Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

that point onward he questioned the religious foundations he
had embraced as a youth. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard
University in 1955. He was invited to join the Harvard
faculty in 1956, and he is still there, as Pellegrino University
Professor Emeritus. He works as Honorary Curator in Entomology
at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Receipt of a Harvard fellowship allowed him to travel
soon after he began his faculty appointment in 1956. He
studied ants in New Guinea and other Pacific Islands. He was
the first outsider to climb Mt. Boana, the crest of the central
Sarawaget Mountains of New Guinea. He also traveled in the
American tropics. He collected lots of ants, always with the
goal of understanding the evolutionary history of the entire
ant family Formicidae.
Wilson’s observations also made him think about how
species diversity developed on islands. Curious as always,
when he returned to Harvard he sat in on mathematics
classes, recognizing that he needed to know more math if he
was to develop general theories of population biology. He
shared his understanding with the world in A Primer of Population
Biology (with geneticist William H. Bossert), which
Edward O. Wilson is one of the leading evolutionary scientists of modern
times. (Courtesy of Science Photo Library)
Wilson, Edward O.
is still one of the fundamental texts on the subject. With
ecologist Robert H. MacArthur of Princeton University, Wilson
developed the theory of island biogeography, which tied
species immigration and extinction to the area of islands and
their distance from the mainland.
But is it possible to study island biogeography experimentally?
In the late 1960s Wilson, with ecologist Daniel
Simberloff, removed all of the animals from mangrove islands
of various sizes and distances from the mainland in the Florida
Keys—a difficult task, especially when a hurricane is
coming—then documented the colonization of these islands
by animals. His work transformed the study of island species
from stories to a science and made island biogeography theory
useful to conservation efforts.
Wilson’s studies of ants created breakthroughs of understanding
in how insects communicate. He and collaborators
worked out the principles of how insects communicate by
chemicals. Subsequently, many researchers have found examples
of chemical communication among vertebrates and even
among plants.
Wherever he traveled, at home or abroad, he could not
help but notice that human activity was destroying natural
habitats and, in the process, replacing high-diversity ecological
communities with low-diversity artificial habitats. He
could see, before most scientists had thought about it, that
species were being driven into extinction faster than anyone
could even recognize them, let alone study them. He
knew that there was yet a lot to be learned from wild species
of ants. For example, ants have high population densities
yet they hardly ever experience epidemic diseases. This
is because their metapleural glands and some symbiotic bacteria
produce chemicals (which some people call antibiotics)
that kill bacteria. Humanity needs new antibiotics (see resistance,
evolution of), yet humans are driving many ant
species into extinction. Wilson’s 1984 Biophilia argued that
humans have a psychological need for contact with the natural
world. In The Diversity of Life and The Future of Life,
Wilson explained the causes and consequences of the sixth of
the mass extinctions, which humans are bringing upon the
world, and what humans might be able to do to slow or stop
it. Not content with writing, Wilson has been active with the
American Museum of Natural History, Conservation International,
The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife
Fund. The destruction of biodiversity, he writes, “is the folly
our descendants are least likely to forgive us.”
Wilson was largely responsible for synthesizing the modern
understanding of insect behavior in his 1971 book The
Insect Societies. He applied these concepts across the entire
animal kingdom in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis. There was only a little bit, the last chapter, about
humans, but it sparked a vigorous controversy about the role
of evolutionary biology in human behavior and created a field
of study now sometimes called evolutionary psychology. Wilson
did not hesitate to make his message clear to the general
public in his 1978 book On Human Nature. Strong disagreement
came from other scientists, including some Harvard
colleagues (see Gould, Stephen Jay; Lewontin, Richard).
Outside the academic world many activists believed that