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

You're really quite extraordinary as a scientist in having won two Pulitzer Prizes for your writing. Often, people will group you with other scientists who have distinguished themselves in popular science writing, like Stephen Jay Gould or perhaps Richard Dawkins. You're somewhat unusual, though, in that you never set out to write popular books. You just write books that are very readable. Where do you think this gift for language and writing comes from?

Edward O. Wilson: I don't know. It's a talent.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If I were a religious person, (I'd say) it was God-given that it was there. It was there when I was a nine-year-old. I just discovered it, and I could write better things than other kids in the class, and more feelingly. The written word just attracted me enormously. Why I didn't become a typical Southern writer, I don't know, and maybe through my scientific career, there was a Southern writer trying to get out. I never became a writer just to be a writer. What I did was to use the talent to present the subject matter I was working on in science in a maximally dramatic and clear manner. More recently, I have been experimenting a little bit with creative writing, and that entails a substantial lyrical content that other scientists rarely experiment with in non-fiction, but again, it's always in the service of the subject.

For example, most recently, because most of so much of my activity lately is in biodiversity conservation and the conservation movement and conservation science, I have tried to produce prose that is as evocative as possible in seizing the attention of the reader and getting the reader to feel the same sense of wonder and concern and a caring sense of stewardship about these organisms that I am describing.

Your talents as a writer have opened your works to many people who wouldn't otherwise have read them, and they've also done a tremendous service to the causes you've supported.

Edward O. Wilson: I thank you for that. At the same time, scientists who are good writers have an unfair advantage over other scientists, a terribly unfair advantage. It worries me. If you have two people with competing theories, and it hasn't been settled which way they're going to go, your talented writer is going to hold the high ground for a long period of time, even if he is wrong.

Looking back over your career as a naturalist, what do you see as the most challenging problems for the natural sciences in the future?

We're at the beginning of an era where, increasingly, the intellectual power of biology as a whole, including the molecular technology, the genomics technology, is being addressed more and more. If you look at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, you see more and more attention paid to the question of diversity in evolution.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. And thus, among the great problems in biology facing us, is first to get enough genomics mapped to detect patterns and develop new understanding across many, many species that will give us a hint as to how the genome evolved, or the general rules, the processes. And then, the biologists at the molecular cell level have launched upon the great unknown sea of proteonomics, of how the proteins are created, in what time schedules, and how they interact, and we've just begun that. As that develops, we're going to be using evolutionary biology all the time, and adaptationist hypotheses, to predict and look for phenomena in the ways that proteins evolve, and the way they interact in the developmental process. That's one great new direction you can look to in the next ten or 20 years. Another is in ecology, particularly the community ecology. How communities are put together in the course of evolution, and the assembly of ecosystems -- what the rules are and what the constraints are -- in order to explain the amount of biodiversity it can get sustainably. So that too, is to be founded in natural history. And then, finally, to shorten this, I've gone on much too long, there is the great problem -- it's an applied problem, if you will, but it's enormously important -- of saving biodiversity. All the evidence shows that biodiversity is quickly going down the tube and we could lose half the species on earth in a century if major changes aren't made. So this is a problem that has to be faced jointly by the biologists, especially the naturalists, those who know where the biodiversity is and how it lives, on the one side, and then leaders in the corporate and governmental world and other branches of science willing to contribute to devising ways to conserve what we have left of biodiversity.

On behalf of the Academy of Achievement, thank you for such a wonderful interview.

Edward O. Wilson: Thank you very much. As a conversation, it was excellent.

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