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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Most of Wilson's childhood was spent along the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida, but when he was 10, his father moved the family briefly to Washington. This proved a paradise of a different kind. He spent countless hours prowling Rock Creek Park, but he also had access to the National Zoo and -- a five-cent trolley ride away -- the National Museum of Natural History.
"I would stand in the rotunda," he recalls, "and I would look up and I knew that on the upper floors up there were the gods of my universe. They were the curators and scientists who collected beetles and watched birds and went to far off lands in South America and the South Pacific.
"And I thought, 'What a great thing to be able to do!' "
'Boy, Was I Ever Wrong'
The term "biodiversity" hadn't been invented when Wilson arrived at Harvard in 1951 to begin work on his doctorate. He didn't worry about saving the creation: He just wanted to explore it.
Blessed with three years of essentially unlimited funding, he soon took off for Mexico, the West Indies and then the South Pacific, reveling in the kind of Darwinesque biologizing soon to become scientifically obsolete. He was on his own, with "no high-technology instruments, only a hand lens, forceps, specimen vials, notebooks, quinine, sulfanilamide, youth, desire, and unbounded hope."
Thus armed, he launched a career with too many high points to be easily summarized. For one thing, he's the rare scientist who has both dug deep and theorized broadly.
"There are very few people who can do both," says current Natural History director Cristian Samper. "One of the things I greatly admire about Ed is that even though he's such a broad thinker and a gifted writer, he still, at the core, has his work on ants."
Ask Wilson to name peak achievements and he mentions the observations he made, in his South Pacific work, about the way dominant groups of ants arose and spread from island to island. This led to a collaboration with "an extraordinary young ecologist, Robert MacArthur," to produce "The Theory of Island Biogeography."
He mentions his work on pheromones; his invention, with others, of the new discipline of population biology; and his proposal, in 1971, of "a science of sociobiology" in which "we can put together almost everything we know about social insects -- ants, bees, wasps and termites -- into a single discipline."
And he recaps the firestorm he sparked when he threw a chapter into his 1975 book, "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis," suggesting that human behavior was subject to the same kind of genetic determinants he'd been exploring in the animal kingdom.
Naively, he says, he had failed to understand how fiercely protective social scientists and academic Marxists would be of the behavioral "blank slate" theory, the idea that "the mind is completely formed by experience and by culture."
Scholarly opponents denounced him as a racist and sexist reactionary. Radical protesters dumped ice water on him at a meeting in Washington, chanting "Wilson, you're all wet."
