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Sunday, March 29, 2015

Ernst Mayr


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ernst Mayr
Ernst Mayr PLoS.jpg
Ernst Mayr
Born Ernst Walter Mayr
(1904-07-05)July 5, 1904
Kempten, Germany
Died February 3, 2005(2005-02-03) (aged 100)
Bedford, Massachusetts, United States
Residence United States
Nationality German/American
Fields systematics, Evolutionary biology, ornithology, philosophy of biology
Doctoral students Robert Trivers
Notable awards Darwin-Wallace Medal (Silver, 1958)
Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal (1967)
National Medal of Science (1969)
Linnean Medal (1977)
Balzan Prize (1983)
International Prize for Biology (1994)
Crafoord Prize (1999)

Ernst Walter Mayr (/ˈmaɪər/; July 5, 1904 – February 3, 2005)[1][2] was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, and historian of science.[3] His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

Although Charles Darwin and others posited that multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor, the mechanism by which this occurred was not understood, creating the species problem. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for species. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. When populations within a species become isolated by geography, feeding strategy, mate selection, or other means, they may start to differ from other populations through genetic drift and natural selection, and over time may evolve into new species. The most significant and rapid genetic reorganization occurs in extremely small populations that have been isolated (as on islands).

His theory of peripatric speciation (a more precise form of allopatric speciation which he advanced), based on his work on birds, is still considered a leading mode of speciation, and was the theoretical underpinning for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Mayr is sometimes credited with inventing modern philosophy of biology, particularly the part related to evolutionary biology, which he distinguished from physics due to its introduction of (natural) history into science.

Biography


Bust of Mayr in the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

Mayr was the second son of Helene Pusinelli and Dr. Otto Mayr. His father was a jurist (District Prosecuting Attorney at Würzburg)[4] but took an interest in natural history and took the children out on field trips. He learnt all the local birds in Würzburg from his elder brother Otto. He also had access to a natural history magazine for amateurs, Kosmos. His father died just before he was thirteen. The family then moved to Dresden and he studied at the Staatsgymnasium (“Royal Gymnasium” until 1918) in Dresden-Neustadt and completed his high school education there. In April 1922, while still in high school, he joined the newly founded Saxony Ornithologists’ Association. Here he met Rudolf Zimmermann, who became his ornithological mentor. In February 1923, Mayr passed his high school examination (Abitur) and his mother rewarded him with a pair of binoculars.[5]

On March 23, 1923 on the lakes of Moritzburg, the Frauenteich, he spotted what he identified as a Red-crested Pochard. The species had not been seen in Saxony since 1845 and the local club argued about the identity. Raimund Schelcher (1891–1979) of the club then suggested that Mayr visit his classmate Erwin Stresemann on his way to Greifswald, where Mayr was to begin his medical studies.[5] After a tough interrogation, Stresemann accepted and published the sighting as authentic. Stresemann was very impressed and suggested that, between semesters, Mayr could work as a volunteer in the ornithological section of the museum. Mayr wrote about this event, "It was as if someone had given me the key to heaven."[5] He entered the University of Greifswald in 1923 and, according to Mayr himself, "took the medical curriculum (to satisfy a family tradition) but after only a year, he decided to leave medicine and enrolled at the Faculty of Biological Sciences."[6] Mayr was endlessly interested in ornithology and "chose Greifswald at the Baltic for my studies for no other reason than that...it was situated in the ornithologically most interesting area."[6] Although he ostensibly planned to become a physician, he was "first and foremost an ornithologist."[6] During the first semester break Stresemann gave him a test to identify treecreepers and Mayr was able to identify most of the specimens correctly. Stresemann declared that Mayr 'was a born systematist'.[7] In 1925 Stresemann suggested that he give up his medical studies, in fact he leaves faculty of medicine and enroll into faculty of Biology and then join the Berlin Museum with the prospect of bird-collecting trips to the tropics on the condition that he completed his doctoral studies in 16 months. Mayr completed his doctorate in ornithology at the University of Berlin under Dr. Carl Zimmer, who was a full professor (Ordentlicher Professor), on June 24, 1926 at the age of 21. On July 1 he accepted the position offered to him at the Museum for a monthly salary of 330.54 Reichsmark.[8]

