The Library of America’s partial collection of works by
E.O. Wilson is fascinating, and at the risk of sounding silly, his memoir,
titled simply Naturalist, is enchanting. His peers consider him “the
natural heir to Charles Darwin.”
E. (Edward) O. Wilson is an entomologist, a branch of biology
that studies insects, and a Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He
is the world’s leading authority on myrmecology – the study of ants. He is also
an exceptionally good writer, having won two Pulitzer Prizes for Literature (general
nonfiction), first in 1978 for On Human Nature, the second in 1991 for The Ants. Significant to readers of his works, he created the popular course on
biology for non-science majors at Harvard – he knows how to communicate to/with
non-scientists.
His list of science awards is lengthy and includes: Crafoord
Prize, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Newcombe Cleveland Prize, American Association
for the Advancement of Science; the Kistler Prize; the King Faisal Prize;
Global Environmental Citizen Award; and the International Cosmos Prize.
Wilson was (is, he is now 92), born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up bouncing around the Alabama gulf coast and Florida panhandle, between custody sharing parents who both moved a lot. For entertainment, he would wander around the woods and wetlands where he developed his love of all-things nature. By the time he finished high school he was an Eagle Scout and had been “born again” in the Southern Baptist Church. He was not old enough to see military service in World War II. He received both his BS and MS from the University of Alabama. Eventually he became a research assistant at Harvard, while working on a PhD, and became a tenured professor thereafter.
Reading his memoir also amounts to reading a history of
advances in the science disciplines of biology – starting with field biology,
through evolutionary biology, geobiology, microbiology, environmental biology, and
eventually into sociobiology (human) – a field of theoretical biology that
remains as controversial today as evolution was in Darwin’s time. His
involvement in studies such as island biological diversity is particularly
interesting – even conducting an experiment in the Florida Keys where
researchers destroyed all life on several small islands so as to witness and record
the “return to life” on the empty islands.
Recommendation: Absolutely.
While at times the “science” in Wilson’s writings can become a bit complex for
non-scientists like me, what comes through clearly is his passion for natural biology.
The Naturalist is a not necessarily easy read, but one definitely worthwhile.
My other blog posts on environmental biology include:
The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Charles Darwin: The Naturalist Who Started a Revolution by Cyril Aydon
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