E.O. Wilson, RIP

One of the courses my mom took as part of her PhD program was ethology. There was a widespread belief that understanding animal behavior would provide important insight into human psychology. I read a few of the ethology books she was reading at the time: Ardrey, Lornenz, Tinbergen. All concerned vertebrate behavior, though.

Wilson was the dean of insect behavior, specifically ants. Late in her life, my mom sent me one of Wilson's books, "Naturalist," which I dutifully read. By then, I had imbibed heavily the reductionist philosophy that understanding mechanism was the key to modern biology. Also, I had read Philip Kitcher's "Vaulting Ambition," a critique of sociobiology, of which Wilson was a champion. So I've not read any of his many other books.

It's not that I don't appreciate the importance of natural history. I read Ernst Mayr's "The Growth of Biological Thought," which was a kind of manifesto for the New Synthesis and the biological species model. The advent of cheap genome sequencing, while confirming many inferences of morphological taxonomy, has also reshaped our thinking of evolution.

All this is to say that I was sad to read the Wilson has died, not because I embraced his scholarship, but because he was an enthusiast for pure basic science and for communicating science to a lay audience. My postdoc mentor commented that no great scientists ever came out of the South. In addition to Thomas Hunt Morgan and Eric Weischaus (both Nobel Laureates), I think we can number E.O. Wilson among the great scientists, even if he was born in the South. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/27/metro/eo-wilson-evolutionary-biologist-who-changed-how-we-look-world-dies-92/