At the International Zoological Congress at Budapest in 1927, Mayr was introduced by Stresemann to banker and naturalist Walter Rothschild, who asked him to undertake an expedition to New Guinea on behalf of himself and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In New Guinea, Mayr collected several thousand bird skins (he named 26 new bird species during his lifetime) and, in the process also named 38 new orchid species. During his stay in New Guinea, he was invited to accompany the Whitney South Seas Expedition to the Solomon Islands. Also, while in New Guinea, he visited the Lutheran missionaries Otto Thiele and Christian Keyser, in the Finschhafen district; there, while in conversation with his hosts, he uncovered the discrepancies in Hermann Detzner's popular book, Four Years among the Cannibals in German Guinea from 1914 to the Truce, in which Detzner claimed to have seen the interior, discovered several species of flora and fauna, while remaining only steps ahead of the Australian patrols sent to capture him.

He returned to Germany in 1930 and in 1931 he accepted a curatorial position at the American Museum of Natural History, where he played the important role of brokering and acquiring the Walter Rothschild collection of bird skins, which was being sold in order to pay off a blackmailer. During his time at the museum he produced numerous publications on bird taxonomy, and in 1942 his first book, Systematics and the Origin of Species, which completed the evolutionary synthesis started by Darwin.

After Mayr was appointed at the American Museum of Natural History, he influenced American ornithological research by mentoring young birdwatchers. Mayr was surprised at the differences between American and German birding societies. He noted that the German society was "far more scientific, far more interested in life histories and breeding bird species, as well as in reports on recent literature."[9]

Mayr organized a monthly seminar under the auspices of the Linnean Society of New York. Under the influence of J. A. Allen, Frank Chapman, and Jonathan Dwight, the society concentrated on taxonomy and later became a clearing house for bird banding and sight records.[9]

Mayr encouraged his Linnaean Society seminar participants to take up a specific research project of their own. Under Mayr's influence one of them, Joseph Hickey, went on to write A Guide to Birdwatching (1943). Hickey remembered later, "Mayr was our age and invited on all our field trips. The heckling of this German foreigner was tremendous, but he gave tit for tat, and any modern picture of Dr E. Mayr as a very formal person does not square with my memory of the 1930s. He held his own." A group of eight young birdwatchers from The Bronx later became the Bronx County Bird Club, led by Ludlow Griscom. "Everyone should have a problem" was the way one Bronx County Bird Club member recalled Mayr's refrain.[9]

Mayr said of his own involvement with the local birdwatchers: "In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnean Society that was the most important thing in my life."[9]

Mayr also greatly influenced the American ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice. Mayr encouraged her to correspond with European ornithologists and helped her in her landmark study on song sparrows. Nice wrote to Joseph Grinnell in 1932, trying to get foreign literature reviewed in the Condor: "Too many American ornithologists have despised the study of the living bird; the magazines and books that deal with the subject abound in careless statements, anthropomorphic interpretations, repetition of ancient errors, and sweeping conclusions from a pitiful array of facts. ... in Europe the study of the living bird is taken seriously. We could learn a great deal from their writing." Mayr ensured that Nice could publish her two-volume Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow. He found her a publisher, and her book was reviewed by Aldo Leopold, Joseph Grinnell, and Jean Delacour. Nice dedicated her book to "My Friend Ernst Mayr."[9]

Mayr joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1953, where he also served as director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1961 to 1970. He retired in 1975 as emeritus professor of zoology, showered with honors. Following his retirement, he went on to publish more than 200 articles, in a variety of journals—more than some reputable scientists publish in their entire careers; 14 of his 25 books were published after he was 65. Even as a centenarian, he continued to write books. On his 100th birthday, he was interviewed by Scientific American magazine. Mayr died on 3 February 2005 in his retirement home in Bedford, Massachusetts after a short illness. His wife, Margarete, died in 1990. He was survived by two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.[10]

The awards that Mayr received include the National Medal of Science, the Balzan Prize, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the International Prize for Biology, the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award, and the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. In 1939 he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958 and the Linnaean Society of New York's inaugural Eisenmann Medal in 1983. For his work, Animal Species and Evolution, he was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1967.[11] In 1995 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences of the American Philosophical Society.[12] Mayr never won a Nobel Prize, but he noted that there is no prize for evolutionary biology and that Darwin would not have received one, either. (In fact, there is no Nobel Prize for biology.) Mayr did win a 1999 Crafoord Prize. It honors basic research in fields that do not qualify for Nobel Prizes and is administered by the same organization as the Nobel Prize.

