By Ed Reynolds
A researcher, entomologist, conservationist, and philosopher of sorts, 83 year-old Edward O. Wilson is regarded as the number one authority in myrmecology, the study of ants. Wilson encountered his first colony of red fire ants as a 13-year-old in an abandoned lot next to his family’s house in Mobile. He spent much of his life near the Gulf Coast where the region’s wildlife mesmerized him.
Though a secular humanist and skeptic, Wilson does not rule out the importance of potential Divine Influence as the mystery behind Creation. In his book The Social Conquest of Earth, he writes: “The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict, where believers on the inside were pitted against infidels on the outside, was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature. The truth of each myth lived in the heart, not in the rational mind.” He insists that belief in grandiose, unbelievable religious tales satisfy a “primal need.” Regarded as the “father of sociobiology” — a field of study in which social behavior is viewed as a product of evolution—Wilson has jousted with fellow genetic theorist Richard Dawkins (a staunch atheist) in a series of fascinating debates.
Winner of the 2012 Alabama Humanities Award, Wilson will be the
keynote speaker at the Alabama Humanities Foundation Annual Awards Luncheon on September 10 at The Club. The topic of his address will be “On the Origin of the Human Condition.” Visit http://www.alabamahumanities.org for further details.
Black & White: A friend claims that biodiversity is one of the last true gems of planet Earth.
Wilson: The surprising thing is that the two current political campaigns are scarcely ever even mentioning any of the environment. The world’s populations are beginning to go green. I think we’ve really come a long way since the early 1990s in terms of awareness. But even in the best part of it, it’s much slower than what people hoped for. Things like reducing the greenhouse gases and so on. Alabama is one of the richest states in biological diversity., and we are only beginning to explore what’s here. I belong to a group in Mobile who are exploring the possibility of a new national park in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the Red Hills of Florida. In the southern Appalachians, I think that there are about 14 known species of oaks. That’s a lot. In the Red Hills just north of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the number of oak species found today is 24. The number of turtle species [both land and sea turtles] found along the south central Gulf Coast, including Alabama, is the largest in the world.
Were you excited by the recent Mars lander mission? Yeah, very. I love it. I think this is one of the great things humanity should do. Not just for the science but also because [it’s] spiriting. And particularly where you have a country like ours leading in this kind of exploration, that’s what lifts us up.
We need more big ideas for big things, what we can do together. Things that we’re all be thrilled by and aspire to. And [while] I think space exploration is not overwhelmingly a big thing, it’s one of the things we can do that makes people proud, excites them, and it’s spiritual. I’ve expressed this in The Social Conquest of Earth; in the last chapter, it said: Forget about sending people into space. Why should we risk the delicate bodies of people? Of course, you know, it’s nice to think of one of us standing on some place like Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, or wherever. It’s thrilling but then that fades quickly. We are so far advanced now in robotic information technology and propulsion techniques, we can do the equivalent of what we’ve just done on Mars, which is send robotics of that quality to do the equivalent of walking, testing, picking up blocks. And we can all sit there and watch it live. I hope I live long enough to see the results of drilling down to the aqueous layers of water on Mars and getting to Europa, a moon of Jupiter where there’s this big sheet of ice with an ocean underneath.
Can religion and science ever coexist?
Yes. I dealt with that in the book The Creation. I addressed religious believers directly. I made it in the form of a long letter to a [fictional] Southern Baptist pastor. We call them “pastors.” They’re Southern Baptists; we’re not supposed to be looking up to any priests. [laughs] We’re all our own interpreter of the Bible but that doesn’t seem to be the way it works out with the Southern Baptist Conference. I was a guest of the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City. I had a meeting with them, of all things, in the President’s Room, which is a rare event. They wanted to talk about the environment and assure me—and I guess they saw me as a kind of spokesman—that the Mormon Church is very pro-environment. They had a lot of land they were taking good care of and so on. At any rate, that book [The Creation] actually met a lot of approval and very little disapproval. The disapproval came, and I heard about it mostly just indirectly, from the Far Right. Probably Evangelicals. And the reason is simple. These are the ones who say, “We’re on this Earth for just one purpose. This is just a ‘way station.’ We should prosper, we should be OK and take care of ourselves and our families. But our main job here is to save souls. So, this hard Far Right set, in effect [says], “Stop wasting our time about trying to save species and trying to save the planet as it is in its natural condition because there are more important things to do, which is saving souls.” And that’s it!
Do you consider yourself an agnostic? Yeah. I like to put it this way—and I try to do it without scandalizing all my religious friends down in Alabama. In a way, I’m not an agnostic if you define an agnostic as a person who believes that it will never be known. I’m not sure that that’s true. The real problem is there are hundreds of religions, some big and some little. But each one has it own Creation story and it’s all about supernatural forces that have created humanity and created a particular tribe and so on, and every one differs from the other. They create their own identity by faith, and to the people who also believe exactly or close to what they do. That’s known as tribal- ism. It’s very powerful in humans and it’s one that tends to tear us apart.
You participated with Richard Dawkins in a series of debates, including one at Samford University several years ago. Are you and Dawkins still arguing? That’s another issue. I said to the Guardian, “I’m not arguing with Richard Dawkins. Basically, he’s an amateur.” He’s a science writer, he’s not a statured scientist. He doesn’t publish, do research, or publish in a peer reviewed journal where his arguments would be tested. And he’s fussing because I put out a theory on the origin on advanced social behavior, which I think is winning the day, which is very new. And it happened to knock the props out from under what he had been using as some of his most effective science writing. And, of course, he didn’t like that. I guess he had to say publicly that he was all against my ideas.
You were one of the first two people to identify the red fire ant. I actually found the first colony in Mobile in a vacant lot next to our house. I was 13 years old, in 1942. I was doing a Boy Scout survey of all the ants, and I found the colony. I didn’t know what it was at the time. But in just five years the ants had spread from Mobile and were becoming so abundant that it was causing a lot of concern. It was beginning to harm the ground of nesting wildlife, disturbing crops, making it difficult to work in pas- tures and so on. And it was at that time that we ran the identity down. We started calling it the “imported” fire ant. I did the first study of it for the Alabama Department of Conservation in 1949. I took three months out from my senior year at the University of Alabama. Me and another student, we roamed all around [the affected] area and worked out where the ant was and what it was doing and so forth. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a professional entomologist.
My first memory is an encounter with a pesticide called chlordane. (Used on termites and fire ants but banned in the 1980s due to its carcinogenic effect.) I ate some when I was four and my Dad was in a panic as he drove like a maniac taking me to the emergency room. Woooo! Here’s to Rachel Carson! Did you know that in the 1950s, when the fire ant was really spreading out, that the United States Department of Agriculture developed an extermina- tion plan that would involve spraying chlordane or other hydrocarbons over the ant’s entire geographic range? We were so ignorant back then. We didn’t realize that fish would be killed and lots of other insects would be killed. And that kids would be eating chlordane. &