Naturalist, conservationist and synthesizer who founded sociobiology.
Credit: Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty
Edward Wilson began by exploring the systematics, geographical distribution, social organization and evolution of ants. He became one of the great scholarly synthesizers, winning two Pulitzer prizes. A superb naturalist who enjoyed challenging dogma, he fought for conservation, brought ideas of biodiversity into the mainstream and set ecology on a rigorous conceptual footing. He has died aged 92.
Wilson was born in 1929 in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up, as he admitted in his 2006 autobiography,, “mostly insulated from its social problems”. After studying biology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, he did graduate studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He felt its Museum of Comparative Zoology, with the world’s largest ant collection, was his “destiny”., which includes the widespread black garden ant.
In 1954, Wilson set out for Melanesia, including New Guinea, to study ant taxonomy and biogeography. On the basis of his data, he elaborated the critique that he and his Harvard colleague William Brown had previously developed on the idea of subspecies. They argued that the distinctions between species should be more clearly defined, allowing for variability within species.
Through his fieldwork in Melanesia and later in the Caribbean, Wilson drafted a principle of biogeography that he called the taxon cycle. Species evolve back and forth between being able to live in marginal habitats, and thus disperse widely, and restricting their distribution to species-rich habitats in island interiors. He tested this and other original hypotheses in the Florida Keys in the 1960s, in collaboration with his former student Daniel Simberloff.
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