Mayr was co-author of six global reviews of bird species new to science (listed below).

Mayr said he was an atheist towards "the idea of a personal God" because "there is nothing that supports [it]" [13]

Mayr's ideas

As a traditionally trained biologist with little mathematical experience, Mayr was often highly critical of early mathematical approaches to evolution such as those of J.B.S. Haldane, famously calling such approaches "beanbag genetics" in 1959. He maintained that factors such as reproductive isolation had to be taken into account. In a similar fashion, Mayr was also quite critical of molecular evolutionary studies such as those of Carl Woese.

In many of his writings, Mayr rejected reductionism in evolutionary biology, arguing that evolutionary pressures act on the whole organism, not on single genes, and that genes can have different effects depending on the other genes present. He advocated a study of the whole genome rather than of isolated genes only. Current molecular studies in evolution and speciation indicate that although allopatric speciation seems to be the norm in groups (such as in many invertebrates—especially in the insects), there are numerous cases of sympatric speciation in groups with greater mobility (such as the birds).

After articulating the biological species concept in 1942, Mayr played a central role in the species problem debate over what was the best species concept. He staunchly defended the biological species concept against the many definitions of "species" that others proposed.

Mayr was an outspoken defender of the scientific method, and one known to sharply critique science on the edge. As a notable example, in 1995, he criticized the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) as conducted by fellow Harvard professor Paul Horowitz as being a waste of university and student resources, for its inability to address and answer a scientific question. Carl Sagan provided a strong rebuttal to the criticism,[14] and pointed out that many eminent biologists and biochemists had endorsed SETI with the statement:
We are unanimous in our conviction that the only significant test of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is an experimental one. No a priori arguments on this subject can be compelling or should be used as a substitute for an observational program. We urge the organization of a coordinated, worldwide, and systematic search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
—69 signatories, including David Baltimore, Melvin Calvin, Francis Crick, Manfred Eigen, Thomas Eisner, Stephen Jay Gould, Matthew Meselson, Linus Pauling, David Raup, and E.O. Wilson, Science Magazine[15]
Mayr rejected the idea of a gene-centered view of evolution and starkly but politely criticized Richard Dawkins' ideas:
The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian.
—Ernst Mayr, Edge[16]
Mayr insisted throughout his career that the gene as the target of selection cannot and should not be considered a valid idea in modern evolutionary thought.
The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhansky, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years.
—Ernst Mayr, Edge[16]

Bibliography

Books

  • Mayr, Ernst (1942). Systematics and the Origin of Species, from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-86250-3. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1945). Birds of the Southwest Pacific: A Field Guide to the Birds of the Area Between Samoa, New Caledonia, and Micronesia. New York: Macmillan. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1963). Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-03750-2. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1970). Populations, Species, and Evolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-69013-3. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1976). Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-27105-X. 
  • Mayr, Ernst. & William B. Provine, (eds) (1980). The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, ISBN 0-674-27225-0
  • Mayr, Ernst (1982). The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge (Mass.): Belknap P. of Harvard U.P. ISBN 0-674-36446-5. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1988). Toward a New Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-89666-1. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1991). Principles of Systematic Zoology. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-041144-1. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1991). One Long Argument. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-63906-5. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (1997). This Is Biology. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-88469-8. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (2001). The Birds of Northern Melanesia. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514170-9. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (2001). What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04426-3. 
  • Mayr, Ernst (2004). What Makes Biology Unique?. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-84114-3. 

