"The Guardian Profile: Edward O Wilson *Darwin's natural heir*
Hailed as a genius of modern science, he's also been accused of racism in a vicious debate over evolution. Ed Douglas on the former Southern Baptist who found clues to human behaviour in the ways of the humble ant and is now focusing on the battle to save the planet *Ed Douglas * *Guardian* *Saturday February 17, 2001* The discovery that humans have only 30,000 genes has been portrayed in some sections of the press as a victory for free will. If we've got fewer genes, if there's less nature, the argument runs, then nurture must take up the slack, right? Perhaps because few of us know what a gene actually does, the debate about whether we are a product of our DNA or our environment rumbles on. The truth is that the two are intimately connected. It's not nature or nurture, it's both, together. In Proverbs, King Solomon had some advice for those rushing into print with ill-informed opinions: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." This is exactly what Edward O. Wilson has done, man and boy, for more than 65 years. He more than anyone understands the relationship between genes and culture and it started with his ants. There are thousands of different species of ant, no one is sure since most of them are unknown to science, and perhaps a hundred million billion of the creatures alive at any one time. True, they haven't written any operas, but they do live in colonies of elegant social complexity. And humanity would disappear from the face of the earth without them. Now 71, Wilson is a tall, slender man, his upper spine crooked from years of looking earthwards. In his brightly lit laboratory behind the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, he stands over a plastic tray of pheidole rhea, remarkable for having two soldier castes. A few workers are marching up the arms of his linen jacket and across his shoulders. He smiles gently as he eases into a chair, his voice a rich, Southern drawl, even though he left Alabama for Harvard over 45 years ago. His manners are Old South as well - warm, polite and thoughtful. The bleaker inheritance of the South is there too, in a way. Wilson's career has been unusually fruitful. And while he has had a lifelong obsession with ants, discovering how they communicate through pheromones, he is most famous for the publication in 1975 of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a work of deep insight that advanced evolutionary thinking and proved a Darwinian manifesto, describing social behaviour from the ants to humans. It also landed Wilson in the fight of his intellectual life. Accused of racism and misogyny, of suggesting that some human beings are genetically superior to others, of echoing Nazi doctrines on eugenics, Wilson and his ideas were splashed on the cover of Time and the front page of the New York Times. Echoes of that fight were faintly heard this week in the renewed nature or nurture debate. It is hard to imagine this generous and polite man at the heart of controversy, let alone one of the most fundamental and bitter scientific arguments of the 20th century. But after it was over, his position in the evolutionary firmament rose to be right up there, on the right hand of Charles Darwin himself. He has won a raft of scientific and conservation prizes, including the National Medal of Science in the US and the prestigious Craaford Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as well as two Pulitzers, the first for On Human Nature, published in 1978 and reissued by Penguin next month, and the second in 1990 for an uncompromisingly scientific study of ants, written with his collaborator Bert Hslldobler. Fellow scientists acknowledge how profound his contribution has been. Jared Diamond, who has his own Pulitzer for Guns, Germs And Steel, described him as "one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers," while fellow evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins admires his breadth of understanding: "He is hugely learned, not just in his field of social insects, but in anthropology and other subjects as well. He is an outstanding synthesiser, his knowledge is immense and he manages to bring it all together in a coherent way." The novelist Ian McEwan describes Wilson as "an intellectual hero", and praises the quality of his writing. "Frankly, I do not know of another working scientist whose prose is better than his. He can be witty, scathing and inspirational by turns. He is a superb celebrator of science in all its manifestations, as well as being a scourge of bogus, post-modernist, relativist pseudo-science, and so-called New Age thinking." In recent years, Wilson's other great expertise, conservation biology, has returned to the side of the angels. In the 1950s, before