Pheidole was thereby opened at last to study by scientists interested in its diversity and ecology. Of equal importance in my own mind, I had demonstrated that it is possible for just one person, working part-time, to master a substantial fraction of global biodiversity. If there are 20,000 species of ants in the world (about 12,000 are known to science as I write, in 2006), then only thirty or so specialists would be enough to achieve their discovery and analysis, and they would need perhaps no more than twenty years to do it. How many such experts would be required to diagnose and classify all organisms on Earth in the same amount of time? Leaving out for the moment the bacteria and archaea, of whose vast diversity we have almost no idea, and taking 10 million as a reasonable guess of the number of living species of other kinds on the planet, the number of specialists needed for this initial census could be under 20,000. That is a tiny fraction of the biologists currently employed in the world, and the multitudinous valuable discoveries they could make possible across the rest of biology would be beyond calculation.
In fact, new technology has turned even that time projection into an overestimate. As the Pheidole monograph approached publication, I learned of a recently developed method of illustration that has begun to revolutionize taxonomy. It is the combination of automontaged high-resolution digitized photography with Internet publishing. The automontage method entails making a series of photographs of the same specimen at different levels of the body, top to bottom and side to side (this can be done quickly by automation), and then combining them by computer to produce a three-dimensional image in perfect focus. The method allows very small objects, such as the type specimens of insects, to be viewed with greater clarity than when examined on the stage of a standard dissecting microscope. The images can be transmitted to others through the Internet, or collected together to create an electronic monograph or field guide.
I was introduced to the method by Piotr Naskrecki, one of the first biologists to use it in taxonomic practice. He kindly photographed the type specimens of Pheidole ants available in the Harvard collection and created a CD to be included in my book. This hybrid publication represents, to my view, the beginning of the end of the centuries-old technology of printed taxonomy, and its partial replacement by a CD is the start of a new, faster study and means of publication. I like to call my printed Pheidole book the “last of the great sailing ships.” Henceforth, it should prove far easier to disseminate information about large and difficult genera of insects and other organisms.
To come to the final and most tumultuous track of my eclectic existence, the twelve years since the original publication of Naturalist have seen many changes in sociobiology, from which I have received, as its nominal founder, both anguish and satisfaction. Applied to ants and other animals, it has flourished. Applied to human social behavior it has also proliferated, but under the name “evolutionary psychology,” now an academic subject with a life of its own. Evolutionary psychology has generated some excellent research and much else that is less than distinguished. Overall it has created an industry of popular books, with substantial combined impact, and become part of the popular culture. Criticism of the kind that followed the publication of my Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975 has largely disappeared. However, attacks of the early era, which were heavily ideological in origin, have left a residue of misunderstanding not just about the content but about the very meaning of the term “sociobiology.” It should be kept in mind that sociobiology is a discipline and, as such, is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior. The thrust of criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, which arose from the now discredited conception of the human brain as a blank slate, was that sociobiology entails a belief in biological determinism. This was a canard, and one mischievously intended. Sociobiology is not a doctrine or a particular conclusion but a discipline, an open field of inquiry, allowing in theory for the human brain to be a blank slate (disproved), or completely hardwired (never claimed), or the product of interaction between genetic predisposition and environment (well established and now almost universally accepted).
Another outgrowth of the controversy was the widespread notion that sociobiology means the study of the genetic evolution of social behavior. However, as in all disciplines of biology, it comprises two approaches. The first is functional sociobiology, the study of how social systems are put together. It is this domain, including the theories of division of labor and of chemical communication, to which I made my principal contribution in the late 1950s to early 1970s. The second domain is the process of genetic evolution of social behavior, pioneered by J. B. S. Haldane and William D. Hamilton, among others, from the 1950s forward. In 1975, my Sociobiology: The New Synthesis brought functional sociobiology and evolutionary sociobiology together for the first time and established the boundaries of the subject. Thereafter, unfortunately, the public controversy was focused not on the discipline as such but on the application of its principles to the human species, and then only to the genetic interpretation of human social behavior. That is a sad and destructive misconstruction of an important scientific discipline.
Five years after the publication of Naturalist, my seventieth birthday came and went without a ripple in my mind. Now it recedes like a shoreline behind a departing ship, serenely, a shrinking abstract line of memory. Entering my late seventies as I write, in 2006, luck still holds: good health, good working conditions, creative capacities undiminished (of the last, granted I am not the best judge). I know better, but I press on as though I will live forever.
I am often asked, given the strong naturalism in my philosophical writings, to express my deepest convictions. They are simple, and I will give them here. Science is the global civilization of which I am a citizen. The spread of its democratic ethic and its unifying powers provides my faith in humanity. The astonishing depth of wonders in the universe, continuously revealed by science, is my temple. The capacity of the informed human mind, liberated at last by the understanding that we are alone and thus the sole stewards of Earth, is my religion. The potential of humanity to turn this planet into a paradise for future generations is my afterlife.