Global reviews of species new to science

Other notable publications

  • 1923 "Die Kolbenente (Nyroca rufina) auf dem Durchzuge in Sachsen". Ornithologische Monatsberichte 31:135–136
  • 1923 "Der Zwergfliegenschnäpper bei Greifswald". Ornithologische Monatsberichte 31:136
  • 1926 "Die Ausbreitung des Girlitz (Serinus canaria serinus L.) Ein Beitrag zur Tiergeographie". J. für Ornithologie 74:571–671
  • 1927 "Die Schneefinken (Gattungen Montifringilla und Leucosticte)" J. für Ornithologie 75:596–619
  • 1929 with W Meise. Zeitschriftenverzeichnis des Museums für Naturkunde Mitteilungen aus dem Zoologischen Museum in Berlin 14:1–187
  • 1930 (by Ernst Hartert) "List of birds collected by Ernst Mayr". Ornithologische Monatsberichte 36:27–128
  • 1930 "My Dutch New Guinea Expedition". 1928. Ornithologische Monatsberichte 36:20–26
  • 1931 Die Vögel des Saruwaged und Herzoggebirges (NO Neuginea) Mitteilungen aus dem Zoologischen Museum in Berlin 17:639–723
  • 1931 "Birds collected during the Whitney South Sea Expedition. XII Notes on Halcyon chloris and some of its subspecies". American Museum Novitates no 469
  • 1932 "A tenderfoot explorer in New Guinea" Natural History 32:83–97
  • 1935 "Bernard Altum and the territory theory". Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of New York 45, 46:24–38
  • 1940 "Speciation phenomena in birds". American Naturalist 74:249–278
  • 1941 "Borders and subdivision of the Polynesian region as based on our knowledge of the distribution of birds". Proceedings of the 6th Pacific Scientific Congress 4:191–195
  • 1941 "The origin and history of the bird fauna of Polynesia". Proceedings of the 6th Pacific Scientific Congress 4:197–216
  • 1943 "A journey to the Solomons". Natural History 52:30–37,48
  • 1944 "Wallace's Line in the light of recent zoogeographics studies". Quarterly Review of Biology 19:1–14
  • 1944 "The birds of Timor and Sumba". Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 83:123–194
  • 1944 "Timor and the colonization of Australia by birds". Emu 44:113–130
  • 1946 "History of the North American bird fauna" Wilson Bulletin 58:3–41
  • 1946 "The naturalist in Leidy's time and today". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 98:271–276
  • 1947 "Ecological factors in speciation". Evolution 1:263–288
  • 1948 "The new Sanford Hall". Natural History 57:248–254
  • 1950 The role of the antennae in the mating behavior of female Drosophila. Evolution 4:149–154
  • 1951 Introduction and Conclusion. Pages 85,255–258 in The problem of land connections across the South Atlantic with special reference to the Mesozoic. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 99:79–258
  • 1951 with Dean Amadon, "A classification of recent birds". American Museum Novitates no. 1496
  • 1953 with E G Linsley and R L Usinger. Methods and Principles of Systematica Zoology. McGraw-Hill, New York.
  • 1954 "Changes in genetic environment and evolution". Pages 157–180 in Evolution as a Process (J Huxley, A C Hardy and E B Ford Eds) Allen and Unwin. London
  • 1955 "Karl Jordan's contribution to current concepts in systematics and evolution". Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London 107:45–66
  • 1956 with C B Rosen. "Geographic variation and hybridization in populations of Bahama snails (Cerion)". American Museum Novitates no 1806.
  • 1957 "Species concepts and definitions". Pages 371–388 in The Species Problem (E. Mayr ed). AAAS, Washington DC.
  • 1959 "The emergence of evolutionary novelties". Pages 349–380 in The Evolution of Life: Evolution after Darwin, vol 1 (S. Tax, ed) University of Chicago.
  • 1959 "Darwin and the evolutionary theory in Biology". Pages 1–10 in Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal (B J Meggers, Ed) The Anthropological Society of Washington, Washington DC.
  • 1959 "Agassiz, Darwin, and Evolution". Harvard Library Bulletin. 13:165–194
  • 1961 "Cause and effect in biology: Kinds of causes, predictability, and teleology are viewed by a practicing biologist". Science 134:1501–1506
  • 1962 "Accident or design: The paradox of evolution". Pages 1–14 in The Evolution of Living Organisms (G W Leeper, Ed) Melbourne University Press.
  • 1964 Introduction, Bibliography and Subject Pages vii–xxviii, 491–513 in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, by Charles Darwin. A Facsimile of the First Edition. Harvard University Press.
  • 1965 Comments. In Proceedings of the Boston Colloguium for the Philosophy of Science, 1962–1964. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2:151–156
  • 1969 Discussion: Footnotes on the philosophy of biology. Philosophy of Science 36:197–202
  • 1972 Continental drift and the history of the Australian bird fauna. Emu 72:26–28
  • 1972 Geography and ecology as faunal determinants. Pages 549–561 in Proceedings XVth International Ornithological Congress (K H Voous, Ed) E J Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands.
  • 1972 Lamarck revisited. Journal of the History of Biology. 5:55–94
  • 1974 Teleological and teleonomic: A new analysis. Boston studies in the Philosophy of Science 14:91–117
  • 1978 Tenure: A sacred cow? Science 199:1293
  • 1980 How I became a Darwinian, Pages 413–423 in The Evolutionary Synthesis (E Mayr and W Provine, Eds) Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • 1980 with W B Provine, Eds. The Evolutionary Synthesis. Harvard University Press.
  • 1981 Evolutionary biology. Pages 147–162 in The Joys of Research (W. Shripshire Jr, Ed.) Smithsonian Institution Press.
  • 1984 Evolution and ethics. Pages 35–46 in Darwin, Mars and Freud: Their influence on Moral Theory (A L Caplan and B Jennings, Eds.) Plenum Press, New York.
  • 1985. Darwin's five theories of evolution. In D. Kohn, ed., The Darwinian Heritage, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 755–772.
  • 1985. How biology differs from the physical sciences. In D. J. Depew and B H Weber, eds., Evolution at a Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, pp. 43–63.
  • 1988. The why and how of species. Biology and Philosophy 3:431–441
  • 1992. The idea of teleology. Journal of the History of Ideas 53:117–135
  • 1994. with W.J. Bock. Provisional classifications v. standard avian sequences: heuristics and communication in ornithology. Ibis 136:12–18
  • 1996. What is a species, and what is not? Philosophy of Science 63 (June): 262–277.
  • 1996. The autonomy of biology: the position of biology among the sciences. Quarterly Review of Biology 71:97–106
  • 1997. The objects of selection Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94 (March): 2091–94.
  • 1999. Darwin's influence on modern thought Crafoord Prize lecture, September 23, 1999.
  • 2000. Biology in the Twenty-First Century Bioscience 50 (Oct. 2000): 895–897.
  • 2001. "The philosophical foundations of Darwinism", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145: 488–495, archived from the original on 2008-04-14 
  • 2002. with Walter J Bock. Classifications and other ordering systems. Zeitschrift Zool. Syst. Evolut-Forsch. 40:1–25
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E. O. Wilson


