E.O. Wilson Interview (page: 4 / 8) Father of Sociobiology	Print Interview

You've had an extraordinary history of collaboration with people in very different disciplines who have supplemented your own abilities. You were listed as second author on many of these publications. Your name, Wilson, comes late in the alphabet, but there are many instances in which a more egocentric senior scientist would have insisted on being listed first anyway.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Edward O. Wilson: I went out of my way to promote the career of junior faculty, a new junior scientist coming and collaborating with me, and beginning their career when they did it. The main reason -- I guess the only reason I can give -- is that I couldn't stand having a bad conscience. So that was it. So I did that, but it didn't take any credit from me personally, I don't think. And also, I owed. I owed particularly my mathematical collaborative, like MacArthur, Lumsden, and then subsequently in the late '70s, George Oster.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

He was a splendid applied mathematician, when we worked out the first full theory of the evolution of caste systems in the social insects in terms of adaptation and optimization. How many? What would be the ideal number of major workers and minor workers to have, and how long they should live? And so on. That was done then.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I have very limited mathematical ability. When I came to the era of island biogeography, I realized that it was very important to base things, or to use mathematical modeling as a mode of reasoning, even if you couldn't make things as precise as you could in molecular biology or physics. You needed to be able to do mathematical modeling in order to reason in at least qualitative ways. So actually, as an associate tenured professor at Harvard, I sat through two years of mathematics as sort of like a -- I don't know -- a 45-year-old bookkeeper putting himself through Parris Island boot camp, because I didn't like mathematics that much, but I learned enough. But my main strategy afterward was to collaborate with mathematicians whenever I needed to work on the theory.

You read William Hamilton's famous paper on kin selection in the mid '60s. You were one of the earliest people to recognize its significance. Did that instill in you, or confirm in you, the importance that mathematical models were going to play in any broader theories of evolutionary biology?

Edward O. Wilson: It did, emphatically. I picked up on this in the middle of my work on island biogeography and chemical communication, which was pretty well filling all my spare time, so I hadn't really thought hard about using genetic models of this kind. I'm not quite sure whether I could have pulled it off, because of my background. Hamilton was a very good mathematician, and he had a particular interest in matrix analysis of kinship. He just developed that. What Hamilton did in 1964 was a brilliant stroke. It is not appreciated that the reason why it was so good was not so much the basic idea of kin selection. Darwin had that in rudimentary form, and Haldane supposedly had come up with something semi-quantitative. What made it great was that Hamilton applied it to the social insects, and particularly the social hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), and he showed that the biasing of genes, the relationships, due to the hymenoptera's special sex-determining mechanism, makes it more useful under certain conditions to raise sisters than daughters.

There is a fascinating passage in your autobiography where you describe going down south on a train, reading the Hamilton paper, and how every inch of your psyche is resisting it at first.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Edward O. Wilson: I worked through Hamilton's quite difficult paper. He could have written in a simpler way. It was difficult mathematics, and difficult, somewhat tortuous reasoning, but I worked through it, and I saw that, indeed, he had made a major new insight. I resisted it, because I didn't believe that there could be such a powerful force, and one so simple, operating in the evolution of the social insect. And also, I was arrogant a little bit, you know. I thought I knew more about social insects than anybody else. I might have, and here was somebody I never heard of before that may have made the most important discovery, at least of the decade, in the study of social insects. But I yielded after a while. I thought that, "Yes, this had to be correct," and my reaction ever since has been that of Huxley, hearing about Darwin's theory of natural selection: "How stupid of me not to have thought of that!" But my hands were very full. I excused myself. My hands were very full at that time in island biogeography.

The train trip in which I read Hamilton's article was on the way down to the Keys, and I also was doing pheromone research, that is, chemical communication research.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. However, by the end of the '60s, I saw the enormous need to pull together everything we know about social insects. It was scattered, and what we knew was scattered through hundreds of journals and dozens of languages, and there was no unifying theoretical theme. It was only descriptive. By that time, I had become convinced that the new field of population biology, which I was helping to develop with MacArthur and Richard Lewontin at Harvard and some others in my age group -- that is, to work out the principles of the biology of whole populations, like genetics population ecology -- now I saw that societies were populations. They had many of the characteristics of populations, and their qualities were determined substantially by the same principles of birth and death and reproduction and dispersal of great parameters that determine the qualities of population. That somehow, social organisms should fit in on that, and that this would be the framework to pull together everything we know about social insects. That is what I did, and published in 1971 the book entitled The Insect Societies. That really was the introduction of sociobiology, not 1975 with a book that had the title Sociobiology, but The Insect Societies in 1971.

At the end of this book, having brought all of these principles together, coherent and whole, and organizing what we knew about social insects up to that time, I had a concluding section entitled, "The Prospects for a Unified Sociobiology," and forecast it would be moving on into other organizations: the vertebrates, including the primates. I published that book, and then I started thinking about that.

E.O. Wilson Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8