E. O. Wilson
Edward O. Wilson was an American biologist, naturalist, ecologist, entomologist, sociobiologist, and myrmecologist — a scientist whose work extended across multiple disciplines within the life sciences.
Born in Birmingham on June 10, 1929, Wilson became a university teacher and science writer who worked in English throughout his career. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship and received the National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, and the TED Prize, honors that recognized both his scientific contributions and his public engagement with ideas.
Among his notable books are The Ants, Journey to the Ants, and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, an acknowledgment of his achievement as a writer alongside his standing as a researcher. These works reflect his sustained engagement with entomology and sociobiology as fields of inquiry.
Wilson died in Burlington on December 26, 2021, at the age of ninety-two. The study of ants, pursued through myrmecology, runs as a consistent thread across the books he produced and the disciplines he occupied throughout his working life.
Quotes by E. O. Wilson
E. O. Wilson's insights on:
We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god like technology.
The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.
The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.
I think that’s my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.
An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being’s, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?