Edward O. Wilson (1929–2021)

Edward (Ed) Wilson began by exploring the systematics, geographical distribution, social organization and evolution of ants. He became one of the great scholarly synthesizers, winning two Pulitzer prizes. A superb naturalist who enjoyed challenging dogma, he fought for conservation, brought ideas of biodiversity into the mainstream and set ecology on a rigorous conceptual footing. He has died aged 92.

Wilson’s book Sociobiology, published in 1975, was the first to address the evolution and organization of societies in organisms ranging from colonial bacteria to primates, including humans. The final chapter, on human social interaction, ignited controversy. Wilson argued that human behaviour, although adaptable to environmental conditions, is rooted in a genetic ‘blueprint’. Opponents claimed that nothing in human behaviour is grounded in genetics, except sleeping, eating and defecation. In a letter to The New York Review of Books, a group of academics including evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin associated Wilson’s view with racism and genocide. Wilson responded with elegance and humour; in my view, most scholars now agree that he won this argument.

Conservation: Glass half full

Wilson was born in 1929 in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up, as he admitted in his 1994 autobiography, Naturalist, “mostly insulated from its social problems”. After studying biology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, he did graduate studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He felt its Museum of Comparative Zoology, with the world’s largest ant collection, was his “destiny”.

In 1955, he obtained his PhD on the systematics of the ant genus Lasius, which includes the widespread black garden ant. Systematic biology and the study of biodiversity remained his mission, but he made significant contributions to other fields, such as animal behaviour and chemical ecology. His early work on chemical communication in animals, particularly social insects, inspired a generation of scientists to explore a new area in behavioural physiology.

In 1954, Wilson set out for Melanesia, including New Guinea, to study ant taxonomy and biogeography. On the basis of his data, he elaborated the critique that he and his Harvard colleague William Brown had previously developed on the idea of subspecies. They argued that the distinctions between species should be more clearly defined, allowing for variability within species. Equally influential was their thinking on character displacement — when similar species in the same area diverge genetically to avoid competing for resources.

Through his fieldwork in Melanesia and later in the Caribbean, Wilson drafted a principle of biogeography that he called the taxon cycle. Species evolve back and forth between being able to live in marginal habitats, and thus disperse widely, and restricting their distribution to species-rich habitats in island interiors. He tested this and other original hypotheses in the Florida Keys in the 1960s, in collaboration with his former student Daniel Simberloff. With ecologist Robert MacArthur, he proposed that species maintain their populations through trade-offs between number of offspring and quality of parental care (the concept of r/K selection). Their 1967 book The Theory of Island Biogeography had far-reaching effects on studies of evolution and conservation.