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

E. O. Wilson
Plos wilson.jpg
Wilson in February 2003
Born Edward Osborne Wilson
(1929-06-10) June 10, 1929 (age 85)
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Nationality American
Fields Biologist
Institutions Harvard University
Duke University
Alma mater University of Alabama
Harvard University
Thesis A Monographic Revision of the Ant Genus Lasius (1955)
Doctoral advisor Frank M. Carpenter
Doctoral students Daniel Simberloff
Donald J. Farish
Corrie Moreau
Known for Popularizing sociobiology
Epic of Evolution
Character displacement
Island biogeography
Notable awards
Edward Osborne "E. O." Wilson FMLS[1] (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he is considered to be the world's leading expert.[2][3]

Wilson is known for his scientific career, his role as "the father of sociobiology" and "the father of biodiversity",[4] his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.[5]

Wilson is (2014) the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University,[6] and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.[7][8] He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and a New York Times bestseller for The Social Conquest of Earth[9] and Letters to a Young Scientist.[9]

Early life

Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama. According to his autobiography Naturalist, he grew up mostly around Washington, D.C. and in the countryside around Mobile, Alabama.[10] From an early age, he was interested in natural history. His parents, Edward and Inez Wilson, divorced when he was seven. The young naturalist grew up in several cities and towns, moving around with his father and his stepmother.

In the same year that his parents divorced, Wilson blinded himself in one eye in a fishing accident. He suffered for hours, but he continued fishing.[10] He did not complain because he was anxious to stay outdoors. He never went in for medical treatment.[10] Several months later, his right pupil clouded over with a cataract.[10] He was admitted to Pensacola Hospital to have the lens removed.[10] Wilson writes, in his autobiography, that the "surgery was a terrifying [19th] century ordeal".[10] Wilson was left with full sight in his left eye, with a vision of 20/10.[10] The 20/10 vision prompted him to focus on "little things": "I noticed butterflies and ants more than other kids did, and took an interest in them automatically."[11]

Although he had lost his stereoscopy, he could see fine print and the hairs on the bodies of small insects.[10] His reduced ability to observe mammals and birds led him to concentrate on insects.

