Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

Sydney M. WilliamsScientist – E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature, Richard RhodesDecember 17, 2021“I wrote this biography in part because I saw in Wilson aquality rare among human beings: he has never stoppedgrowing in knowledge or expanding in range.” Richard Rhodes Scientist – E.O. Wilson: A Life in NatureMy introduction to Edward O. Wilson was twenty years ago when I read Naturalist. Since, I have read three more of his books: Anthill, Wilson’s sole work of fiction, Social Conquest of Earth and Tales from the Ant World, which I reviewed on October 27, 2020, a small percentage of the thirty-five books he has written. Mr. Wilson is a retired professor of entomology at Harvard, where he specialized in myrmecology, but became famous for his writings on eusociality. He has been called Darwin’s natural heir.Though never a student of flora or fauna, I have always enjoyed nature – Hiking through the White Mountains and sculling across marsh creeks in the Connecticut River’s estuary (as I once did), and now walking the trails in the woods near where we live. When I read the autobiographical Naturalist, Professor Wilson had been retired for five years. But, for me, the book was an awakening to a new world –that of ants. As a child in rural, coastal Alabama, Wilson was enamored with nature. An early accident destroyed his vision in one eye, which led him to focus on smaller forms of life.Richard Rhodes captures this ninety-two-year-old man whose curiosity has never waned. Mr. Rhodes begins his story in an unusual but creative way. Mr. Wilson, in interviews with the author, spoke little about his private life and thoughts. But he granted access to letters he had written his fiancée, Irene Kelly, over a ten-month period between November 1954 and September 1955. Mr. Wilson, then a junior fellow at Harvard University, traveled to the South Pacific, Australia, India and Europe to collect specimens for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. On Fiji, he wrote to Miss Kelley that he only carried a hands lens, forceps, specimen vials and notebooks. Mr. Rhodes added: “His real high-tech instrument was his brain, his heart its engine.” While still on Fiji, Mr. Wilson wrote his fiancée: “I am really in a foreign country now,” and that natives in the interior “still live rather primitively in grass huts.” And he could be amusing. Cannibalism had been given up some time earlier, however an older (and former) cannibal passed on the Fijian’s assessment that “human flesh was salty, not as tasty as pig.” Wilson and Kelley were married upon his return at the end of September 1955.While there is no question that Mr. Rhodes admires his subject, he does not shy from the most controversial period of Mr. Wilson’s career, which followed the publication of the textbook, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in 1975. Most biologists at the time believed that culture accounted for about 90% of human behavior. But based on his studies of social insects and animals, including humans, he argued that about half of a human’s behavior, including traits like altruism, were a consequence of genetic inheritance (nature), not culture (nurture). Wilson was attacked by those who identified him with earlier eugenicists like Herbert Spencer, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt who claimed that deviant behavior and racial differences in intelligence were genetically based, even though “Sociobiology explicitly rejected the concept of race as applied to human beings.” Forty years later, Wilson was vindicated. Mr. Rhodes explained: “In 2015, in the scientific journal Nature Genetics, a study appeared that settled the argument about how much of human behavior is nature and how much nurture…the conclusion of the study: ‘Across all traits the reported heritability is 49%.’”The size and complexity of the field Wilson chose to study is mind boggling, and Mr. Rhodes does yeoman’s work in simplifying Wilson’s history. There are an estimated 10,000 trillion ants in the world, whose combined weight would match that of all humans and exceed that of all elephants. But Wilson’s interest in the natural world extends beyond ants. There are, according to his estimates, about 1.7 million species that have been named, with an estimated seven million species yet to be discovered. Each species, as Wilson says, is “the terminus of a lineage that split off thousands or even millions of years ago.” As for the complexity of any species, Richard Rhodes wrote: “Wilson described the information density of a single strand of mouse DNA. Stretched out, such a strand would be about one meter (3.3 feet) long, but invisible to the naked eye (and small enough to curl up inside an equally invisible cell), because it’s only twenty angstroms – two-billionths of a meter – in diameter.” Mr. Rhodes quotes Wilson: “The full information contained therein, if translated into ordinary-sized letters would just about fill all 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica published since 1768.”This is a short book (at 221 pages), but it provides a close look at one of the most fascinating men of our times: Edward O. Wilson grew up in the rural south during the Depression, in a dysfunctional family that moved multiple times. He overcame a terrible accident that caused the loss of one eye. Filled with the wonder we associate with a young child, Wilson followed his dream of becoming a naturalist and still follows it. Along the way, he has won more than 150 awards and medals, including two Pulitzers and 40 honorary degrees. It is his child-like awe for all things nature that is infectious and his persistence and emphasis on empiricism that is admirable.Scientist is a fine introduction to this remarkable man.

What I enjoyed most about this book is how it described how science is made. Rhodes focus on how and why Wilson chose his field and topics, the logic and logistics behind his experiments and the difference between field and lab science mystified science for me somewhat. I particularly enjoyed reading about his battles with Watson and the critics of sociobiology as it confirmed my own sense of how scientists and academics can be just as hide bound and petty as the rest of us.Seeing Michael Crichton and Paul Simon pop up was also fun. After reading this, I do feel I am in a better position to understand what makes a great scientist and that is a desire to synthesize a unifying theory that reconciles key questions across multiple disciplines.

Rhodes’s biography of E. O. Wilson is a very approachable description of the life and contributions of the Harvard biologist. I recall taking my young children down Oxford Street to see the “bugs” in the Harvard collection. Hundreds if not thousands of “bugs” pinned in some logical order. Yet this was just the static and at best morphological world of these creatures. Where Wilson managed to excel is understanding and explaining the dynamic societal world of these creatures, as living, organized, dynamic and adaptive entities.Rhodes takes the reader from Wilson’s early youth in the south and his interest in “bugs” and his travels up to Harvard and his establishment of himself as a world renowned experts in bot the statics and dynamics of these creatures.The book can be divided into three sections. The first is his early life and his establishment as an exemplar leader in his field. He accomplished this by the extensive field work and then the reduction of that effort into his writings.The second phase can be described as a combative phase focused on his work called Sociobiology. I read the book when it first came out and was amazed as to its comprehensive coverage and insightful integration of facts and processes. The basic premise in my mine of sociobiology was the integral part the genetics of the species plays in the social life of the creatures. For Wilson the genetics was viewed at the higher level not down to the DNA level. What I found most intriguing was the attacks and animus he generated in the Marxist crowd at Harvard, Lewontin et al, who felt his approach denied the fundamental deterministic tenets of Marxist dialectic. The presentation of the Marxist attack upon Wilson at an AAAS meeting where he was to speak is reminiscent of the “woke” crowds of today. It was the 60s/70s and I remember these all too well.In this second phase we also see the conflict between Watson and Wilson, the DNA chemist/physics crowd and Wilson’s dynamic environment understanding of species behavior. It would take a long time before the two managed to bridge the gap. Yet they did. The interplay of DNA level understandings with the observations of species dynamics is still a massive work in progress.The third phase is up to the present where Wilson has been both recognized and accepted.I found the ongoing references to Wilson and Camus of interest. It is especially of interest since Camus and Monod ( the French Scientist who explained the details genetic expression with a Nobel in 1965) were joint colleagues in the French Resistance. Perhaps more than just a coincidence.Overall, this is a superbly well written biography, being just the right length and flowing with details but not loading the reader with excess. Wilson is a classic, and most likely will just get better as time goes by and his view of nature can be integrated into a holistic understanding of nature.

E. O. Wilson is a fascinating figure. However this book tends to repeat previously published source material. The personal interviews by the author help to provide some new insight.