SCIENCE science.org 28 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6579 361EDITORIAL
I
had the good fortune of spending a lot of time with
E. O. Wilson, who recently passed away at the age
of 92. Wilson was a towering figure who proposed
grand ideas about biology and conservation, not
just in scientific papers but in numerous books,
some winning Pulitzer Prizes, that stood out for
their outstanding writing. I began interacting
with Ed Wilson when I was running the Morehead
Planetarium and Science Center at the University of
North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, and we worked
together on a number of education projects. I had the
privilege when I was the UNC chancellor of award-
ing an honorary degree to Wilson when he spoke at a
commencement. Wilson’s life is worth examining not
just for his extraordinary accomplishments, but also
for how debates about his ideas
drove science forward.
Wilson was an outstanding
researcher, as described in this
week’s Retrospective by Stuart
Pimm. His work on the role of
pheromones in the social be-
havior of ants was published
in Science, and in 1967 he was
recognized with the Newcomb
Cleveland Prize of the American
Association for the Advance-
ment of Science (AAAS, the pub-
lisher of Science). From there,
he began assembling ideas from
across science to make grand
proposals that sought to bring
biology together with human be-
havior and even the humanities.
His sociobiology hypothesis was
criticized by a number of biologists who felt that he
overemphasized the role of genetics in human behav-
ior. He was famously doused with water at a meeting
of the AAAS by a critic who felt that his deterministic
ideas were discriminatory. Many others, however, be-
lieved that Wilson was simply acknowledging the fact
that genetics was a contributor to social phenomena.
In understanding the thread of Wilson’s career, it
is important to recognize that—like any high-profile
research—his work was debated and sometimes criti-
cized by other scientists. It’s an oversimplification to
say that Wilson was suddenly attacked because of the
political implications of sociobiology. The controversy
was part of the larger scientific debate that extends tobehavioral genetics to this day. Biologist Anne Fausto-
Sterling—who was often a critic of Wilson’s—believed
that even the legendary early work on ant phero-
mones relied too heavily on the role of genetics. “His
ant research had alternate interpretations and there
are legitimate criticisms of his methods and conclu-
sions,” she told me, “and they were there all along.”
I had many chances to ask Ed about the debates and
the famous water throwing, and he was never reticent
to discuss it. It was many years later, so maybe he had
mellowed, but he seemed to see it all as a passionate
argument about something very important, nature
versus nurture, which of course it was.
Ed’s discipline as a writer always amazed me. I once
asked him how he got the determination to crank out
so much fantastic prose. “I guess
I’ve always been a writer,” he
said. “Southerners are storytell-
ers, and I’ve always looked on
scientific discoveries as stories.
I mean, they’re factual, but what
happens to lead up to them,
what ideas are embodied when
you make them, what the con-
sequences are—those are sto-
ries, and I’ve always had a great
pleasure in telling the stories of
science.” I recently asked ecolo-
gist Jonathan Losos, who was
Wilson’s colleague at Harvard,
what he made of this. “As for
where this talent came from, I
don’t know,” he said. “I do think
that part of it was an incredible
knack to see the big picture, to
be able to gather great amounts of information from
disparate fields and to put them together in novel and
creative ways.” That ability may have led him at times
into territory where he wasn’t always an expert, but it
sparked discussion and experimentation that brought
our understanding to new and interesting places.
In the weeks following Wilson’s death, many of these
debates have been rekindled. That’s what he would
have wanted. He loved science and batting around big
ideas—he lit up when he got to do so.
The human drama, positive and negative, of a life like
Ed Wilson’s is an asset to science and something to cel-
ebrate. Let’s not lose our sense of wonder about that.
–H. Holden ThorpSeeing the big picture
H. Holden Thorp
Editor-in-Chief,
Science journals.
[email protected];
@hholdenthorp10.1126/science.abo
PHOTO: CAMERON DAVIDSON
“The human drama,
positive and
negative, of a life like
Ed Wi l s o n’s
is an asset to science
and something
to cel ebrate.”