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The ant king's latest mission
« on: 2006-10-02 15:20:51 » |
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The celebrated scientist, who found fame studying our smallest creatures, has never been far from controversy and his new campaign - Christianity and science uniting to save the world - will put him back in the spotlight
Robin McKie
Sunday October 1, 2006
The Observer
By any reckoning, Edward O Wilson is a man whose moment of ideological glory has arrived. The distinguished evolutionary biologist has just made headlines across America following the publication of his book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. In it, he asks America's religious right to join forces with science to save the planet. 'Pastor, we need your help,' he writes. 'The Creation - living Nature - is in deep trouble.' The message is simple: let us bury our differences to save the world. It is as if Ian Paisley had written to the Pope for help in dealing with local hooligans: unlikely, but potentially highly effective.
Wilson is ideally suited to effect a rapprochement between evolutionary science and fundamental Christianity. His forebears as far back as the mid-1800s were Southern Baptists from Alabama and Georgia and he was raised a fundamental Christian, being baptised at 14. Then 'something small somewhere cracked'. Wilson abandoned the church and turned to science for explanations of Nature's marvels.
His religious past has occasionally reached out to reclaim him, however. Wilson recalls attending a service at Harvard in 1984 held by Martin Luther King's father, a Baptist preacher, to promote good race relations. A gospel choir sang after King's sermon. To his astonishment, Wilson found himself weeping. 'My people, I thought. My people.'
Wilson can still talk the Baptist talk, it seems. He also looks and acts the part of the Southern gentleman. He has a rich drawl, impeccable manners and displays deference to others. He is also notably reticent, rarely mentioning his wife Renee or daughter Cathy in interviews. His demeanour speaks of a man who has buttoned up his personal life and his past, which is not surprising, given the chaos of Wilson's youth.
In 1937, his parents divorced and he was passed from relative to relative before being returned to his alcoholic father, experiences that profoundly shaped his life. 'A nomadic existence made Nature my companion of choice, because the outdoors was the one part of my world I perceived to hold rock steady. Animals and plants I could count on; human relationships were more difficult.'
Other events had even greater consequences. Like any self-respecting Southern boy, Wilson enjoyed fishing. One day, he pulled too hard on his line and a pinfish - small, perch-like with needle-sharp spines - flew out of the water and into his face. One of the spines pierced the pupil of his right eye, blinding it.
That was bad enough. Unfortunately, Wilson then developed extreme myopia in his left eye. In addition, he also began to manifest a hereditary defect which prevented him hearing sounds in upper registers, including bird songs.
These were hard disabilities for a prospective naturalist. He couldn't hear birds, nor could he locate them unless they obligingly fluttered past in clear view. There was only one avenue left to him: the little things in life, animals that could be picked up and brought close for inspection. He became an expert on insects and, in particular, ants.
After high school, Wilson went to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he fell under the spell of its school of evolutionary biology. He proved to be a brilliant student and worked tirelessly to study as much of the poorly explored ecology of Alabama as possible. Thus his weekends and holidays were spent clambering into bay-gum swamps, hiking along muddy stream banks and striding through hillside forests in search of unusual creepy-crawlies. By the age of 18, he had been converted to scientific professionalism.
Wilson graduated in 1949. By this time, his father's health had reached a grim status. Increasingly depressed, his father wrote a note of apology to his family, drove his car to the banks of the Mobile River and shot himself. Wilson was heartbroken. 'No man knows his father well enough to matter until it is too late; then understanding comes in fragments,' Wilson states in his memoir, Naturalist. The remark is typical of Wilson at his epigrammatic best and gives a hint of the emotional currents that run deep inside him. It also reveals his quality as a writer.
After Alabama, he moved to Harvard University. ('It was my destiny,' he says.) Here, the fledgling naturalist repeated his ecological foraging trips, though this time, backed by generous funding, he was able to roam much further afield: to Mexico, the West Indies and the South Pacific. He sought the rare and the unusual in the insect world, placing each species in its correct environmental niche and from that knowledge built up pictures of complex, interacting ecological systems in rainforests, grasslands and deserts. It was an approach to biology that glorified complexity and it would bring Wilson into direct conflict with some powerful scientific figures.