At nine, Wilson undertook his first expeditions at the Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. He began to collect insects and he gained a passion for butterflies. He would capture them using nets made with brooms, coat hangers, and cheesecloth bags.[10] Going on these expeditions led to Wilson's fascination with ants. He describes in his autobiography how one day he pulled the bark of a rotting tree away and discovered citronella ants underneath.[10] The worker ants he found were "short, fat, brilliant yellow, and emitted a strong lemony odor".[10] Wilson said the event left a "vivid and lasting impression on [him]".[10] He also earned the Eagle Scout award and served as Nature Director of his Boy Scout summer camp. At the age of 18, intent on becoming an entomologist, he began by collecting flies, but the shortage of insect pins caused by World War II caused him to switch to ants, which could be stored in vials. With the encouragement of Marion R. Smith, a myrmecologist from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, Wilson began a survey of all the ants of Alabama. This study led him to report the first colony of fire ants in the US, near the port of Mobile.[12]

Concerned that he might not be able to afford to go to a university, Wilson attempted to enlist in the United States Army. His plan was to earn U.S. government financial support for his education, but he failed his Army medical examination due to his impaired eyesight. Wilson was able to afford to enroll in the University of Alabama after all. There, he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in biology. He later earned his Ph.D. degree in biology from Harvard University.

Retirement

In 1996, Wilson officially retired from teaching at Harvard University, where he continues to hold the positions of Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology.[13] He and his wife Irene now reside in Lexington, Massachusetts. His daughter, Catherine, and her husband Jonathan, reside in nearby Stow, Massachusetts.[13]
In December 2013, it was announced that, starting in 2014, Wilson's foundation, the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, would be based as an independent foundation at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. As part of the agreement, Wilson would become a special lecturer at Duke University.[14]

Theories and beliefs

Epic of evolution

"The evolutionary epic," Wilson wrote in his book On Human Nature, "is probably the best myth we will ever have." Wilson's intended usage of the word "myth" does not denote falsehood—rather, a grand narrative that provides people with placement in time—a meaningful placement that celebrates extraordinary moments of shared heritage.[15] Wilson was not the first to use the term, but his fame prompted its usage as the morphed phrase epic of evolution.[5]

Wilson explained the need for the epic of evolution:[16]
Human beings must have an epic, a sublime account of how the world was created and how humanity became part of it... Religious epics satisfy another primal need. They confirm we are part of something greater than ourselves... The way to achieve our epic that unites human spirituality, instead of cleave it, is to compose it from the best empirical knowledge that science and history can provide.
The worth of the epic, he said, is that "[t]he true evolutionary epic retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic."[17]

Cosmologist Brian Swimme concludes in a 1997 interview:[18]
I think that what E. O. Wilson is trying to suggest is that to be fully human, a person has to see that life has a heroic dimension... I think for the scientist, and for other people, it's a question of, "Is the universe valuable? Is it sacred? Is it holy? Or is the human agenda all that matters?" I just don't think we're that stupid to continue in a way that continues to destroy. I'm hopeful that the Epic of Evolution will be yet another strategy in our culture that will lead our consciousness out of a very tight, human-centered materialism.
Naturalistic and liberal religious writers have picked up on Wilson's term and have used it in a number of texts. These authors however have at times used other terms to refer to the idea: Universe Story (Brian Swimme, John F. Haught), Great Story (Connie Barlow, Michael Dowd), Everybody's Story (Loyal Rue[19]), New Story (Thomas Berry, Al Gore, Brian Swimme) and Cosmic Evolution (Eric Chaisson[20]).[21][22][23]

