In the 1970s, the Harvard biology department was for life scientists like what Los Alamos in the 1940s had been for physicists: an assemblage of the great names, but with even more clashes of personality and politics.
The distinguished science journalist Richard Rhodes, author of the famous 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has published a biography of a central figure in the Biology Wars of the 1970s, Scientist: E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature. Rhodes completed his manuscript shortly before Wilson’s death at 92 last December.
Old-fashioned natural historian Edward O. Wilson, who was happiest collecting bugs in the field and then burrowing into the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology’s collection of millions of specimens, found himself the leader of the zoologists, ornithologists, botanists, and entomologists besieged by an invasive species of molecular biologists offering theories broader than those the traditional species specialists could conjure up. Led by the arrogant James D. Watson, discoverer of the DNA double helix, the newcomers derided the naturalists as mere “stamp collectors.”
To counter Watson’s derision of his view of life’s apparent lack of theory, Wilson coined the term “evolutionary biology” in 1958. In 1975 he published his monumental textbook Sociobiology on how Darwinian selection might explain the social behavior of any and all organisms. But Wilson’s extension in his last chapter of Darwin to human societies unleashed the ideological animus of two leftist Harvard biologists whom Wilson had voted to hire to help in his war with Watson: Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.
Scientist makes an interesting comparison with The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya, which I reviewed here last week. In his 80s, Rhodes remains a lively and elegant writer, making Scientist a pleasure to read.
While von Neumann impressed the most famous physicists of the 20th century as their cognitive superior, Wilson showed how far you could go in a softer science without overwhelming genius. He succeeded instead with the Ben Franklin virtues of hard work, ambition, a readable prose style, a willingness to try new things, and a knack for making friends. And, to paraphrase geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, he had an inordinate fondness for ants.
As a tenured Harvard professor, Wilson found himself having to take introductory calculus at age 32 alongside his teenage students. And the great discovery of the era about Wilson’s specialty of social insects—the theory of kin selection—was made by an obscure but more mathematical Englishman, William D. Hamilton.