The first of these was Jim Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the double helical structure of DNA. Watson, also newly arrived at Harvard, became an outspoken denouncer of traditional approaches to evolutionary biology, the very ones practised by Wilson. Instead, Watson espoused, forcibly, the cause of molecular biology as the only route to the understanding the secrets of life. Thus test tubes and gel trays were seen as the way forward, forceps and field trips were for losers.
Given his fame, the views of Watson easily held sway over those of Wilson. 'I found him the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,' says Wilson. 'He became the Caligula of biology.'
Worse was to come. In 1971, Wilson began work on a grand unified theory which aimed to explain all animal behaviour in terms of genes and he published this under the title Sociobiology in 1975. Rashly, Wilson added a brief chapter which suggested human beings were also subject to such inherited influences. The effect was incendiary.
Marxists and social scientists, who believe the human mind is shaped only by experience, reacted with fury. Fellow Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin published a brutal criticism of Wilson in the New York Review of Books, claiming his theory had close parallels with ideas that led to Nazi gas chambers. Wilson, who had merely suggested that genes influenced behaviour and whose liberal credentials are sound, only found out about the attack when it appeared on newsstands. Later, at a public symposium, protesters poured a jug of iced water on his head.
This was harsh treatment for a scientist who had merely tried to establish parallels between societies, from insects to mammals, and attempted to demonstrate their common genetic roots. In any case, Wilson got his revenge fairly quickly. In his 1978 book, On Human Nature, he outlined a far more robust case for concluding mankind is influenced by its genes. It won a Pulitzer Prize. (Wilson won a second for The Ants, which he wrote with Bert Holldobler, in 1990.) After that, he produced a series of acclaimed books - The Diversity of Life, Naturalist, and others.
'I do not know of another working scientists whose prose is better,' says novelist Ian McEwan, who describes Wilson as 'an intellectual hero'. It is a fair point for there is real majesty in his writing. There is also a certain amount of venom. As Wilson, the great ant expert, once remarked about Marxism, whose supporters had brought him such pain: 'Wonderful theory, wrong species.'
In any case, Wilson's remarkable literary skills should not detract from his achievements as a scientist. Even if he had never published on any topic outside the study of ants, he would still be rated a top-ranking biologist. For example, one of his discoveries was to figure out how ants communicate: through taste and smell, by releasing pheromones, chemical messengers, that allow one to talk to another. 'He is an outstanding synthesiser, his knowledge is immense and he manages to bring it all together in a coherent way,' says Richard Dawkins, another admirer.
However, it has been his immense knowledge of the natural world that has monopolised his more recent literary efforts and he has become positively strident in voicing concerns about the climatological fate that awaits 'the Sumatran rhinoceros, the flat-spined, three-toothed land snail, the Furbish lousewort' and all the other life forms with which we share this world. Like so many others, he been rather short on suggested actions, however. Hence the importance of his new call to action and to the series of follow-up lectures and addresses that he is given at cathedrals, churches and halls across America. Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world, he says, and they need each other badly.
'I think we need something like this in America,' he says. 'We have had too many divisions over stem cells, Intelligent Design and other issues. We have got to unite and get some purpose. This has got to snowball. We have got to get a popular movement in action to make our government understand the danger. We've got to move from the ground upwards.'
It is an appropriate image. This, after all, is a man who has spent his life on the ground, with the ants, working upwards. His moment has truly arrived.
The Wilson Lowdown
Born On 10 June 1929, the only son of Edward and Inez Freeman Wilson. Wilson graduated from the University of Alabama in 1949 and later obtained his doctorate from Harvard. In 1956, he was appointed assistant professor of biology at the university and is still active at Harvard, researching ants and other insects.
Best of times Winning Pulitzer Prize for On Human Nature in 1978 and the Crafoord Prize, ecology's equivalent of the Nobel, in 1990. Five years later, Wilson was named one of the 25 most influential men in the United States by Time magazine.
Worst of times Divorce of his parents when he was seven and then suicide of his father in 1951. Attacked by protesters - who poured a jug of water on his head at a scientific symposium and chanted: 'Wilson, you are all wet' - following publication in 1975 of his book, Sociobiology, which argued that social behaviour among humans is influenced by our genes.
What he says 'A civilisation able to envision God and to embark on the colonisation of space will surely find the way to save the integrity of this planet and the magnificent life it harbours.'
What others say 'One of the 20th century's greatest thinkers.' Jared Diamond, Pulitzer-winning writer and ecologist
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