Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

Woese, Carl R.
sociobiology provided an intellectual justification for oppression.
At a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science in Washington D.C., Wilson was
one of the platform scientists at a discussion of human evolution.
Protesters chanted, “Racist Wilson you can’t hide, we
charge you with genocide!” A protester jumped up on stage
with a pitcher of water and poured it all over Wilson, saying,
“Wilson, you are all wet!” Evolutionary anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon helped push the protester off the stage,
and Stephen Jay Gould took the microphone to denounce
the protesters’ tactics. Meanwhile Wilson just wiped off the
water and continued with the meeting. No one who has met
Wilson can believe that he in any way condones the misuse of
sociobiology as a rationalization for political oppression.
If anyone could handle the challenge of trying to bring
together all fields of knowledge into a single unified structure,
it would be Edward Wilson. His 1998 Consilience
called for a return to original Enlightenment ideals for
bridging the sciences and the humanities. College education
is a smorgasbord of largely disconnected subjects that
leaves undergraduates more annoyed than enlightened; the
typical divisions of a newspaper (news, business, sports, leisure)
are even more disconnected. Rather than to have science
as just one area of study, equal perhaps to music, or
as an occasional page in a newspaper, Wilson wants science,
particularly evolutionary science, to be understood as the
foundation of all human history and activity. Naturally this
approach has drawn attacks from scholars in the humanities
who do not want their field to be seen as a subset of
science. Wilson writes, “My truths, three in number, are
the following: first, humanity is ultimately the product of
biological evolution; second, the diversity of life is the cradle
and greatest natural heritage of the human species; and
third, philosophy and religion make little sense without taking
into account these first two conceptions.” Although Wilson
admits his approach to consilience may be wrong, it is
widely recognized as one of the most concise and organized
attempts ever made.
Wilson has received many of the highest awards that are
available. There is no Nobel Prize for evolutionary biology,
but Wilson has received the Crafoord Prize, the award given
by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for areas not
covered by the Nobel Prize, as well as the National Medal
of Science in the United States. In addition to his two Pulitzer
prizes, Wilson has received prestigious prizes in Japan,
France, Italy, and Saudi Arabia and from world conservation
organizations. As much as he cherishes these prizes, he is still
very grateful for the teaching awards he has received from the
students of Harvard University.
Even though most people his age have decided to take it
easy, Wilson still has major projects. His primary goal is to
facilitate the formation of an “Encyclopedia of Life,” which
will use modern technology to speed up the process of documenting
the Earth’s rapidly disappearing biodiversity. His
motto might be reflected in this quote, “Love the organisms
for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and,
with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don’t, the
love and the pleasure will have been enough.” Even though
he is one of the most respected scientists of modern times, he
will not hesitate to crouch down on the ground to look at an
ant. He is still, at heart, a Boy Scout working on an insect
merit badge.
Further Reading
Cowley, Geoffrey. “Wilson’s world.” Newsweek, 22 June 1998, 58–
62.
MacArthur, Robert H., and Edward O. Wilson. Theory of Island
Biogeography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967.
Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1984.
———. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage
Press, 1998.
———. The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1992.
———. “The encyclopedia of life.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution
18 (February 2003): 77–80.
———. The Future of Life. New York: Vintage Press, 2002.
———. Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949–2006. Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
———. Naturalist. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994.
———. On Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1978.
———. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1975.
———, and William H. Bossert. A Primer of Population Biology.
Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates, 1971.
———, and Bert Hölldobler. The Ants. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990.
Woese, Carl R. (1928– ) American Microbiologist, Evolutionary
scientist Carl R. Woese (see photo on page 419) is
one of the few scientists whose research has transformed the
way scientists think about life and evolution. His work laid
the foundation for the molecular study of evolution and for
the tree of life. Born July 15, 1928, Woese studied physics
as an undergraduate at Amherst College, and biophysics for
his doctorate at Yale. He joined the microbiology faculty at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964.
Woese’s first major contribution was to demonstrate the
importance of using DNA to test hypotheses of evolutionary
relatedness, rather than using visible anatomical structures
(see DNA [evidence for evolution]). This is especially
important for comparisons among prokaryotes such as bacteria,
which have relatively few visible differences, and for
comparing prokaryotes with more complex organisms such
as humans. Evolutionary change leaves a record in the DNA,
even when almost all visible differences between two species
(for example, between a bacterium and a human) have
vanished in evolutionary time. Woese was not the only scientist
to think of using DNA to reconstruct evolutionary
history, but very few other scientists attempted it, because
in the 1970s the techniques were very laborious and slow.
Techniques that had to be done by hand and required weeks
of work are now automated and can be done overnight. It