Naturalist
Wilson, Edward 0.
T he Gulf coast of Alabama and northwest Florida, where Edward O. Wilson grew up in the years just prior to World War II, was poor and obscure even by the relaxed standards of the South. Scratch...
...Wilson would not be a soldier, though...
...He'd been blinded in one eye, yes, but his vision in the other was acute...
...This was-and is-heretical, if you believe in the revealed truth that holds that all individual differences are culturally determined...
...62 The American Spectator March 1995 man, and Wilson goes on into the grown-up business of scientific research, important discoveries, and faculty wars...
...Robert Maynard Hutchins once famously remarked that academic wars were especially vicious because so little was at stake...
...Nor'thStar Audio Books Order Toll-Free 1 (800) 522-2979 The American Spectator March 1995 1 63...
...The next, a year later, was for good: he has been at Harvard since September 1951...
...he was turned down for the military because of his eye and wept in frustration...
...Wilson's will was something like that of Stonewall Jackson's...
...A study group of Marxist academics began meeting at Harvard to plot Wilson's intellectual destruction...
...Bad tactics, he essentially told them...
...I have always been ambitious and never made any secret of it," Wilson said in another context...
...he went to the Baptist church...
...What had gone before, "traditional" biology-my biology-was infested by stamp collectors who lacked the wit to transform their subject into a modern science...
...Wilson remembers it wistfully, recalling that FDR came to visit the school and admire the boys in formation...
...His battles with the likes of James Watson and Stephen Jay Gould give the reader, whose interest in biology might be finite, more than enough reason to go on...
...He is widely published and given early tenure...
...That first trip was to visit...
...The odd thing, one thinks upon finishing this book, is that Wilson should ever have been thought of-and attacked as-a determinist and an opponent of free will...
...The snake was too strong for him and he was nearly bitten, an episode that he recalls with chilling clarity...
...It must have been a lonely, bewildering experience for a boy of seven...
...Cost - $29.95 plus $2.95 for postage/hdl...
...His own life is splendid testament to those wonderful, buried possibilities in the individual that can grow and flower in spite of just about anything...
...Wilson writes with an effortless clarity (he has won two Pulitzers) and wistful gratitude about a youth that lesser writers would paint with broad strokes of self-pity...
...W ilson is currently advancing the cause of biodiversity, which puts him on the side of the Greens...
...The man would prevail or die trying...
...He makes big contributions in the area of population biology...
...This narrative of a life that began in the moist, vaguely gothic regions of the South and led to just about every award and distinction a biologist can receive betrays a sense of wonder that has never dimmed...
...he watched his father die of alcoholism...
...B ut Wilson has, as he says, "been blessed with brilliant enemies...
...But if E.O...
...One of those pierced Wilson's eye...
...These are years of accomplishment and honors...
...Ho hum...
...Wilson is a Green, he is certainly not a knee-jerk Green, and it would be wise for all those who instinctively resist the arguments of environmentalists to pay attention...
...It insures the survival, not of the drone certainly, or even the queen, but of the society, which, in turn, insures the survival of the genes...
...In the case of his struggles with James Watson, whom Wilson describes as "the Caligula of biology," that issue was nothing less than the nature of biology itself...
...Wilson attempted to extend his hypothesis to the behavior of human beings, however, and this made him a marked man, an early victim of the witch-hunting ideologues whose descendants launched the PC inquisition...
...But in terms of the society, there is a hard, Darwinian rationale behind this apparently altruistic act...
...If a drone ant sacrifices himself to save the queen, for example, this behavior is suicidal when considered from the perspective of the individual...
...One relives it-and misses it-with him...
...O ~ Rush Limbaugh I Unabridged on audio cassette The Rush Limbaugh Story 0=.794-aw Unabridged on 7 90-min.cuss...
...Smart, outrageous...
...Harvard, it turns out, was equally fortunate...
...He was especially keen on snakes and one day tried to capture a five-foot cottonmouth...
...He became instead one of the great scientists of this century...
...The shy, owlish young man with one suit to his name no doubt looked the rube when he first crossed Harvard yard in awe...
...The first third of Naturalist is devoted to Wilson's life before Harvard, and his account of those years is so beguiling that the reader is sorry to see it end and reluctant, almost, to keep on with the book...
...What seems like further misfortune for a young boy who had already seen more than his share, Wilson considers in retrospect a defining event in his life...
