WILSON, EDWARD O.

born June 10, 1929, Birmingham, Ala., U.S. in full Edward Osborne Wilson American biologist recognized as the world's leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of all animals, including humans. Wilson devoted much of his early career at the University of Alabama (B.S., 1949; M.S., 1950) to the study of ants. In the same year that he gained his doctorate (1955) at Harvard University, he completed an exhaustive taxonomic analysis of the ant genus Lasius. In collaboration with W.L. Brown, he developed the concept of character displacement, a process in which two closely related species populations undergo rapid evolutionary differentiation after first coming into contact with each other, in order to minimize the chances of both competition and hybridization between them. After his appointment to the Harvard faculty in 1956, Wilson made a series of important discoveries, including the determination that ants communicate primarily through the transmission of a chemical substance known as a pheromone. In the course of revising the classification of ants in the South Pacific, he formulated the concept of the taxon cycle, in which speciation and species dispersal are linked to the varying habitats that organisms encounter as their populations expand. In 1971 he published The Insect Societies, his definitive work on ants and other social insects. The book provides a comprehensive picture, treating the ecology and population dynamics of innumerable species in addition to their societal behaviour patterns. In his second major work, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), Wilson presented his theories about the biological basis of social behaviour. It contained a chapter proposing that the essentially biological principles on which animal societies were based applied to human social behaviour. This inflamed certain scientists and groups that regarded such ideas as politically provocative. Actually, Wilson maintained that he saw perhaps as little as 10 percent of human behaviour as genetically induced, the rest being attributable to environment. In his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning book On Human Nature (1978), Wilson explored the implications of sociobiology in regard to human aggression, sexuality, and ethics. His book The Ants (1990) was a monumental summary of contemporary knowledge of those insects. In The Diversity of Life (1992), Wilson traced how the world's living species became diverse and examined the massive species extinctions caused by human activities in the 20th century. His autobiography, Naturalist, appeared in 1994. One of Wilson's most notable theories is that even a characteristic such as altruism may be genetically based and may have evolved through the process of natural selection. Traditionally, natural selection has been thought to foster only those physical and behavioral traits that increase an individual's chances of reproducing. Thus, an altruistic behaviour, as when an organism sacrifices itself in order to save other members of its immediate family, would seem incompatible with natural selection. Wilson maintains, however, that much altruistic behaviour is consistent with natural selection in that the sacrifice is made to save closely related individualsi.e., individuals who share many of the sacrificed organism's genes. Thus, in Wilson's theory, the preservation of the gene, rather than the preservation of the individual, becomes the focus of evolutionary strategy. At Harvard, Wilson was professor of zoology (196476) and F.B. Baird, Jr., professor of science thereafter. He was also curator of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1972 on. In 1990 he shared Sweden's Crafoord Prize with the American biologist Paul Ehrlich.