A Life Spent Discovering and Illuminating Nature: Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson

Book Review
Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson
First Published in 1994 by Island Press
This Revised Edition Published in 2006 by Island Press (A Time Warner Company)

How does a person choose a particular profession? The answer is almost always different for every person. For Edward O. Wilson, the world-renown entomologist and evolutionary biologist, the calling to biology came at an early age while growing up in rural Florida, where he became fascinated with wildlife.

Edward Wilson's autobiography The Naturalist is an account of his earliest moments in nature all the way to his famous triumphs that culminated in two Pulitzer-prize books, Ants and On Human Nature; the most influential book ever written on the social behavior of animals, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis; and prestigious awards including the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (the award was established to recognize fields of science, including ecology, not covered by the Nobel Prize), the National Medal of Science, the International Prize for Biology, and the gold medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

As readers and critics of his previous novels will testify, Edward Wilson is a very good writer both in style and content. Hence, this book is as exciting as many of the better fiction novels. It is filled with many interesting tales of nature, including his childhood escapades into snake-filled swamps, ant hunts in Cuba and Mexico, and a climbing expedition in the highlands of New Guinea. Wilson also discusses how he came upon his discoveries, which not only included many new species of ants and other insects, but perhaps more importantly later in his career, how animals and plants spread from one area to another, how ants and other social animals communicate and, finally, how human nature is dictated by our genes.

Also very interesting are Wilson's accounts of "the molecular wars", a period in the 1950s and 1960s when non-molecular biologists were threatened to become extinct because of the discovery of DNA and other molecular structures and processes, and the human nature vs. nurture debate which spawned immediately following his publication of Sociobiology: A New Synthesis. In the book, Wilson describes the social behavior of all animals, including humans. If one views the behavior of all animals and how it evolved over millions of years in various species, it is much easier to see how human behavior is a product of evolution, particularly when compared to the social behavior of other primates. Wilson writes,

"Genetic determinism, the central objection raised against book two, is the bugbear of social sciences. So what I said that can indeed be called genetic determinism needs saying again here. My argument was essentially as follows. Human beings inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structures, a propensity that is shared by enough people to be called human nature. The defining traits include division of labor between the sexes, bonding between parents and children, heightened altruism toward closest kin, incest avoidance, other forms of ethical behavior, suspicion of strangers, tribalism, dominance orders within groups, male dominance overall, and territorial aggression over limiting resources. Although people have free will and the choice to turn in many directions, the channels of their psychological development are nevertheless--however much we might wish otherwise--cut more deeply by the genes in certain directions than in others. So while cultures vary greatly, they inevitably converge toward these traits. The Manhattanite and New Guinea highlander have been separated by 50,000 years of history but still understand each other, for the elementary reason that their common humanity is preserved in the genes they share from their common ancestry."

Unfortunately for Wilson--a self-described liberal-centrist--non-scientists and scientists alike with political agendas who did not understand or want to acknowledge the truths of evolutionary biology and history, scolded and attacked him while offering no scientific facts that would prove him wrong, to a point where he almost left Harvard University. [This is what happened recently to Lawrence Summers when he correctly, but inconveniently for leftist-leaning faculty and advocates, suggested that there may be genetic reasons for women not being more prevalent in high-end science and engineering fields.] Eventually the firestorm died down and there is virtually not a single scientist today who disagrees with Wilson's hypotheses. In fact, sociologists and psychologists today understand the limitations and predispositions of people towards certain traits due to inheritance.

Lastly, Wilson describes how he became especially active in the 1980s and 1990s in habitat preservation. Today, Edward Wilson is viewed by many as the most effective spokesman in the world for the cause, not the least because of his two books on the subject: Biophilia, where Wilson describes the inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life and The Future of Life, an account of the beautiful diversity of life that may be destroyed if we do not act soon.

His quote from 1980 still serves true today (if we continue on our current path):

"The worst thing that can happen, will happen, is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us."