...The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct," he told one interviewer, "is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats...
...He became an Eagle Scout...
...Scratch farming, timber, and turpentine accounted for what prosperity there was, and young men who grew up to distinguish themselves invariably did so as either soldiers or athletes...
...Wilson's Sociobiology, which appeared in the mid-1970s, was favorably received by specialists and has become settled theory regarding animal behavior...
...He was predictably elated and felt vastly fortunate to be there...
...This was not true of the battles Wilson found himself fighting...
...He was sent to live with relatives and friends, and shipped off to a military boarding school...
...Wilson will be remembered primarily as the father of sociobiology, though he had many collaborators and it is far from his only theoretical breakthrough...
...He was a child of divorce at a time when that was truly stigmatizing...
...He is made a Harvard fellow at a young age...
...His first trip out of the South was to Harvard on a Greyhound bus that "seemed to stop at every city and town of greater than 50,000 population along the way...
...I was never content to be a merely descriptive biologist...
...But Wilson and a small cadre rallied and embarked on an effort to reinvigorate their tradition, and what emerged was sociobiology, one of the most radical and controversial scientific hypotheses of the last twenty years...
...Watson would not speak to Wilson when they passed in the hall-they were like antagonists on opposite sides of some scientific DMZ...
...While speaking at a symposium, Wilson was denounced by members of a group called the International Committee Against Racism, one of whom dumped a pitcher of water on his head...
...I would thereafter celebrate the little things of the world, the animals that can be picked up between thumb and forefinger and brought close for inspection...
...There could be, in other words, a genetic basis for something that might even be called "human nature...
...Newsman Paul D. Colford takes a no-holds-barred look at the public and private lift of this complex, surprising man...
...Stephen Jay Gould, who had signed the New York Review letter, was also present and used the occasion to quote Lenin to the protesters as a way of scolding them...
...Meet the man behind the phenomenon...
...I wanted to do something in theory, where the big contributions are made...
...His sin was to speculate that gender roles and tribalism, altruism, incest avoidance, and other forms of human behavior might have biological roots...
...This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us...
...These superficial details, however, concealed not merely a dazzling intelligence-everyone at Harvard is intelligent-but also the kind of fierce will that often comes out of the South in inauspicious packages...
...There were plenty of good reasons why he should-have never made it out of the South...
...Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, believed that the future of biology was chemical and molecular: He arrived with a conviction that biology must be transformed into a science directed at molecules and cells and rewritten in the language of physics and chemistry...
...Wilson found solace and enchantment in the woods and swamps, where he went to study the abundant wildlife and to collect specimens...
...Wilson is too much the scientist to be the predictable, ideological ally of anyone...
...He could not determine distances, but he could study a small specimen in fine detail at close range without aid: The attention of my surviving eye turned to the ground...
...The pinfish is so named for the spines in its dorsal fin...
...But in Wilson's memory, the poverty and pain and solitude are somehow redeemed, and his childhood takes on a sort of Huckleberry Finn glow...
...he went to the University of Alabama, the first member of his family to attend college...
...If this pattern had held, Wilson would have been one of many distinguished academics whose life and work would interest only other specialists, and reading about it would have been an exercise in tedium...
...Wilson was not much at either soldiering or sports, though he went through his initiations and rites of passage in both...
...While fishing off a dock one day, he jerked a small fish common to those waters, called a pinfish, out of the water and into his face...
...Its central insight is this: the way societies of organisms organize themselves and behave is a survival strategy...
...And at Alabama he became formally what it seems he had always been-a biologist...
...He treated most of the other twenty-four members of the Department of Biology with a revolutionary's fervent disrespect...
...Inevitably, he was recognized as something special...
...The letter condemned sociobiology and linked it to the Nazi gas chambers...
...But the child becomes the NATURALIST Edward 0. Wilson Shearwater Books-Island Press / 352 pages / $24.95 reviewed by GEOFFREY NORMAN Geoffrey Norman is editor-atlarge of Forbes FYI...
...They published a long open letter in the New York Review of Books...
...and very conservative, his facts love him...and his detractors hate him...
...Sociobiology is the employment of evolutionary biology to make sense of the social behavior of individual species...
...He also speculates that the experience may have had something to do with his lifelong admiration for the military virtues...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 3
