Edward Osborne Wilson’s scientific career began with an accident when he was seven years old. While fishing, he injured his right eye and went blind on one side. With the remaining left eye, he was able to concentrate very well on the near area. And began “automatically” to be more interested in butterflies and ants than other children, he wrote in 2006 in his biography. So he first became an ant researcher and eventually one of the most important evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin.
Born on June 10, 1929 in Alabama, Wilson grew up with his father and stepmother after his parents’ divorce in 1936, the family often moved. Already in his childhood he was enthusiastic about insects, it was only later that he noticed the history of human development. In 1955 he received his doctorate in biology from Harvard University near Boston, where he also became a professor. From Harvard he explored the world’s biodiversity, wrote dozens of books, taught and founded sociobiology in the 1970s. In the last chapter of his first book on the subject, he first wrote about animals, but in the last chapter he also addressed humans – and triggered a wave of indignation.
“We are flying blind”
With his idea that not only biology but also human behavior must be viewed in the light of evolution, he received a lot of criticism. Some accused him of social Darwinism, among other things, and put him in a corner with racists and sexists. Wilson in turn declared that moral thinking can also be scientifically justified, which hardly reassured the critics. Even Harvard colleagues accused him of justifying eugenics, “a student poured a bucket of ice water over my head,” Wilson told the SZ years ago. He later distanced himself from sociobiology and partially revoked some of his earlier writings on it.
Wilson later also got into trouble with the US Conservatives when he began to draw attention to the worldwide decline in species. Wilson popularized the term “biodiversity” and established it in 2007 the project “Encyclopedia of Life” (EOL) that wants to catalog the living world as completely as possible before too many living beings are irretrievably wiped out, mainly by humans. “We are flying blind,” is how he often described the ignorance and ignorance with which people encounter their immediate environment.
Even after his retirement in 1996, Wilson kept an office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology on the Harvard campus and continued to write books. In one of them (“The Creation”) in 2007 he tried to win over Bible-savvy Americans to the fight for environmental protection and biodiversity, although, as he said, as a student he gradually lost faith.
In the course of his life, Wilson was given many additional names: he was called “father of sociobiology”, later also “father of biodiversity” and “modern Darwin”. His first names, on the other hand, usually purred together to the first letters: EO Wilson is on many of his books, for two of which he received the Pulitzer Prize in the non-fiction category, along with numerous scientific prizes. EO Wilson died on Sunday at the age of 92.