You will understand, then, why I stay engaged with such purpose and optimism in all the subjects that have occupied me across six decades, from the natural history of ants through the labyrinth of behavioral and evolutionary biology to the great challenge that faces us all, citizen and scientist alike, in the decline of Earth’s living environment. I am able still to continue field studies of ants island by island in the West Indies. In my brief visits there I am accompanied by younger myrmecologists, friends and colleagues in the study of ants. It is a time of joy, of entering habitats never before explored, discovering new species, learning and recording new facts of natural history, sharing with much hilarity war stories of earlier expeditions. The experience is primal. The true naturalist is a civilized hunter, and we are a happy hunter band. Thereby I revive the same emotions I experienced long ago as a teenage student at the University of Alabama, when the central ambition of my life was to be this kind of scientist. I am thus able to offer truth in testimony to the beautiful insight of Albert Camus:
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek
to rediscover through the detours of art
those two or three great and simple images
in whose presence his heart first opened.
Edward O. Wilson
January 15, 2006
acknowledgments
I am indebted to a number of persons for important assistance in reconstructing the events of my early childhood. They were, in Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, William B. Carlin II; Edward B. Kitchens, Brigadier General (Ret.); and Murella Powell; in Pensacola, Florida, Frank Hardy, Sr., Barbara McVoy, and Patricia Shoemaker; and in Washington, D.C., Ellis G. MacLeod. I obtained some details of my ancestry from Elizabeth Wilson Covan, our family’s genealogist; my mother, Inez Linnette Huddleston; and William M. P. Dunne, professor at the Sta
te University of New York, Stony Brook, and an expert on the history of Gulf Coast pilotage. Life at the University of Alabama and Harvard University during my student years was reconstructed with the aid of information from my friends William L. Brown and Thomas Eisner; from Joyce Lamont, librarian at the University of Alabama; and from Aaron J. Sharp, my mentor at the University of Tennessee, who helped me gain admission to Harvard.
I am also grateful to the following friends and colleagues for reading portions of the manuscript and generously providing help and advice: Alexander Alland, Jr., Gary D. Alpert, Stuart Altmann, George E. Ball, George W. Barlow, Herbert T. Boschung, Napoleon Chagnon, Franklin L. Ford, Stephen Jay Gould, William D. Hamilton, Bert Hölldobler, Robert L. Jeanne, Ernst Mayr, Basil G. Nafpaktitis, William Patrick, Reed Rollins, Ullica Segerstråle, Daniel Simberloff, Lawrence B. Slobodkin, Frederick E. Smith, Kenneth Thimann, Robert L. Trivers, Barry D. Valentine, and James D. Watson. My wife Irene (Renee) discussed the work in progress and provided help and encouragement throughout. John P. Scott sent background materials on the earliest days of sociobiology, while Michael Ruse provided wise counsel and advice over the years that enriched my perception of the sociobiology controversy. None of these consultants, of course, is in any way responsible for errors of fact that may have survived, or for my interpretations.
The service at Pensacola’s First Baptist Church in 1943 described in Chapter 3 is a composite pieced together, respectfully and I trust without distortion, from my fifty-year-old memories, from conversations with my fellow member (still active) Barbara McVoy, and from On the Bay—On the Hill, a history of the Pensacola church by Toni Moore Clevenger and a 1986 publication of the First Baptist Church, Pensacola.
The portion of Langston Hughes’s poem “Daybreak in Alabama” that opens Part I is from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959) and is reprinted by permission of the publisher. My account of the capture of the cottonmouth moccasin (Chapter 6), together with the reconstruction of early conversations on island biogeography with Robert MacArthur and the description of MacArthur’s personality (Chapter 13), is taken with slight modification from Biophilia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). The summary of Konrad Lorenz’s 1953 lecture at Harvard (Chapter 15) is based upon an imperfect memory. I may have combined my recollections with some details from reading and discussion conducted soon afterward, but the spirit and main themes I believe to be accurate.
As for all my books in the past, back to The Theory of Island Biogeography with Robert MacArthur in 1967, I am grateful to Kathleen M. Horton for her invaluable editorial assistance and advice.
