brilliant yellow, and emitted a strong lemony odor." He called the impression vivid and lasting, and he was still saying so seventy years later. He made Eagle Scout and served as nature director at his scout camp. At eighteen he switched from flies to ants, partly because wartime shortages had made the pins for mounting flies hard to get, and began a survey of Alabama's ant species, reporting the first fire ant colony in the country near Mobile.

Alabama, Harvard, and the Fire Ants

He took his bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama in 1949 and a master's in biology in 1950, then went to Harvard for his doctorate, finishing in 1955 and marrying Irene Kelley the same year. Election to the Harvard Society of Fellows funded expeditions to Cuba, Mexico, Australia, New Guinea, Fiji, Sri Lanka and the islands of the South Pacific. He stayed at Harvard for forty-six years.

His early work was taxonomy that kept opening into theory. Studying how ant species shifted habitats as they spread, he formulated the taxon cycle. Working with the mathematician William Bossert, he produced a classification of pheromones based on how insects actually signal to one another, establishing chemical communication as a serious subject.

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Islands

The most elegant work of his career came with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur. Their theory of island biogeography, published as a book in 1967, proposed that the number of species on an island settles at an equilibrium between immigration and extinction, determined largely by the island's size and its distance from a source of colonists. It was a quantitative, predictive theory in a discipline that had mostly been descriptive.

Then Wilson did something few theorists dare. With Daniel Simberloff he tested it, selecting tiny mangrove islets in the Florida Keys, exterminating every insect on them, and watching what came back and in what numbers. The predictions held. *The Theory of Island Biogeography* became a standard text and, decades later, the intellectual foundation of reserve design in conservation biology: it explained precisely why fragmented habitat bleeds species.

Sociobiology, and the Pitcher of Water

*The Insect Societies* appeared in 1971, applying evolutionary reasoning to the extraordinary social organisation of ants, bees and termites. Four years later Wilson published *Sociobiology: The New Synthesis*, which did the same for vertebrates and, in its final chapter, for human beings. The argument was that social behaviour, including ours, has an evolutionary history and a genetic substrate.

The reaction was ferocious, and it came from his own building. The Sociobiology Study Group, including his Harvard colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, published "Against 'Sociobiology'", accusing him of a deterministic view of human society with a political lineage they considered obvious and disgraceful. At the 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, protesters surrounded Wilson and poured a pitcher of water over him while calling him a racist. He kept publishing.

Two Pulitzers and a Word for Loving Life

*On Human Nature* followed in 1978 and won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. *The Ants*, written with Bert Hölldobler, won him a second in 1991: a 700-page technical monograph that became a mass-market prize-winner, which is close to unheard of. In *Biophilia* (1984) he proposed that humans carry an evolved affinity for living things, giving conservation an argument from human nature rather than from guilt. In *Consilience* (1998) he pushed his largest claim, that "knowledge is a single, unified thing, not divided between science and humanistic inquiry."

Half-Earth

He retired from Harvard in 2002 at seventy-three and became, if anything, more visible. He edited *BioDiversity* in 1988 and did more than anyone to make the word itself a public concern. In 2014 he proposed that half the Earth's surface be set aside for the rest of life, an idea he laid out in *Half-Earth* in 2016 and pursued through the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation and the Half-Earth Project. He described his own religious position as a provisional deism, neither firmly agnostic nor atheist, and argued that scientists and religious leaders should make common cause to, in his phrase, save the creation.

Why Edward Is Called a Genius

Wilson's gift was synthesis at multiple scales at once. Attenborough put it exactly: he was simultaneously the world's foremost specialist on a single family of insects and one of the few people who could see the whole planetary system those insects belong to. Most scientists manage one of those. Wilson could move from the identification of a species to a mathematical model of species equilibrium to a general theory of social behaviour without ever losing the thread back to the actual animal in the actual soil. He also wrote unusually well: the entomologist Frank Sulloway said "he had a way of using language that was like poetry," and his colleague Piotr Naskrecki described him as "somebody who was really, really good at planting seeds in people's heads." Two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Medal of Science in 1977, the Crafoord Prize in 1990 and more than 430 scientific papers are the record.

The counter-case is real and has to be stated. *Sociobiology*'s final chapter extrapolated from insects to humans further than the evidence of 1975 supported, and Wilson was slow to acknowledge how readily such arguments are conscripted for political ends. His late work on group selection, in the 2010 paper with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita and in *The Social Conquest of Earth*, was rejected by a large majority of evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins, whom Wilson dismissed in return as "a journalist" rather than a scientist. Most seriously, correspondence released after his death showed decades of private support for the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, whose claims about race and intelligence are widely regarded as both flawed and racist; Wilson defended him in private while declining to do so publicly, and his own foundation repudiated that support in 2022. None of this dissolves the island biogeography, the pheromone work or the ant systematics, which are secure. It does mean the honest verdict on Wilson is that he was a genius of biological synthesis whose judgement outside biology was, at times, badly wrong.

Legacy

His wife Irene died on 7 August 2021; Wilson died on 26 December that year in Burlington, Massachusetts, aged ninety-two, survived by their daughter Catherine. Colleagues remembered a man who picked up a venomous Matabele ant with his bare fingers because he wanted a closer look, and who took on a final graduate student, Corrie Moreau, years after becoming emeritus. Island biogeography still governs how reserves are drawn. Biodiversity, biophilia and Half-Earth are all his coinages or his causes. And a boy who lost half his sight is the reason a great deal of what we know about the social insects is known at all.