Naturalist

4 ideas

1. A fishing accident narrows a naturalist's gaze

   At about age seven, while fishing in Florida, Wilson yanked a pinfish from the water and one of its dorsal spines pierced his right pupil. He later lost sight in that eye, and he also had high-frequency hearing loss, so he could not easily track birds or mammals at a distance or hear birdsong and frog calls. He still had sharp close-up vision in his left eye, so he turned to insects he could hold near his face, especially ants. The disability decided his specialty rather than ending his interest in nature.

2. Island species number as dynamic equilibrium

   Wilson and Robert MacArthur proposed that the number of species on an island settles where the rate of new species arriving equals the rate of local extinction. Islands close to a mainland get more arrivals, and larger islands have fewer extinctions, so area and isolation predict how many species an island holds, even though the particular species keep changing. Wilson and Daniel Simberloff tested this by fumigating small mangrove islands in the Florida Keys and watching arthropods recolonize them to roughly their original species counts.

3. Sociobiology's human chapter provokes political attack

   In 1975 Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Its final chapter extended evolutionary explanations of social behavior to humans. Harvard colleagues including Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, through the Sociobiology Study Group, publicly accused the work of supporting genetic determinism and social injustice. At a 1978 AAAS meeting, protesters rushed the stage and poured water over Wilson's head, chanting 'you're all wet.'

4. Seek the field others are abandoning

   Wilson describes Harvard's 'molecular wars,' in which James Watson and the new molecular biologists treated organismal and field biology as obsolete stamp collecting. Wilson responded by pressing further into whole-organism, ecological and evolutionary questions, which were now less crowded. His advice is to march away from the sound of the guns: a scientist has more chances to make original discoveries in neglected areas than by joining a crowded, fashionable frontier.

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