They Couldn’t Cancel Him

H ave you ever wondered just what those ants are so busy doing all the time? Edward O. Wilson did, and by the time he was 30, he was the world’s leading authority on the subject. In a career that spanned 70 years, most of them at Harvard University, Dr. Wilson became one of the most influential — and, for a time, controversial — scientists in the world. When he died on December 26 in Burlington, Mass., he was hailed as “Darwin’s natural heir” by the foundation that bears his name. And that is no exaggeration. Wilson was perhaps the greatest zoologist in history, and certainly one of the finest writers the sciences have ever produced.

Wilson’s study of zoology and genetics widened his lens far beyond the study of insects, and he followed the science fearlessly. In 1975, he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in which he theorized that the major aspects of social behavior among animals — from aggression and altruism to hierarchies and parenting — can all be explained by natural selection. He then demonstrated his theory by looking at the animal kingdom, starting with colonial microorganisms and social insects, and working his way systematically to primates and humans.

Sociobiology dives right into the great philosophical questions it raises. Here are the opening sentences:

Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions — hate, love, guilt, fear, and others — that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection.

Written in a literary and often riveting prose style, the book was clearly calculated to make its author famous, and it worked. It also caused a firestorm at Harvard University, where left-leaning colleagues led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould published a letter of a type that has become drearily familiar in recent years: Through facile distortion and false analogy, these early harbingers of cancel culture associated Wilson with the biological determinism that had been used to justify forced sterilization, restrictive immigration, and even the Holocaust.

But Wilson never claimed that all human behavior is biologically determined. He merely pointed out that behavioral tendencies observable in all social species have evolutionary consequences, and therefore have an evolutionary dimension that must be explored. Sociobiology was just evolutionary psychology on a grander scale.

The explicitly Marxist “Scientists for the People” were unable to get Wilson canceled, as scores of noted scientists and students came to his defense — and, in 1978, he struck back with one of the best pop-science books ever written, On Human Nature, for which he won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes. In it, Wilson explained why, for example, the avoidance of brother–sister incest is not just universal in humans but observable in plants and animals whenever dangerous defects in recessive genes can become expressed as a result of inbreeding. The book showed the intelligence, modesty, and self-confidence that were his hallmarks.

In a new preface to the 2004 edition of On Human Nature, Wilson recalled the initial reaction to Sociobiology:

The fashionable mood in academia was revolutionary left. Elite universities invented political correctness, enforced by peer pressure and the threat of student protest. Marxism and socialism in this ambience were all right. Communist revolutions were all right. The regimes of China and the Soviet Union were, at least in ideology, all right. Centrism was scorned outside the dean’s office. Political conservatives, stewing inwardly, for the most part dared not speak up. Radical left professors and visiting activists, the heroes on campus, repeated this litany: The Establishment has failed us, the Establishment blocks progress, the Establishment is the enemy. Power to the people it was — but with an American twist. Because ordinary working people remained dismayingly conservative throughout this sandbox revolution, the new proletariat in the class struggle had to be the students. And, unable to picture their futures as stockbrokers, bureaucrats, and college administrators, many of the students complied.

This is all even more true today than it was in the 1970s, with the sad difference that the Marxists and socialists have all but taken over the establishment at those elite universities. Wilson prevailed against the woke mob of the 1970s because his scientific contributions were so pioneering and important, and because he had so many admirers both in the academy and outside it. But it’s a real question whether he could survive cancellation in today’s ambience of unprecedented intolerance on campus.

Wilson also courted animosity among American conservatives with his pronouncements against religion. Though not an atheist (he claimed to be a “provisional deist,” which would put him with many of the Founding Fathers), he nonetheless declaimed against “religious faith.” He criticized “ethical philosophers” who consult little more than their unscientific feelings as they seek to intuit the differences between good and evil.

In 1991, Wilson returned to the subject of insects with an encyclopedic tome titled, simply, “The Ants,” for which he won another Pulitzer along with co-author Bert Hölldobler. As Rich Lowry notes, the 700-page tome “has to count as one of the least likely winners of the Pulitzer Prize ever,” but it’s no surprise: The book is, like so much of his writing, endlessly fascinating. Here is one passage:

By almost any conceivable standard, the single most important feature of insect social behavior is the existence of the nonreproductive worker caste. The altruistic actions of this caste integrate the colony tightly and make possible advanced forms of labor specialization. The baseline for the role of the worker [ant] is provided by the queen, who in most species still behaves in a primitive, totipotent manner resembling that of a solitary aculeate wasp. She alone traverses the whole life cycle of the species. Acting like a solitary insect, she leaves the mother colony, mates, and builds a nest. During this time her anatomy and physiology are essentially those of a solitary wasp, and her behavioral patterns are equally complicated. Only when the first brood of workers arrives does she become specialized, narrowing her repertory to an almost exclusively egg-laying role. In contrast, workers are specialized throughout their lives, with a large part of their repertory devoted, start to finish, to the welfare of the queen and their siblings.

After a time, fame seemed to suit him better than controversy, and he embraced an increasingly transcendental naturalism. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson observed that while knowledge has tended to fracture into increasingly specialized subdivisions, the greatest advancements in civilization have come from the synthesis of disparate fields; for example, the “New Synthesis” of evolutionary biology and genetics, which made modern medicine possible. He was a futurist with a classical mind, who yearned for a return to the serious study of history, literature, and science that the Ivy League used to require of its students: “Only fluency across the boundaries,” he wrote, “will provide a clear view of the world as it really is.”

In the decades after his retirement from Harvard in 1996, he focused increasingly on defending biodiversity. He saw the rise of Homo sapiens as a mass-extinction event on par with the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, due chiefly to the sheer amount of land that has been converted to agriculture on our watch. Wilson argued that by making half the earth a vast nature preserve, we could save perhaps 90 percent of the remaining species on land.

But why? That was perhaps the one thing that Wilson couldn’t systematically explain, even if the value of biodiversity and the risks from ecological disruptions appear evident. More than anything, Wilson believed in biophilia — the love of all living things. But those are the very same instinctual feelings that religious faith and ethical philosophy rely on.

It’s a paradox worth pondering as we contemplate this great American life. Wilson was a committed agnostic and a fearless scientist. But his sense of awe and wonder at the majesty of life, which overflowed in his writings, was unmistakably spiritual. Perhaps deep down inside he agreed with Hamlet, that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.