SCIENTIST

Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian Rhodes offers a sparkling biography of the eminent, sometimes controversial biologist and naturalist.

E.O. Wilson (b. 1929), perhaps the best-known entomologist of the modern era and the discoverer of countless biological and behavioral details on the “social insects,” has long worked by a kind of mantra that Rhodes uses in opening: “If a subject is already receiving a great deal of attention…stay away from that subject.” Wilson, who learned the rudiments of science as a Boy Scout growing up in an unsettled home in Alabama, always charted his own course, leading to a Harvard scholarship and, soon, an invitation to travel to the South Pacific to study ants for the university’s museum. When he did so, Wilson recalls, “only about a dozen scientists around the world were engaged full-time in the study of ants.” The number has grown exponentially, in part through Wilson’s influence. However, as Rhodes shows in this nimble account, Wilson was not one to sit still. He moved into the more abstract realms of ecology, got into tangles in the 1950s with famed molecular biologist James Watson, and essentially created a new scientific discipline: evolutionary biology and, within it, what is called island biogeography, studying how animals come to inhabit remote islands. As his questions grew larger, so did his answers, leading to trouble. Wilson ran afoul of a sizable chunk of academia when he advanced his theories of “sociobiology,” applying ideas of animal ethology to humans, even though he encouraged his colleagues to take a remote view “as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth.” His biggest effort is ongoing, Rhodes writes in closing—namely, the effort to do even more, to catalog every species on Earth so as to document better which have gone extinct.

An exemplary portrait that may not win Wilson acolytes but that provides ample evidence for his importance to science.