Edward O. Wilson: More Than Just Ants

The ground breaking biologist, E.O. Wilson has died at the age of 92.  A Harvard professor for forty-six years, he was responsible in large part for founding the field of sociobiology. His seminal work in the field, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis was widely acclaimed and later condemned when he extended his theories of natural selection based on social behavior to humans. Dr. Wilson argued that our species had a propensity to behave in certain ways and form certain social structures. He called that propensity human nature. Wilson graduated and achieved his master's degree at the University of Alabama before going to Harvard for his PhD work. He began his studies with ants before branching into evolutionary biology and ecology. His book, “The Theory of Island Biogeography,” published in 1967, is considered one of the most influential published works of ecology and “a founding principle of conservation biology.”

Wilson began investigating the larger question of how animal behavior evolved. He came to the startling conclusion that the theory of natural selection could not explain why some ants behave the way they do. Ants are extremely cooperative to the extent that daughter ants become sterile to increase the chances of their queen's offspring surviving. By becoming less reproductively competitive these daughter ants could pass down more genes they share to future generartions. This concept originated with a British researcher, William Hamilton, and was labeled "inclusive fitness". Wilson became a convinced advocate. After publishing Sociobiology in 1975, Wilson declared, “The organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA,” Some critics of his work said he was attempting to resurrect discredited ideas of biological determinism that gave way to eugenics and eventually the Nazi program of genocide.

Despite the controversies, animal behaviorists have largely adapted his ideas to their studies. Researches have identified thousands of genes in the human genome that affect behavior that they share with other species. Attempts to create a "unified theory" of animal behavior based on evolution have not proven successful, however. He eventually came to reject the notion of "inclusive fitness" in a 2010 paper. Later in life he turned his focus on biological diversity and the problem of mass extinction. He traveled to Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique to study the park's resurgence of biodiversity after being ravaged to near extermination in a long-running civil war. He called for a world of Gorongosas in which half the Earth's surface needed to be left wild in order to avoid a calamitous dystopia in his 2016 book, “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life,”. Scientists are now studying which ecosystems to save first in a careful rescue plan. A colleague remarked, “We’re taking Ed’s idea and running with it. It’s that simple.”