index
activism, 367–369
adaptive demography, 313–314
aggression, 315–316, 333
Akihito, Emperor of Japan, 204
All Species Foundation, 370
Alland, Alexander, 348, 378
Allee, Warder Clyde, 311
allometry, 312–314
Alpert, Gary D., 284, 378
Altmann, Stuart, 253, 308–312, 378
altruism, see kin selection
American Anthropological Association, 331–332
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 307–308, 344, 347
amphiuma, 104
ancestry, 62–67, 127–129
Aneuretus (primitive ant), 198–199
Animal Behavior Society, 330–331
ant castes, 312–314
Antarctic biogeography, 170
Ants (book), 94, 306
ants, 48–50, 52–53, 59–60, 71, 94–97, 104–105, 109, 115–117, 132–135, 141, 148–150, 152, 173–174, 176–178, 182–196, 203, 242, 282–306, 312–314, 318–319, 371–373, 375
Aoki, Kenichi, 353
arachnophobia, 188
area-species formula, 216–217
army ants, 96–97, 104–105
army, enlistment, 98–99
Arnold Arboretum, 231
art, definition, 245
Associated Institutions, Harvard, 231
Atkins Gardens, Cuba, 147
Australia, field research, 175–181, 197
automontage method, 372–373
Baker, John Harvard, 136–137
Ball, George E., 108–109, 378
ballooning, spiders, 275–276
Bannister, Roger G., 118
Baptism (religion), 33–46
baptism (rite), 43
Barlow, George W., 378
barracudas, 50
Beatty, Joseph, 270
Beckwith, Jonathan R., 337
Beebe, William, 139, 239–240
beetles, 104–105
Bell, Daniel, 340
Bergmann, G., 192
Bible, King James version, 366
BioDiversity (book), 358
biodiversity, 60–61, 189–191, 209–210, 354–364, 366; conservation of, 367–373; origin of term, 359
biogeochemistry, 236
biogeography, see dominance, in faunas, and island biogeography
biological determinism, 374
biology, recent history, 225–227
Biophilia Hypothesis (book), 362
biophilia, 360–363
bird watching, 14–15, 183, 245, 263
Blanco’s Woods, Cuba, 147–148
Bok, Derek, 306, 345
Bonner, John Tyler, 258
Boorman, Scott A., 258
Boschung, Herbert T., 102, 108, 378
Bossert, William H., 122, 257, 266, 297–298, 314
Botanical Museum, Harvard, 231
Boy Scouts of America, 73–80
Boyd, Robert, 353
Bradley, Philip H., 82
Brewton, Alabama, 80, 82–91
Brinton, Crane, 145
broken stick model, 246–247
Brown, Doris, 135–136
Brown, William L., 132–316, 206–209, 215, 378
Bryant, Paul W. (“Bear”), 105
Buck, Frank, 139
bull ring, military school, 21–22
bulldog ants, 177–178
Bundy, McGeorge, 202
Buren, William F., 117
bush flies, 177
business leaders, 367–368
Butenandt, Adolf, 288
butterflies, 58, 67–69, 93, 183
Camp Bigheart, Pensacola, 84
Camp Pushmataha, Mobile, 77–79
Camus, Albert, 376
Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 323–324
Carlin, William B., 377
Carpenter, C. Ray, 308
Carpenter, Frank M., 136, 200–201
Carr, Archie F., 277
Carson, Rachel, 12–13
Carthy, J. D., 288
Castro, Fidel, 149
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., 353
cave ants, 242
cave exploring, 93–115
Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, 308–310
CD, Pheidole (book), 373
Center for Applied Biodiversity Science (CI), 368
Ceylon, 197–199
Chagnon, Napoleon A., 331, 349–350, 378
chameleons, 150–151
chemical communication, theory of, 374
character displacement, 208–209
Chermock, Ralph L., 108–110, 113
Chetverikov, Sergei, 111
Chomsky, A. Noam, 146
citronella ants, 59–60
Civil War, 65–67, 101–102, 128
Clark, John, 178
Clevenger, Toni Moore, 378
Climate and Evolution (book), 21
Cohen, Joel E., 257
Cole, Arthur C., 129–130
Committee on Evolutionary Biology, Harvard, 227
Committee on Macrobiology, Harvard, 225
Comstock, John Henry, 110
concept formation, evolutionary biology, 205–206, 210–211, 213–214
Congressional Medal of Honor, 26–27, 67
Conne11, Joseph H., 255
conservation activism, 367–369
Conservation International (CI), 367–368, 370
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (book), 368
consumption, per capita, 368
Cornell University, 109–110
corporate leaders, 366–367
Counter, S. Allen, Jr., 45
courage, 25–27, 54–55
Covan, Elizabeth Wilson, 377
Crane, Jocelyn, 239–240
Creation, 366, 368
The Creation (book), 368
creative writing, 366
creativity, evolutionary biology, 205–206, 210–211, 213–214
Creighton, William S., 95
Crick, Francis, 223–224
Crimson Confidential Guide, 256–257
Crocker, Mrs. A. E., 178
crocodiles, 30–31
Crompton, A. W. (“Fuzz”), 232
Crow, James E, 257
Crowley, L., 192–193
Cuba, 29, 146–151
cultural evolution, 350–353
Curtis, Bob, 183–188
dacetine ants, 109, 132–135
Darlington, Philip J., 28–31, 163–164, 211–212, 215, 217, 244, 249, 257
Darwin, Charles, 131, 166, 209, 313, 317, 331, 333
Darwin’s finches, 209
daughter, see Wilson, Catherine (Cathy)
Davis, Bernard D., 338
Dawkins, Richard, 317, 351
Death Valley, 143–144
Decatur, Alabama, 92–99
Deevey, Edward S., 236
depression, mental, 242
developing countries, 367
DeVoto, Bernard A., 146
Diamond, Jared M., 358
dingoes, 180
distance running, 118–121
division of labor, theory of, 374
divorce, parents, 16–17
DNA structure, 223–224
Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 112, 215
doctoral research, 140–144, 288
dominance, in faunas, 211–217
Double Helix (book), 219
Douglas, Bob, 178
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 139
Dressler, Robert L., 147–152
Dry Tortugas, Florida, 265–266
Dunlop, John T., 301