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 dried off and soldiered on. In 1978's Pulitzer Prize-winning "On Human Nature," he says, he tried harder to incorporate social science into his thinking and to explain that he'd never believed in what he was being accused of believing: total biological determinism, the idea that humans "were just puppets."
It's worth remembering, while contemplating the breadth and depth of Wilson's accomplishments, that he's had to contend with something else at least as formidable as the angry opposition to sociobiology. He'd set out to make it as an old-fashioned biologist in the 1950s, just as James Watson and Francis Crick solved the riddle of DNA. Soon, molecular biologists -- the new gods of the scientific universe -- began scooping up resources and faculty appointments.
But what he calls "molecular triumphalism" came with a silver lining. "The unpopularity of organismic and evolutionary biology," he explains, "provided me with enormous opportunities." With fewer competitors, he felt like a prospector alone on a gold field, able to strike out in any direction he chose.
What could be better?
Except that as Wilson continued to pile up scientific achievements, their source -- the natural world -- was discovered to be under siege.
By the 1970s, he had traveled enough in the tropics and heard enough warnings from colleagues to know that species and habitat loss was becoming an urgent problem. At first, he thought scientists should keep out of the political arena. "Boy, was I ever wrong," he says now. "I realized that, like these fictional scientists who discover a meteorite headed toward Earth, the scientists better speak up."
In "The Creation," he lays out the grim scenario.
Precise measurement is difficult, but the extinction rate is vastly higher -- somewhere between 50 and 500 times as high -- than it was before Homo sapiens showed up, and it's rising fast.
By 2050, according to estimates Wilson cites, climate change alone could account for "extinction of a quarter of the species of plants and animals on the land." And that's without factoring in other causes of species loss: habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, human overpopulation and overharvesting.
One consequence of inaction, Wilson notes, is that in less than 20 years, the decline in freshwater ecosystems could leave 40 percent of the world's population facing chronic water scarcity. Peter Seligmann, CEO of Conservation International -- on whose board Wilson sits -- outlines another this way: "Loss of forest means loss of insects; loss of insects means loss of pollinators; loss of pollinators means loss of food, crops . . . "
The good news? Much progress could be made by protecting what conservation biologists call "hot spots," those areas -- covering less than 3 percent of the Earth's surface -- where endangered species are most highly concentrated.
The bad news? As a threat, biodiversity loss is much harder to explain than climate change (though the science behind biodiversity hasn't generated as much controversy). This complexity makes it more difficult to get people's attention.
