E.O. Wilson Interview (page: 3 / 8) Father of Sociobiology	Print Interview

Some molecular biologists in those days used to deride natural history, comparing it to stamp collecting and so forth. When you introduced experimental techniques into natural history on this grand scale, what impression did that make on your more skeptical colleagues?

Edward O. Wilson: I never bothered to find out. We were in the full rage of molecular biology then. So many of the most successful ones thought there would never again be anything worthwhile in natural history, but I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1969, at a fairly early age, so I must have had some support from them.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I remember one memorable occasion in which I met the great physicist, (Paul Adrien Maurice) Dirac. I just enjoyed sitting down with him for a while. He was a kind of a taciturn fellow, and I didn't know what exactly to say to P.A.M. Dirac. Finally, I mentioned -- because we were in Florida at the time of the experiments and the theory -- and immediately got his attention. That was wonderful describing that to him, because I think I convinced him that you could do this type of work. At any rate, that now was that phase, and in the '60s -- well, in the late '50s already -- I'd seen another direction to go in, and I was cultivating that simultaneously, and that was chemical communication. In the late '50s -- this was right at the beginning also of my work on island biogeography with MacArthur -- chemists were developing a microanalysis. They were, for the first time, able to identify organic compounds at the microgram level. Which meant, also for the first time, we could take a single insect and identify the exocrine gland substances that it had in it. I knew, because I had begun doing that work at that time, locating the glandular sources of the substances that the ants used to communicate. I was having a considerable success in the laboratory with that. I was discovering one thing after another, partly because nobody else had picked up on it yet, and I had that little window of time when I could really make a discovery, almost every time I went in a lab. Here was a grand opportunity, not only to locate the source of the glands -- like alarm substances from the mandibular glands and trail substances from poison glands and so on -- but we could identify the substances.

So I collaborated with a couple of chemists in the early '60s, and we actually started identifying some of these substances. Bill Bossert, a mathematician here at Harvard, he was a graduate student at the time. He joined me, and almost entirely through his skills developing diffusion models, and with what we knew about pheromones, we developed the first real quantitative theory of pheromone evolution: what size molecules would be needed for what amount of privacy and communication and so on. We developed that, and we also developed the models of diffusion; that is, how much of the substance was needed, how far it would spread and what pattern and so on. That was a nice result.

Natural history has made tremendous progress as a formal discipline, with real hypothesis testing. How has that changed the relationship with molecular biology?

The second half of the 20th Century was marked by the "triumph of the molecule" as it were. This was the era of molecular biology. But it was also the era of extremely reductionist and intensely focused biology that was problem-oriented, and therefore was concentrated typically on a single species at a time. The people who succeeded in that method of science did so brilliantly, but they lost all sense of the diversity of life, and they lost all sense of evolution. Therefore, they lost all appreciation of what was referred to, dismissively often, as traditional biology, what had gone before.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In the second half of the 20th Century, that spanned pretty much my career as a biologist. I lived through that era and I was, in one sense, disadvantaged, and in another extremely fortunate. Disadvantaged because I was in a field that was being marginalized by the community of biological scientists, undersupported, and generally underappreciated. I was at a great advantage, however, in that it was also a time when evolutionary biology was emerging as a powerful new science, and in the hands of a quite small population of people. My generation of scientists then was able to engage in the improvement of a subject in a way that allowed a very large share of the discoveries per person. Great opportunities to make discoveries! All we had to do, it seemed, was walk into the lab, or go into the field, and think a little bit, and you came up with new things.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. For example, in addition to predictive theories that have actually worked out in my own experience in the field of conservation and ecology very well, in the theory of island biogeography, there was the entire new field of pheromone studies opening. That allowed me personally to collaborate with chemists at the dawn of the era in which it was possible to identify not just grams or milligrams of purified substances, but micrograms, so that we could analyze trace amounts of pheromones being released by a single insect. And that opened a whole new vista of study, and quickly led to reconstruction of the evolution of chemical communication, including the social insects, where it's tremendously important.

As time went on and we came up to the 21st Century, in a sense, the molecular biologists began to run out of things to do and they rediscovered diversity. By this time, evolutionary biology has grown quite sophisticated in many sectors along the advancing front, and in the hands of a relatively small number of people doing it. So when the molecular biologists discovered that it would frequently take ten or twenty people to conduct a single experiment, at that stage of the science, they began to look about and they rediscovered evolution. So the situation today is that molecular biologists are collaborating very extensively with evolutionary biologists and we have the best of both worlds.

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