his discoveries about chemical language in ants or his ideas about sociobiology, he was in New Guinea studying biogeography, the geographical spread of species, which has offered evolutionary biologists a rich hunting ground for discoveries about natural selection and the mathematical principles that underpin how environments function. Later, working with the brilliant population biologist Robert MacArthur, this early research formed the basis for another seminal work The Theory Of Island Biogeography. MacArthur, who died in his early 40s from renal cancer, once told Wilson that he would rather save an endangered habitat than formulate a grand scientific theory. Ironically, as the planet's last wild places effectively become islands in a sea of human development, Wilson and MacArthur's theories have become a useful tool in the conservation struggle that will dominate the 21st century. " http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4137503,00.html "Edward O. Wilson Edward Wilson é um dos maiores naturalistas vivos (1929 - ), associando uma obra científica de excepcional qualidade com uma faceta de divulgação ao grande público que já lhe valeu dois prémios Pulitzer Adaptação de António Barreto Edward Wilson, considerado por muitos como o mais proeminente biólogo do século XX e certamente um dos maiores naturalistas da história americana, nasceu em Birmingham, no Alabama, em 1929. Conseguiu os seus graus de bacharel e de mestre, ambos em biologia, pela Universidade de Alabama, e doutorou-se, também em biologia, pela Universidade de Harvard - instituição em que é professor desde 1953. Foi professor de zoologia em Harvard, curador de entomologia (no Museu do Zoologia Comparativa), professor de Ciências em Baird, professor de ciências em Mellon e professor da Universidade de Pellegrino. Wilson devotou uma fracção significativa da sua carreira às formigas, tendo publicado recentemente dois livros notáveis sobre estes fascinantes insectos, ambos com Bert Holldobler: The Ants (1991), que ganhou o Prémio Pulitzer e Journey to the Ants (1994), que ganhou o Prémio Alemão do Livro Científico do Ano. A carreira de Wilson foi, no entanto, muito mais abrangente do que a sua notável pesquisa sobre formigas. A sua carreira como pensador e autor no campo da biologia começou com o seu livro de 1967 The Theory of Island Biogeography (escrito com o ecologista Robert MacArthur), o qual forneceu a fundamentação científica para toda a subsequente discussão sobre o declínio dos ecossistemas de ilhas, reais e funcionais. Oito anos mais tarde, o seu quinto livro, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, apresenta a teoria revolucionária de que os comportamentos sociais humanos, da guerra ao altruismo, têm uma componente genética fundamental. Wilson é autor, co-autor ou editor de outros 20 livros, entre os quais se destacam On Human Nature (1978) que lhe granjeou o seu primeiro "Prémio Pulitzer"; The Diversity of Live (1992), nomeado pela "New York Public Library" como um dos mais proeminentes livros do século; e Naturalist (1994), citado como um dos melhores livros do ano pela "New York Times Book Review". Naturalist, um maravilhoso relato sobre a infância itinerante de Wilson, a sua solidão e o seu precoce fascínio com os insectos no campo, granjeou a Wilson muitas prémios, entre os quais o "Los Angeles Times Book Prize" e o "Publishers Marketing Association´s Benjamin Franklin Award", e ainda o merecido renome de escritor refinado e a honra, da qual ele tem particular orgulho, que é o "John Hay Award" da "Orion Society". Por outro lado, são inúmeros os prémios científicos ganhos por Wilson. Como exemplo podem-se citar o U.S. National Medal of Science, o Japan´s International Prize for Biology, o Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Crafoord Prize, o French Prix du Institut de la Vie, o Germany´s Terrestrial Ecology Prize e o England´s Kent Conservation Book Prize. Wilson foi ainda nomeado com uma das 25 personalidades mais influentes dos E.U.A.pela revista Time, em 1996. Alarmado pela perda acelerada de espécies em todo o mundo no nosso século (Wilson estimou que 20% das espécies do planeta perder-se-ão nos próximos 23 anos), transformou-se numa voz eloquente e poderosa na defesa das diversidade biológica. Segundo Wilson, "a perca de biodiversidade é provavelmente o facto que os nossos descendentes estarão menos dispostos a nos perdoar." " http://www.naturlink.pt/canais/Artigo.asp?iArtigo=178&iLingua=1 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cosmology, Mathematics and Philosophy" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cosmology-mathematics-and-philosophy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cosmology-mathematics-and-philosophy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
