NATURALIST OFTEN CITED AS HEIR TO DARWIN
Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard naturalist whose mapping of social behavior in ants led him to study social behavior in all organisms and who became one of the greatest naturalists of his generation, died Sunday in Burlington, Mass. He was 92.
The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation announced his death but did not provide a cause.
Often cited as Charles Darwin’s greatest 20th-century heir, Wilson was an eloquent and immensely influential environmentalist and was the first to determine that ants communicate mainly through the exchange of chemical substances now known as pheromones.
He discovered hundreds of new species by putting his hands in the dirt as a field biologist, synthesized evolving thinking in science and helped popularize terms such as biodiversity and biophilia to explain it. Of his many accomplishments in evolutionary biology, his biggest contribution was probably in the new scientific field of sociobiology, in which he addressed the biological basis of social behavior in animals, including humans.
He wrote technical scientific studies and popular science, receiving two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction as well as the National Medal of Science.
Wilson went on to become a leading advocate and popular interpreter of ecological diversity. He prompted the creation of the Encyclopedia of Life project, an online collaborative encyclopedia of all living species known to science.
During a professional career spent primarily at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Wilson experimented on a grand scale, once staging a mass extinction on several Florida Bay islands to document
species recovery.
His most significant and controversial idea appeared in his 1975 book, “Sociobiology,” which described the role that genetics plays in the social behavior of organisms. The first 25 chapters built his unifying theory of behavior in the animal world, a monumental achievement in itself.
The controversy came from the last chapter, on humankind. Wilson proposed that human behavior is genetically based, that humans
inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structures, including a division of labor between the sexes, parent-child bonding, heightened altruism toward closest kin, incest avoidance, suspicion of strangers, tribalism, male dominance and territorial aggression over limited resources.
He later noted in “Naturalist,” his 1994 autobiography, that his was “an exceptionally strong hereditarian position for the 1970s.”
The response was furious, starting at his own school, where colleagues accused him of genetic determinism and tied the theory to Nazi eugenics, racism, sexism, sterilization and restrictions on immigration. Demonstrators disrupted the campus, calling his theory an apologia for the status quo.
Decades later, scientists now acknowledge that genes play some still undefined role in human nature. But at the time, the outrage that greeted the idea prompted Wilson to write “On Human Nature,” which won the 1979 Pulitzer for general nonfiction.
He also won the Pulitzer in 1991 for “The Ants,” which he co-wrote with Bert Holldobler.
Edward Osborne Wilson Jr. was born in Birmingham, Ala., on June 10, 1929. His family moved frequently, and he found solace in nature.
Between the ages of 9 and 11, he lived in Washington, exploring the National Zoo and Rock Creek Park and standing in awe in the rotunda of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. After he read an article on entomology in National Geographic when he was 10, the budding naturalist turned his gaze to the ground, studying snakes, butterflies, flies and finally ants.
At 13, after he and his family returned to the vacant lots and dark swamps of the Deep South, he discovered the first known colony of imported fire ants in the U.S., Solenopsis invicta, near his home in Mobile, Ala.
In high school, he set about realizing the goal of surveying all the ant species in Alabama.
He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1949 and received a master’s degree from the school the following year. He enrolled in the University of Tennessee for graduate study but soon was admitted to Harvard, where he received his doctorate in biology in 1955.
He developed an explanation of how ants adapt to adverse environmental conditions by colonizing new habitats and splitting into new species to avoid competition. In 1959, he proved his hypotheses that ants communicate through the release of chemicals, a discovery that still delights students of crawling insects. Ants, he learned by close observation and experimentation, lay down trails of chemical markers to food, use chemical signals to call for help and even identify the dead not by lack of motion, but by decomposition.
Pheromones, he later wrote, were “not just a guidepost, but the entire message.”
Wilson’s wife of 65 years, Irene Kelly Wilson, died in August. Survivors include their daughter, Catherine, according to his foundation.