A Sept. 20 Style article incorrectly gave Focus on the Family founder James Dobson the title "reverend." He is not an ordained clergyman.
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Science And Salvation
The biologist, in front of a photograph of weaver ants at his Harvard office, wants religious communities to join in efforts to protect biodiversity.
(Josh Reynolds for The Washington Post)
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He's saying: Let's put our differences aside. "We've got a job to get done."
'A Normal Boy, Within Reason'
Go looking for Ed Wilson in the slightly shabby maze that is Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and you're likely to be told: "He's in the Ant Room."
He's happy to show you around.
"One of the marks of a great university," he says, "is that it's full of treasures nobody ever sees." Sure enough, hidden in rows of steel cabinets, housed in a space no bigger than a tract mansion's master bedroom, are . . . a million dead ants. Lovingly labeled and impaled on pins, they form the largest collection in the world; they're one of the reasons Wilson chose to stay at Harvard, decades ago, when Stanford tried to lure him away.
With Wilson, everything starts with ants.
Oh, he's moved way beyond them, in a career noted for its repeated attempts at cosmic syntheses. But if he'd published nothing at all beyond his work on ants, he'd still be in the top ranks of modern biology. To take just one example, Wilson figured out how ants communicate through taste and smell -- how they "talk" to each other by means of pheromones.
A remarkable discovery. But it's a bit less surprising if you consider that at the age of 9, he was keeping harvester ants in a sand-filled jar under his bed so he could observe their excavations. That at 13, he made the first recorded observation of the fire ant Solenopsis invicta in the United States. And that as a 19-year-old student at the University of Alabama, he was hired by the Alabama Department of Conservation to evaluate the impact of fire ants on the state's agriculture.
"I was a normal boy, within reason," Wilson writes in his autobiography, "Naturalist." True enough, if by normal you mean a boy whose parents divorced at a time and place where this was still a rarity; a boy whose father's job changes put him in 14 schools in 11 years; a boy who compensated for the lack of long-term friendships by immersing himself in the natural world.
It wasn't just ants. He plunged into any natural habitat within bicycle reach: streambeds, woodlands and swamps replete with such exotica as pileated woodpeckers, orchids, alligators, bats and skinks -- all the while dreaming "of being a real explorer."
For a long time he was obsessed with snakes. "Don't ever handle a live one!" warned a field guide of the deadly cottonmouth moccasin, yet Wilson did so frequently, "with the fifteen-year-old's naive confidence that I would never make a mistake."
Squeamish readers of "Naturalist" might want to avoid Chapter 6, in which he describes a foolhardy attempt to hold on to a wildly struggling five-foot cottonmouth "with a body as thick as my arm and a head the size of my fist."
The snake almost won.