Sociobiology

Michael McGoodwin paraphrasing and quoting Wilson (pp. 16 and 222) on sociobiology:[24]
Sociobiology is defined as the scientific or systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior, in all kinds of organisms including man, and incorporating knowledge from ethology, ecology, and genetics, in order to derive general principles concerning the biological properties of entire societies. "If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, [then] genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species." "The brain [and the mind] exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly." The two apparent dilemmas we face therefore are: (1) We lack any goal external to our biological nature (for even religions evolve to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners). Will the transcendental goals of societies dissolve, and will our post-ideological societies regress steadily toward self-indulgence? (2) Morality evolved as instinct. "Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated?"
Although much human diversity in behavior is culturally influenced, some has been shown to be genetic - rapid acquisition of language, human unpredictability, hypertrophy (extreme growth of pre-existing social structures), altruism and religions. "Religious practices that consistently enhance survival and procreation of the practitioners will propagate the physiological controls that favor the acquisition of the practices during single lifetimes."
Unthinking submission to the communal will promotes the fitness of the members of the tribe. Even submission to secular religions and cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantages.[24]

Wilson used sociobiology and evolutionary principles to explain the behavior of the social insects and then to understand the social behavior of other animals, including humans, thus established sociobiology as a new scientific field. He argued that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is the product of heredity, environmental stimuli, and past experiences, and that free will is an illusion. He has referred to the biological basis of behaviour as the "genetic leash."[25] The sociobiological view is that all animal social behavior is governed by epigenetic rules worked out by the laws of evolution. This theory and research proved to be seminal, controversial, and influential.[26]

The controversy of sociobiological research lies in how it applies to humans. The theory established a scientific argument for rejecting the common doctrine of tabula rasa, which holds that human beings are born without any innate mental content and that culture functions to increase human knowledge and aid in survival and success. In the final chapter of the book Sociobiology and in the full text of his Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature, Wilson argues that the human mind is shaped as much by genetic inheritance as it is by culture (if not more). There are limits on just how much influence social and environmental factors can have in altering human behavior.

Ants and social insects

Wilson, along with Bert Hölldobler, carried out a systematic study of ants and ant behavior,[27] culminating in the encyclopedic work The Ants (1990). Because much self-sacrificing behavior on the part of individual ants can be explained on the basis of their genetic interests in the survival of the sisters, with whom they share 75% of their genes (though the actual case is some species' queens mate with multiple males and therefore some workers in a colony would only be 25% related), Wilson was led to argue for a sociobiological explanation for all social behavior on the model of the behavior of the social insects. In his more recent work, he has sought to defend his views against the criticism of younger scientists such as Deborah Gordon, whose results challenge the idea that ant behavior is as rigidly predictable as Wilson's explanations make it.

Edward O. Wilson, referring to ants, once said that "Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species",[28] meaning that while ants and other eusocial species appear to live in communist-like societies, they only do so because they are forced to do so from their basic biology, as they lack reproductive independence: worker ants, being sterile, need their ant-queen in order to survive as a colony and a species, and individual ants cannot reproduce without a queen and are thus forced to live in centralised societies. Humans, however, do possess reproductive independence so they can give birth to offspring without the need of a "queen", and in fact humans enjoy their maximum level of Darwinian fitness only when they look after themselves and their offspring, while finding innovative ways to use the societies they live in for their own benefit.[29]

Consilience

In his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences, and might be able to unite the sciences with the humanities. Wilson prefers and uses the term "consilience" to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor. He defines human nature as a collection of epigenetic rules, the genetic patterns of mental development. He argues that culture and rituals are products, not parts, of human nature. He says art is not part of human nature, but our appreciation of art is. He argues that concepts such as art appreciation, fear of snakes, or the incest taboo (Westermarck effect) can be studied by scientific methods of the natural sciences. Previously, these phenomena were only part of psychological, sociological, or anthropological studies. Wilson proposes that they can be part of interdisciplinary research.

The units and target of selection

Wilson has argued that the "unit of selection is a gene, the basic element of heredity. The target of selection is normally the individual who carries an ensemble of genes of certain kinds." With regard to the use of kin selection in explaining the behavior of eusocial insects, Wilson said to Discover magazine, the "new view that I'm proposing is that it was group selection all along, an idea first roughly formulated by Darwin."[30]

Spiritual and political beliefs

Views on religion

As paraphrased by Michael McGoodwin[24]
The predisposition to religious belief is an ineradicable part of human behavior. Mankind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief. Men would rather believe than know... A kind of Darwinistic survival of the fittest has occurred with religions... The ecological principle called Gause's law holds that competition is maximal between species with identical needs... Even submission to secular religions such as Communism, capitalism and guru cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantage. The mechanisms of religion include (1) objectification (the reduction of reality to images and definitions that are easily understood and cannot be refuted), (2) commitment through faith (a kind of tribalism enacted through self-surrender), (3) and myth (the narratives that explain the tribe's favored position on the earth, often incorporating supernatural forces struggling for control, apocalypse, and millennium). The three great religion categories of today are Marxism, traditional religion, and scientific materialism... Though theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline, religion will endure for a long time to come and will not be replaced by scientific materialism.

Scientific humanism

Wilson coined the phrase scientific humanism as "the only worldview compatible with science's growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature".[31] Wilson argues that it is best suited to improve the human condition. In 2003, he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.[32]

God and religion

On the question of God, Wilson has described his position as provisional deism[33] and explicitly denied the label of "atheist", preferring "agnostic".[34] He has explained his faith as a trajectory away from traditional beliefs: "I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist & Christian no more."[25] Wilson argues that the belief in God and rituals of religion are products of evolution.[35] He argues that they should not be rejected or dismissed, but further investigated by science to better understand their significance to human nature. In his book The Creation, Wilson suggests that scientists ought to "offer the hand of friendship" to religious leaders and build an alliance with them, stating that "Science and religion are two of the most potent forces on Earth and they should come together to save the creation."[36]

Wilson makes a similar suggestion, an appeal to the religious community, on the lecture circuit. An article on his September 17, 2009 lecture at Midland College, Texas, reports, "he said the appeal received a 'massive reply' and a covenant has been written. 'I think that partnership will work to a substantial degree as time goes on,' Wilson said."[37]

Wilson appears in the documentary Behold the Earth, which inquires into America's "divorce from nature" and the relationship between science and religion.

Ecology

When discussing the reinvigoration of his original fields of study since the 1960s, Wilson has said that if he could start his life over he would work in microbial ecology.[38] He studied the mass extinctions of the 20th century and their relationship to modern society, arguing strongly for an ecological approach:
Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. ... Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.[39]
His understanding of the scale of the extinction crisis has led him to advocate a number of strategies for forest protection, including the Forests Now Declaration, which calls for new markets-based mechanisms to protect tropical forests. In 2014, Wilson called for the global set aside of 50% of the earth's surface for other species to thrive in as the only possible strategy for solving the extinction crisis [40]

Reception of human sociobiology

Wilson experienced significant criticism for his sociobiological views from several different communities. The scientific response included several of Wilson's colleagues at Harvard,[41] such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, who were strongly opposed to his ideas regarding sociobiology. Marshall Sahlins's work The Use and Abuse of Biology was a direct criticism of Wilson's theories.[42]

Politically, Wilson's sociobiological ideas have been opposed by some. Sociobiology re-ignited the nature and nurture debate, and Wilson's scientific perspective on human nature led to public debate. He was accused of racism, misogyny, and eugenics.[43] In one incident, his lecture was attacked by the International Committee Against Racism, a front group of the Marxist Progressive Labor Party, where one member poured a pitcher of water on Wilson's head and chanted "Wilson, you're all wet" at an AAAS conference in November 1978.[44] Wilson later spoke of the incident as a source of pride: "I believe...I was the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea."[45]

“I believe Gould was a charlatan,” Wilson told The Atlantic. “I believe that he was ... seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.”[46]

Religious objections included those of Paul E. Rothrock, who said: "... sociobiology has the potential of becoming a religion of scientific materialism."[47]

Philosopher Mary Midgley encountered Sociobiology in the process of writing Beast and Man[48] and significantly rewrote the book to offer a critique of Wilson's views. While Midgley praises the book for its recognition of the study of animal behavior, clarity, scholarship, and encyclopedic scope, she extensively critiques Wilson for conceptual confusion, scientism, and anthropomorphism of genetics.[49]

Awards and honors


Wilson at a "fireside chat" during which he received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal in 2007

Dr. E.O. Wilson addresses the audience at the dedication of the E.O. Wilson Biophilia Center at Nokuse Plantation in Walton County, Florida.

Wilson's scientific and conservation honors include:

Main works

Edited works

  • From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books, edited with introductions by Edward O. Wilson (2010 W.W. Norton)
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